Rural Legends.

Aongus Von Bismarck · 26-06-2015 12:24AM #1

We’ve all heard of the urban legend – Bruce Springsteen buying dinner for an entire table at Chapter One after meeting one of the party outside for a cigarette - if they’d promise not to hassle his mate Bono if he went out for a smoke.

Ronnie Drew taking a porter-filled piss into your auld one’s letterbox as he stumbled home from the pub after talking about music with this red haired lad called Luke Kelly. The usual auld palaver that emerges out of Dubs getting maudlin about the ‘durtee aulddd town” of yesteryear.

So where are the rural legends? Those stories that you hear that couldn’t possibly be true, but really should be if there is any sense of justice, mischief and revenge in the world? Joe Dolan playing for 4 hours in your uncle's garden after his van broke down outside Clifden. Meeting the Quare Fella on a boreen after drinking 12 pints of stout. That sort of thing.

Why such a trivial question from the dreaded AvB I hear you ask? Well I’ve had a few glasses of good Scotch that I picked up at the airport in Frankfurt,alongside a sudden appreciation for hearing an elderly neighbour of ours deliver juicy gossip in a beautiful and old-fashioned way.

The Baron.

Mr Rhode Island Red · 26-06-2015 12:27AM

*places index and middle finger into the general outer ear area, closes eyes, and begins to sing*

"Let me tell you the story 22 verses long, about the woman who d****ed and didled along..."

The_Valeyard · 26-06-2015 12:29AM

The Ghost Tractor that plows the fields during a full moon, cursing the land with a bad crop as it silently travels from field to field.

pablo128 · 26-06-2015 12:30AM

When I saw the thread title I immediately thought of Padraig Nally.

Tigger · 26-06-2015 12:33AM

something, something, €500 of grass confiscated from three Galway lads buy the nicest ones twerp of a brother

uch · 26-06-2015 12:33AM

Me Aunty Betty, best brown Bread this side of the Shannon

Tigger · 26-06-2015 12:34AM

pablo128 wrote: »

When I saw the thread title I immediately thought of Padraig Nally.

lives about 10 miles from here

pablo128 · 26-06-2015 12:35AM

Tigger wrote: »

lives about 10 miles from here

Offer him a handshake on my behalf if you ever bump into him, if you wouldn't mind.:)

The Backwards Man · 26-06-2015 12:36AM

Years ago the neighbour was driving home from the pub full drunk, as was the custom at the time. Unbeknownst to him, another neighbour was taking his horse out of the field to go to the vet as it was acting up, but as he was taking it in the trailer it dropped stone dead in the middle of the road. So off he goes to get the tractor and linkbox, and a bit of help, to take it away. In the meantime, our hero comes tootering along and drives straight up on the dead horse and gets stuck on it, can't get forward or back. In a panic he runs home to wake up his brother out of bed, telling him the story, 'I killed Paddy's horse and now the car's stuck on it, come quick!' So the brother gets their tractor out of the shed and down the road they go, where they find the car parked neatly beside the road, and no sign of a horse at all. The brother calls him all the dirty drunken bastards under the sun, imagining a horse through drink, and to this day he hasn't touched a drop, and no one has ever told him that he really did drive up on a horse that night.

fleet_admiral · 26-06-2015 12:39AM

That us Dublin folk like culchies. We dont, yis are all saps

Aongus Von Bismarck · 26-06-2015 12:46AM

The story I heard was about two small farmers in rural East Galway. They fell out in the early 80's about something to do with access to a river for livestock. Didn't speak for the guts of 30 years. Wouldn't even acknowledge each other. Joe had a beautiful spring lamb robbed back in April. It was strange as no body was found, and if there was going to be a theft, then it wouldn't be of just one lamb.

Two weeks later, his silent neighbour, Peadar, of 30 years comes across the road, says hello and goes down to herd his cattle. Arrives back and approaches the victim of lamb theft. Asks him to put the entire thing behind them, as they are getting old and what happened, happened. News of this spread throughout the village. A famous grudge had ended.

They make some sort of peace, and eventually even got around to chatting in the weeks after that. It eventually got around to inviting the families to each others homes for dinner. All a bit forced, but that's the way things panned out. Peadar's family were invited to Joe's first. Had a lovely dinner by all accounts if the story is to be believed. After Mass the following Saturday evening was agreed for the week after.

