Angela Bourke – The Burning Of Bridget Cleary
Robin Askew
The Burning Of Bridget Cleary - Angela Bourke
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Enjoyed The Blair Witch Project? Then immerse yourself in this engrossing and exhaustively researched true story from late 19th century Ireland. The facts of the case are relatively straightforward: in 1895, 26-year-old Bridget Cleary disappeared from her house in rural Tipperary. Local rumour claimed that she had been taken by fairies to their fort of Kylenagranagh, from where she would eventually emerge riding a white horse. But when her badly burned body was recovered from a shallow grave a week later, her husband Michael, father, aunt and four cousins were arrested. The subsequent trial made headlines even in the London press.
According to contemporary newspaper reports, it emerged in court at nearby Clonmel that Michael Cleary had believed his ailing wife was a witch. He gave her herbs from a local herb doctor and then, with the aid of other male members of the household, held her over the kitchen fire and called upon her to say, in the name of God, that she was not his wife. Finally, she was stripped of her clothing, knocked to the floor, covered in paraffin oil and allowed to burn to death while being watched by eight relatives – six men and two women. Some of them remonstrated with the husband, who insisted that it was not his wife who was burning but a witch, whom he confidently expected to disappear up the chimney. When this didn’t happen, he wrapped a sheet around the charred body and buried it in a dyke near the family home.
There is, of course, a great deal more to this tragic tale than these stark details convey. Dublin-based academic Angela Bourke brilliantly sets the case in its social and political context, revealing its significance at the cusp of change between an older world of folklore and fairy-belief and the new age of literacy and industry. While Bridget and her husband were childless and newly prosperous, their jealous peers were not, and the instigator of her unpleasant demise was a toothless, limping, increasingly isolated patriarch whose waning power over the fearful countryfolk derived from his ample knowledge of fairy-forts, ghosts, and other supernatural malarkey.
Equally significant in the reporting of the Cleary case was the ongoing Home Rule movement. The Unionist press seized on this outbreak of "barbarism" as evidence of the locals’ lawlessness and consequent unsuitability for independence; elsewhere, it simply fanned the flames of crude anti-Irish racism. Bourke’s exemplary scholarship teases out many such strands from this horrific case, evincing a powerful empathy for all involved. Occasionally, you may need to remind yourself that these people burned a woman alive, or stood around and watched while it happened, but by the time you put the book down, you at least have a greater understanding of how this gruesome event came to pass and why it still reverberates to this day.
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