The parish of Gort-Kilmacduagh-Kiltartan is rich in folklore. This provided the basis of Lady Gregory’s book Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland. Many of these stories can be read in the book Many Leaves, One Root by Mary de Lourdes Fahy. Read about “The Strange Hearse”; “A Headless Man”; “Disappearing Cattle”; “The Coiste Bodhar”; “The Evil Eye”; “Pot of Gold”; “The Banshee”; “Fairies at the Castle”.
From the time that W.B. Yeats came to Coole in 1897, Lady Gregory began to collect folklore. All over South Galway and North Clare She heard tales of Cuchulain, Deirdre and the Fianna. When she met President Theodore Roosevelt in 1911, he informed her that her Cuchalain was his favourite bedside book. Dr. Thomas Wall of the Irish Folklore Commission rightly called Lady Gregory “the mother of folklore”.
Folklore collected by the children of this parish 1937-1939 can be viewed on the following site: www.duchas.ie, sections 0047 and 0050 – Gort Convent, Gort Boys N.S., Kilmacduagh, Kiltartan and KIllamoran.
Quite an amount of folklore was collected from adults by Sean O’Flannagain for the Folklore Commission.
