Fairy Legends from Donegal

"The stories were all told as being true, and as having happened just a year or two back. ‘Long ago there was spinning in every house of this parish, and all the old women had the custom of taking the wheel band off at night. If they did not do so they thought the wee folk would be spinning with the wheel until morning. It is always said that it is not right for either man or woman to take the spinning wheel out after nightfall. People know that anyone, man or woman, who does so will be led astray by the fairies.’ Reading this book you can see how country life was dominated by rituals which were designed to appease the “little folk”, the spirits of the place, who would do mischief if the wrong things were done. Probably these beliefs go back to the very beginnings of man’s existence in Ireland. Sean O hEochaiadh was a fisherman and self-taught folklorist who recorded these stories over decades from Gaelic-speakers in Donegal. He had a huge Ediphone that he would haul up to people’s homes, often on foot, and then he would coax them to spin their tales which he recorded on wax cylinders, transcribing them later by hand. His persistence, and his deep love of his County and its inhabitants, have preserved for us what is in effect a core-sample of the history of Irish beliefs and language, and there is little doubt that without him much of it would have been lost."