A new film looks at an extraordinary event in a small village in County Tipperary in the late nineteenth century, when a young wife was burned to death by her husband on the hearth of the fire in their house. Vincent Murphy tells her story.

 

I was sixteen when I bounced into the family bar with a bag from the music store in Clonmel under my arm and announced that I had just bought the record about the witch burning in Cloneen. My mother was sitting drinking a coffee at a table by the fire and I got a kick on the ankle from under the table and a look that stopped me in my tracks. She just nodded towards the bar where I saw a line of men sitting having a drink. They were from the neighbouring village of Cloneen.

Luckily for me, they were all in conversation and hadn’t noticed or heard me when I arrived through the door. Because, as I learned a few minutes later, people didn’t talk about that particular subject. Especially people from Cloneen where the alleged “witch burning” happened. I knew virtually nothing about the subject at the time, except that it was something that I shouldn’t talk about openly.

So, it was a great surprise to me years later when I heard a couple of young girls slagging off each other in the bar one night, to hear one referring to the other as “Ya bloody witch burner”. The girl in question was descended from one of the people that had played an important role in the burning of the young woman in Cloneen all those years ago. It looked to me that the story that was formerly forbidden was now talked about, even if it was only in bar room banter.

Bridget Cleary lived in Ballyvadlea, a townland outside the village of Cloneen in Co Tipperary. It’s not far from Dragon, Mullinahone, Killenaule, Fethard and Clonmel, all of which figure in the bigger picture. In 1895, Bridget, age 26, was burned to death by her husband on the hearth of the fire in their house. This, because of the proliferation of superstition, became known as “the last witch burning in Europe”, a title that was great for newspaper headlines, but ultimately wrong in every way.

Ireland at the time was still a very rural society and the superstitions of centuries were still very much believed in many quarters. While the country had a reasonably good educational system at the time, the stories around the fire and superstitious beliefs still rang strong. So strong that the highly organised and powerful Catholic Church, which had a strong grip on the population, adopted many of the pagan festivals and holy days, along with their symbols, and incorporated them into their belief system to capture the minds of the people. (St Patrick and the shamrock being one).

There was no electricity at the time, so light after the setting of the sun was given by fire in lamps, torches and firelight from the hearth. Fire flickers and throws shapes. Unknown shapes became unknown spectres. Unseen sounds became menacing. The wail of a Banshee was well known in Irish tales. That sound in the 21st Century is the wail of a female fox. It is, to anyone unfortunate enough to have heard it in the dark on a country road, quite terrifying.

The white floating figures that swept across the landscape were ghosts or banshees, which we now know to be barn owls. They too have a terrifying shriek. It is said that most of the ghosts and supernatural beings disappeared with the arrival of rural electrification and the electric light.
But in 1895 they still existed.

Bridget Cleary (nee Boland) was different to most of the other women in the neighbourhood at the time. She was said to be attractive and had business acumen, wearing gold earrings as a successful young woman. She was educated and had a trade as a milliner, plus a small business selling her hens eggs (six or seven hens were considered as valuable as a single cow!). Thus she was a woman that was not dependent on her husband, as most of the other women of the era were.
She had worked in the nearby town of Clonmel where she met her husband to be, Michael Cleary, who worked as a cooper, making barrels that were used as storage. They were married in 1889, but after six years of marriage, they were still childless. This too would have marked Bridget as different.

The male in Irish society at that time would never have been seen as the reason that a couple were without children. The problem would have rested completely with the female, even if it was the man’s fault that they could not produce an heir.

Her case was not helped by the suspicion that she was having an affair with a local land agent, William Simpson, who was looking after a farm from which the tenants had been evicted. All of these things mitigated against her.

Continue reading in this week’s Ireland’s Own