Another knee-stone of St. Senan was beside the creek of Poulanishery on the opposite shore to Scattery. Between Dysert O'Dea and Rath Blamaic a rock with two basins bore the marks of St. Manawla's knees when she carried off the round tower of Rath.[1] St. Columba's thumb and finger marks are shown on a limestone boulder in the road fence near the lane to his entrenched church in Glen Columbcille. The bosses on the "plague stone" at Tomfinlough church were the two plague swellings torn from a woman's head and thrown against the stone by St. Luchtighern.
Not only the saints, but also Finn MacCumhail and his warriors have left marks on the rocks of Clare. A huge rock named Cloughmornia or Cloughlea, near Ballysheen and not far from Sixmilebridge, has in its sides long straight gashes where Finn and his band tried (or sharpened) their swords.[2]. Finn's fingerprints are visible on a rock which was brought to Cullaun House near Quin early in the last century by the facetious Tom Steele from Birr in King's County, where it was seen by Thomas Dineley about 1680. The stone was called "the Navel of Ireland,"[3] and the V-marks are now regarded as the footprints of the cock that crowed at St. Peter's denial.
Hughey's Rock, a great boulder on the brow of the ridge between Edenvale and Rockmount near Ennis, bears the fingermarks of Hughey, a giant who threw it at another giant from Mount Callan.[4]
Caves.—I have heard at Newhall of a cave "between Ennis and Lisdoonvarna" in which runs an underground river that
- ↑ Ordnance Survey Letters' (Co. Clare), vol. i., p. 50. A similar legend occurs in the Book of Lecan.
- ↑ The Battle of Magh Leana, p. 30 (notes). The legend was still surviving at Ballysheen in 1899.
- ↑ The Journal of the Royal Historical and Archaeological Society, vol. viii. (1864), p. 360. The cock legend is often represented on tombstones etc., and appears at Ennis Abbey (1460). In a version gathered by me in eastern Limerick, the cock says,—"I'm only a cock, and you're an apostle; but I'm the better gentleman any day!" In The Tripartite Life of St. Patrick, p. 415, the Angel Victor in the form of a bird leaves footmarks on a stone.
- ↑ So told me by Shaneen (Little John) O'Halloran at Edenvale in 1869 and later.
