A curious thing – 1896

Chronicle 3rd October, 1896

During Lord Mulgrave’s, or a preceding Lord Lieutenant’s rule in Ireland, there was a curious thing never traced to its source and never explained. In the east of Kildare, at Kill, a strange woman gave a piece of kindled peat to a man, with the injunction to pass it along to the next person on the Naas road, that person to repass it westward still alight, and so on westward. If the turf were let go out before a new piece were substituted from a living hearth, misfortune would come. That was on an autumn evening. Within twelve hours the ‘burnt turf’ had been carried to Galway Bay, across Kildare, the Queen’s and King’s counties, and Galway. No one has ever published an explanation of the affair.