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Biddy Early was the last woman in Ireland to be tried for witchcraft. She was famous for her long red hair and her beauty, and for her eyes, which were said to be green, and sometimes red, with elliptical pupils like a cat's. She was born in County Clare, in Lower Faha, between Feakle and Gort, in 1798.That was the year of the Croppies. Seamus Heaney wrote a great poem about it. The peasants filled the pockets of their greatcoats with barley, to feed themselves on the run, and they made theirfinal stand at Vinegar Hill, shaking scythes at cannon.
They fell in the thousands, and they buried us without shroud or coffin, and in August the barley grew up out of the grave.Lower Faha is only a few miles from my mother's family's farm at Coolreagh, in the old Barony of Upper Tulla.
When Biddy
was a girl she spent a great deal of time talking to herself, in places
where the blackthorn grows, places like the rath in Jack Brian's field
beside the farm at Coolreagh. It's one of those overgrown stone circles
where people used to see faint lights dancing on certain nights of the
year.
From her mother, Biddy
inherited the endowment of a very old botanical taxonomy, a pharmacopia
of the roots and herbs andnettles, with the knowledge of which plants
gave cures, and which plants caused harm. Throughout her adult life,
visitors came to Biddy with little presents of butter and poteen, and
they went away with cures and potions for injured cattle and for sick
children, for failed crops and for broken bones. Now and then, someone
would want to know where a lost lamb would be found, or how an evil
spell might be taken out of a pig, and Biddy would remedy those matters
as well, and now and then she would foretell events by looking into the
glass of a little blue bottle.
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