is in Sligo, and the country people say that Maeve, still a
great queen of the western Sidhe, is buried in the cairn of stones upon
it. I have written of Clooth-na-Bare in 'The Celtic Twilight.' She 'went
all over the world, seeking a lake deep enough to drown her faery life,
of which she had grown weary, leaping from hill to hill, and setting up
a cairn of stones wherever her feet lighted, until, at last, she found
the deepest water in the world in little Lough Ia, on the top of the
bird mountain, in Sligo.' I forget, now, where I heard this story, but
it may have been from a priest at Collooney. Clooth-na-Bare would mean
the old woman of Bare, but is evidently a corruption of Cailleac Bare,
the old woman Bare, who, under the names Bare, and Berah, and Beri, and
Verah, and Dera, and Dhira, appears in the legends of many places. Mr.
O'Grady found her haunting Lough Liath high up on the top of a mountain
of the Fews, the Slieve Fuadh, or Slieve G-Cullain of old times, under
the name of the Cailleac Buillia. He describes Lough Liath as a desolate
moon-shaped lake, with made wells and sunken passages upon its borders,
and beset by marsh and heather and gray boulders, and closes his
'Flight of the Eagle' with a long rhapsody upon mountain and lake,
because of the heroic tales and beautiful old myths that have hung about
them always. He identifies the Cailleac Buillia with that Meluchra who
persuaded Fionn to go to her amid the waters of Lough Liath, and so
changed him with her enchantments, that, though she had to free him
because of the threats of the Fiana, his hair was ever afterwards as
white as snow. To this day the Tribes of the Goddess Danu that are in
the waters beckon to men, and drown them in the waters; and Bare, or
Dhira, or Meluchra, or whatever name one likes the best, is, doubtless,
the name of a mistress among them. Meluchra was daughter of Cullain; and
Cullain Mr. O'Grady calls, upon I know not what authority, a form of
Lir, the master of waters. The people of the waters have been in all
ages beautiful and changeable and lascivious, or beautiful and wise and
lonely, for water is everywhere the signature of the fruitfulness of the
body and of the fruitfulness of dreams. The white hair of Fionn may be
but another of the troubles of those that come to unearthly wisdom and
earthly trouble, and the threats and violence of the Fiana against her,
a different form of the threats and violence the country people use, t