A Story

Long ago, in the northern side of Sherkin on a stormy night, a man by the name of Gláinín went out looking for ‘wreck’, and on going around the ‘Points’ he saw on the rocks a woman combing her hair. He went towards her and put his hand on her shoulder. She threw back her hair, and looking up at him, said;

         “As you put your hand on me now, you'll have to marry me.”

He said he was satisfied but before they were married he had to make three promises; never to kill a black sheep, never to invite a landlord to dinner, and never to kill a seal. He promised to keep all three. They lived very happily together and had three children. One morning he said he would go ‘wrecking’ (a local name for the timber that is washed ashore after a storm). He met a seal which was resting on the sand and did not notice the tide going from it. The seal was quite alive when he met him. The man slipped around to a boat in the vicinity, and having procured an oar, he returned and killed the seal and brought it home on his back. When he arrived, his wife was, as usual, sitting on a stool combing her hair. He went in and threw the seal on the floor. On noticing the dead carcass, the wife hurried in its direction, and kneeling down, took hold of one of the seal’s paws, muttering at the same time;        

“Lapa, lapa, a driothóir a croí thíos a Muire na cró.” [“The paw, the paw, of my beloved brother, down here on the ground.”]

The wife then asked her husband three times for a kiss, but he refused.

“’Tis well for you,” she said, licking around her mouth as far as her tongue would go, “for I would bite that much out of you before I’d go.”

She kissed her five children in succession and went back to the place where her husband first met her. Then, taking a little bundle from her pocket, shook it and immediately a black horse came to the rock. She jumped on his back and was never seen again.