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Review [published December 2001]
Angela Bourke: The Burning Of Bridget Cleary
Robin Askew
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
BUY Angela Bourke books online from 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’
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