Day 29. Black dogs, dolmens, crows and castles.

Another day of site visits neatly shoehorned in to the last of my holidays...The day started with a massive walk with Freya, then an indulgent stint of lying full-length on my study sofa, reading European Monsters, and finally, a drive around Cratloe to document a few more places of legend. I've been consulting W.J. Wstropp's marvellous work on the folklore of County Clare and started to make a grid today of sites he mentions and their significance. Unfortunately he is very circumspect about haunted houses, carefully excising specific references to their location, just giving the stories, but what he omits, he makes up for in his tales of holy well, mythical creatures and neolithic tombs.

My first stop was Craughaun graveyard to photograph the Ballinphunta dolmen.

Then on to the nearby Cratloe Woods, recorded by Westropp as the location of the Black Dog of Cratloe who ran beside carraiges and was often a portent of doom. when I tried to reverse the jeep into a parking space, a wet, cross-looking black Labrador blocked my way, and when I started walking down the forest path, he ran in front of me. I was so busy looking round (it's a really old, tangled forest that dates from 700 AD) that at first I didn;t realise the coincidence - when I did, I snapped a few shots of the black dog.

Then finished up at Cratloemoyle Castle, a difficult place to stop and access (just off the motorway sliproad outside Limerick, and then over a bank and a netted fence, and through long grass). It's a beautiful towerhouse, owned by an Irish American since 1973, but not preserved in the least.

Glorious. As I approached it, a dark cloud of crows rose from it, cawing and circling. Very atompsheric.

And then home and a few more European Monsters. Beautiful day.