ON THE ETHNOGRAPHICAL SURVEY OF THE UNITED KINGDOM. 637 
timber was called the auger, being provided with four short arms or 
spokes by which it could be turned round. As many men as could be 
collected are then set to work, having first divested themselves of all kinds 
of metal. From this the new tire was instantly procured, and all other 
fires having been quenched with water! they were rekindled from the new 
fire and accounted sacred ; and the cattle were successively made to smell 
them.2? In many ways this is more important than the Mull example. 
It gives five elements, a, b, c, e, and /, and the important divergence 
0, which imposes the smelling of the fire by the cattle. In this 
latter incident lies the justification for asserting that cattle sacrifice 
is no part of this ritual. It is contact with the sacred element which 
is necessary, not sacrifice. So, too, in Moray, when a contagious dis- 
ease occurred among the cattle, the people of the villages extinguished 
all their household fires and then produced a fire by means of friction. On 
this a vessel was placed in which juniper branches were boiled, and with 
this decoction all the cattle were sprinkled. On the conclusion of the 
ceremonies the household fires were relighted by a brand from the friction 
fire? Shaw wrote this account in the last century, and it is somewhat 
difficult to localise the customs he records. He says that the midsummer 
solemnity was celebrated by making ‘the deas-soil about their fields of 
corn with burning torches of wood in their hands to obtain a blessing on 
their corns.’ On Midsummer eve ‘they kindle fires near their corn fields 
and walk round them with burning torches,’ and ‘the like solemnity was 
kept on the eve of the first of November as a thanksgiving for the safe 
ingathering of the produce of the fields.’ This example yields five ele- 
ments, 6, c, d, e, and g ; and it accentuates the conception of contact with, 
rather than sacrifice to, fire by the act of sprinkling water heated by fire 
instead of the natural action of the smoke as an indication of contact. 
With these facts before us we pass on to the well-known example at 
Kildare sanctioned and upheld by the Christian Church. Giraldus Cam- 
brensis is the authority for this. He says that ‘the nuns and holy women 
tend and feed the fire, adding fuel with such watchful care that from the 
time of St. Bridget it has continued burning through a long course of 
years.’ Twenty nuns were engaged. Each of them had the care of the 
fire for a single night in turn, and on the evening before the twentieth 
night, the last nun, having heaped wood upon the fire, said: ‘ Bridget, take 
charge of your own fire, for this night belongs to you.’ The nuns then left 
the fire, and in the morning it was found alight as usual. The fire was _ 
surrounded by a hedge made of stakes and brushwood, and forming a 
circle within which no male could enter.® Giraldus wrote in the twelfth 
century, and St. Bridget was born, according to tradition, in 453. This 
would give a life of seven hundred years for this fire. Henry de Londres, 
Archbishop of Dublin, caused it to be extinguished in 1220, but it was 
afterwards again lighted and remained so until the suppression of the 
monasteries by Henry VIII.° This supplies remarkable evidence of the 
fact of perpetual fire, which has only been symbolised in the examples 
hitherto adduced, but on the other hand the adaptation to church and 
1 The mention of water is given by Jamieson’s authority only, not by Logan. 
2 Logan, op. cit.; Jamieson, op. cit. s.v. ‘ Black spaul.’ 
8 Shaw, Hist. of Moray (2nd edit.), iii. 154 ; ‘all this I haveseen done,’ says Shaw. 
4 Thid. iii, 146. 
5 Giraldus Cambrensis, Topography of Treland, lib. ii. can. xxxiv.-vi. 
® Archdall’s Mon. Hib. iii, 240. 