They arrived into Peadar's after Mass. Headed into the kitchen. What was for dinner? Two big succulent legs of East Galway lamb. Despite Peadar never keeping a lamb in his life. By all account they ate in stony silence.

The Backwards Man · 26-06-2015 12:56AM

Did he buy it in the butchers then?

GerB40 · 26-06-2015 01:03AM

There's the yarn about the town council meeting where somebody suggested putting gondolas into the park pond to which someone replied "that's all well and good but who'll feed them".

suicide_circus · 26-06-2015 01:06AM

I heard this story about this lad from galway who ratted out his own brother for toking a spliff

DEFTLEFTHAND · 26-06-2015 01:09AM

GerB40 wrote: »

There's the yarn about the town council meeting where somebody suggested putting gondolas into the park pond to which someone replied "that's all well and good but who'll feed them".

That's supposedly true. I looked it up there and it's attributed to a former Wicklow County Councillor named Jimmy Miley.

_Whimsical_ · 26-06-2015 01:10AM

There's that story that crops up several times in the "has anything creepy ever happened to you" thread. It's basically about a couple living in the country who have a son , or adopt a son depending on the version of the story, and leave him to fend for himself in a hen house as a small baby where he grows up believing he's a bird rather than a human. He has clawed feet he can perch on things with and pecks at things with his mouth and nose. In some versions the couple are eventually arrested and the boy goes into care and in others it's never discovered. There seem to be a good few old people,70s 80s who are quite convinced this happened in Ireland. I remember my elderly neighbour telling me about it and I read here other people's grannies telling them.
Has to be a rural legend... surely?

The Backwards Man · 26-06-2015 01:12AM

Stories are told here of the time the AI office opened in the town. Two oul boys come in to the town on the mart Monday, and take a dander up to have a look at this marvel of modern scientific techniques. Undeterred by the 'Closed For Lunch' on the door, the two bucks do their best to peek in the darkened windows of the office. Eventually one says to the other, 'very quiet for a place of it's kind, isn't it?'

NachoBusiness · 26-06-2015 01:20AM

In the 80s I remember one about a girl who bought some KFC and smuggled it into the Savoy cinema and as she is eating it her hands become covered in grease and she can't eat her popcorn so goes to the toilet to wash her hands and when she looks in the mirror she sees blood all over mouth and hands. She then runs screaming into the lobby and they out the house lights up and find a deep fried rat in her KFC box.

crockholm · 26-06-2015 01:35AM

The local pub I heard this one in has a Sign up proclaiming that the pub was established in the 1790s,whereas the truth was that they had no idea and randomly picked a year that sounded good.So they are well able to spin a yarn.

The publican,who has been a drunkards labourer since the 60s swears that he used to have a regular (long deceased) customer from the farming hinterland who would arrive with the pony and trap and was in or around the pensionable age.This scene being set in a time with much fewer vehicles than today.The town itself is situated on a bit of a hill,and a tractor was parked outside the pub where the old farmer was drinking,for whatever reason,probably gravity and a poor handbrake,but the tractor started to roll slowly downhill and the farmer,upon seeing this,ran from the pub and implored the driverless tractor to "WHEE,WHEE....HOULD" alas,to no avail.

We were drinking in that pub in 2002 and our beermats advertised the "Cork Jazz Fest 95''-It will surely be missed now that the doors are shut.

sabat · 26-06-2015 01:52AM

In my mother's home town the local Anglo-protestant lords of the manor (one of the most famous houses in Ireland) died out when the last in line was a childless woman. As she was over 6 feet tall and barren, the rumour was that she was a hermaphrodite.

FanadMan · 26-06-2015 03:07AM

Aongus Von Bismarck wrote: »

We’ve all heard of the urban legend – Bruce Springsteen buying dinner for an entire table at Chapter One after meeting one of the party outside for a cigarette - if they’d promise not to hassle his mate Bono if he went out for a smoke.

Ronnie Drew taking a porter-filled piss into your auld one’s letterbox as he stumbled home from the pub after talking about music with this red haired lad called Luke Kelly. The usual auld palaver that emerges out of Dubs getting maudlin about the ‘durtee aulddd town” of yesteryear.

So where are the rural legends? Those stories that you hear that couldn’t possibly be true, but really should be if there is any sense of justice, mischief and revenge in the world? Joe Dolan playing for 4 hours in your uncle's garden after his van broke down outside Clifden. Meeting the Quare Fella on a boreen after drinking 12 pints of stout. That sort of thing.

Why such a trivial question from the dreaded AvB I hear you ask? Well I’ve had a few glasses of good Scotch that I picked up at the airport in Frankfurt,alongside a sudden appreciation for hearing an elderly neighbour of ours deliver juicy gossip in a beautiful and old-fashioned way.

The Baron.

I never thought I'd type this but have to - "Go home.....you're drunk!"

jill_valentine · 26-06-2015 03:18AM

Local woodland is supposedly home to a Father Ted style panther cat.

The Big House down the way supposedly has a boarded up room where the walls are meant to bleed.

A very lonely little lane down a densely hedged hill near here that has a lot of "headless coachman" stories associated with it.

There's a bunch of matching stone crosses all around the local countryside which, IIRC, marked a pilgrimage route back during the "Island of saints and scholars" era. However, they're so widely dispersed that several have developed individual makey uppy "origin stories". One is supposed to mark the point where some British soldiers shot a rebel fugitive dead and another is supposedly the point where a motorcyclist crashed and died. The crosses are actually far older than that.

uch · 26-06-2015 03:44AM

Aongus Von Bismarck wrote: »

We’ve all heard of the urban legend – Bruce Springsteen buying dinner for an entire table at Chapter One after meeting one of the party outside for a cigarette - if they’d promise not to hassle his mate Bono if he went out for a smoke.

Ronnie Drew taking a porter-filled piss into your auld one’s letterbox as he stumbled home from the pub after talking about music with this red haired lad called Luke Kelly. The usual auld palaver that emerges out of Dubs getting maudlin about the ‘durtee aulddd town” of yesteryear.

So where are the rural legends? Those stories that you hear that couldn’t possibly be true, but really should be if there is any sense of justice, mischief and revenge in the world? Joe Dolan playing for 4 hours in your uncle's garden after his van broke down outside Clifden. Meeting the Quare Fella on a boreen after drinking 12 pints of stout. That sort of thing.

Why such a trivial question from the dreaded AvB I hear you ask? Well I’ve had a few glasses of good Scotch that I picked up at the airport in Frankfurt,alongside a sudden appreciation for hearing an elderly neighbour of ours deliver juicy gossip in a beautiful and old-fashioned way.

The Baron.

So you're a Culchie bollix after all, who'd have known

The Adversary · 26-06-2015 03:55AM

jill_valentine wrote: »

Local woodland is supposedly home to a Father Ted style panther cat.

Always heard something similar in the scouts. The story went that a panther or tiger depending on who told the story, escaped the circus and was still living in the Comeragh mountains (Or presumably other regional variants depending on where you're from) Apparently the legend is widely believed because you'd often see articles in local papers where so and so spotted it early in the morning or late at night.

lizzyman · 26-06-2015 04:02AM

Aongus Von Bismarck wrote: »

We’ve all heard of the urban legend – Bruce Springsteen buying dinner for an entire table at Chapter One after meeting one of the party outside for a cigarette - if they’d promise not to hassle his mate Bono if he went out for a smoke.

Ronnie Drew taking a porter-filled piss into your auld one’s letterbox as he stumbled home from the pub after talking about music with this red haired lad called Luke Kelly. The usual auld palaver that emerges out of Dubs getting maudlin about the ‘durtee aulddd town” of yesteryear.

So where are the rural legends? Those stories that you hear that couldn’t possibly be true, but really should be if there is any sense of justice, mischief and revenge in the world? Joe Dolan playing for 4 hours in your uncle's garden after his van broke down outside Clifden. Meeting the Quare Fella on a boreen after drinking 12 pints of stout. That sort of thing.

Why such a trivial question from the dreaded AvB I hear you ask? Well I’ve had a few glasses of good Scotch that I picked up at the airport in Frankfurt,alongside a sudden appreciation for hearing an elderly neighbour of ours deliver juicy gossip in a beautiful and old-fashioned way.

The Baron.

From your Tumblr:

"I have little time for nostalgia though. It’s the comfort blanket of the procrastinator."

And now you want old stories about Joe Dolan and the Quare Fellow. Tsk tsk Aongus. If you're going to be a douche at least be consistent about it.

Mozzeltoff · 26-06-2015 05:07AM

Ara might have one or two..

I grew up in the foothills of the Devils Bit. Local legend has it that in the years before St. Patrick arrived in Ireland the Devil himself walked across land. As he was crossing the countryside he came to a huge mountain. Apparently he didn't want to climb the mountain so he decided to open his big gob and take a massive bite out of the mountain. As he did this a crumb of the rock landed by his feet. This rock still stands today and is known in the locality as The long stone.

Another story springs to mind and it's one my dad told me.

An old neighbour of my grandfathers used to have this shack for keeping turf in. The neighbour always kept the turf well stacked but it wasn't a very secure place to keep it as the shack was open at two sides. Anyway over a period of time he notices that his turf is disappearing a lot faster from one side. He knows himself that he's not burning that much of it so he draws the conclusion that someone must be stealing it. One afternoon he picks a sod of turf from the stack, bores a hole in it, places a shot gun cartridge into it, covers it back over and places the sod of turf back.

Sure enough more turf goes missing, including the sod with the cartridge in it. A day or two later he runs into a good friend of his who informs him that there was a bit of a commotion in the pub the night before. Apparently the publicans wife lit the range and threw a few sods of turf in it. A few minutes later there was a massive explosion from the range and they hadn't a clue as to what happened and the range was utterly banjaxed.

Sunnyisland · 26-06-2015 06:23AM

Sure what about the story of that field in kerry. Didn't they make a film about it...

il gatto · 26-06-2015 07:28AM

"Urban legend" is just used to differentiate them from traditional legends/folklore. They are not strictly urban. And local stories don't really count. Only the ones loads of people know, usually with different "facts", such as location, people involved etc.
One I heard was real but don't believe as about 2 aging brothers who had a farm. One of the brothers walked into the yard to see the other being electrocuted at the meter box. His hand was stuck to it and he was shaking violently. He grabbed a shovel and ran over and whacked his arm to break contact. His brother screamed and clutched his arm asking what the f@ck had he done. The arm was clearly broken. The man explained what he did. Unfortunately it turns out his brother had leaned on the ESB box to shake of his welly which had a stone in it.
Is it true? I seriously doubt it, but I like to think it might be. And tell people the story swearing it is. That's how these things get legs I suppose.

whisky_galore · 26-06-2015 08:45AM

The one that you hear a lot of the time is the farmer that decides to level a 'fairy fort' and things go disasterously wrong afterwards. People and farm animals getting sick and dying afterwards etc etc.
The version I heard is a guy that were demolishing one with an old style JCB with an open cab, pulls at old barbed wire fencing to uproot it, the wire whips around and takes his eye out.

Other ones include supposedly 'bottomless' lakes or bogs where someone inevitably goes in and the body is never found. Bad-minded neighbours working spells or 'pisheogs' on people was another one.

Met a batchelor farmer once who had a tractor that he never used, it rolled over and killed a man once and he was afraid the same might happen to him. It was still standing there until about 10 years ago when the haybarn it was in collapsed around it, the old fella died and it went for scrap eventually.

_Brian · 26-06-2015 09:07AM

Know of a farm that had two bachelor brothers living and working it.
One brother was mucking out a small shed one day throwing the dung out the door with a grape (4 pronged fork).
Other brother came home and walked in the door only to have the grape driven through him where he died on the spot.

I know an older farmer, 70's.
He was telling me he was an awful lad for the drink. He would go on a batter of drink for a few days at a time where he would just fall into bed at night and straight back to the pub the next morning. He was in a session one week and hadn't seen stock or his elderly father who he lived with at the time for a few days. Anyway, when he sobered up he went looking and found his auld fella dead, sitting on a bale of hay in the byre where he was watching a cow calving, they reckoned he was dead maybe 3-4 days. He never drank a drop afterwards.

Last one:
I worked for years servicing milking machines on farms. A service engineer in the neighbouring county was telling me he got a call out to a farm he wasn't familiar with. He found the farm and called the house where the woman sent him on up the yard to where the machine and farmer were. Anyway, when he went up, there was the farmer standing on a crate trousers down "servicing" one of his cows. After an uncomfortable glance at each other the service man got in his van and left, no more calls from that farm.

26-06-2015 09:11AM

I am fond of the one about the landlord during the famine who shot a poor starving tenant dead on the steps of his big house, and eve after no matter how much they wash the steps they can never wash the blood away as it keep reappearing.

Rural Legends.

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