Stories of Lough Guir

"Stories of Lough Guir" is a captivating collection of supernatural tales by Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu, a prominent Irish writer known for his mastery of Gothic fiction. Set against the eerie backdrop of the Irish landscape, particularly the mythical Lough Guir, the stories weave together themes of love, loss, and the supernatural. Le Fanu's intricate narratives explore the intersection of reality and the paranormal, featuring ghostly apparitions, haunted settings, and the complexities of human emotions. The collection showcases Le Fanu's lyrical prose and his ability to evoke a haunting atmosphere, making it a significant contribution to the genre of Victorian Gothic literature.

• Short story

								
When the present writer was a boy of twelve or thirteen, he first made
the acquaintance of Miss Anne Baily, of Lough Guir, in the county of
Limerick. She and her sister were the last representatives at that
place, of an extremely good old name in the county. They were both
what is termed "old maids," and at that time past sixty. But never
were old ladies more hospitable, lively, and kind, especially to young
people. They were both remarkably agreeable and clever. Like all old
county ladies of their time, they were great genealogists, and could
recount the origin, generations, and intermarriages, of every county
family of note.

These ladies were visited at their house at Lough Guir by Mr. Crofton
Croker; and are, I think, mentioned, by name, in the second series of
his fairy legends; the series in which (probably communicated by Miss
Anne Baily), he recounts some of the picturesque traditions of those
beautiful lakes--lakes, I should no longer say, for the smaller and
prettier has since been drained, and gave up from its depths some long
lost and very interesting relics.

In their drawing-room stood a curious relic of another sort: old
enough, too, though belonging to a much more modern period. It was the
ancient stirrup cup of the hospitable house of Lough Guir. Crofton
Croker has preserved a sketch of this curious glass. I have often had
it in my hand. It had a short stem; and the cup part, having the
bottom rounded, rose cylindrically, and, being of a capacity to
contain a whole bottle of claret, and almost as narrow as an
old-fashioned ale glass, was tall to a degree that filled me with
wonder. As it obliged the rider to extend his arm as he raised the
glass, it must have tried a tipsy man, sitting in the saddle, pretty
severely. The wonder was that the marvellous tall glass had come down
to our times without a crack.

There was another glass worthy of remark in the same drawing-room. It
was gigantic, and shaped conically, like one of those old-fashioned
jelly glasses which used to be seen upon the shelves of confectioners.
It was engraved round the rim with the words, "The glorious, pious,
and immortal memory"; and on grand occasions, was filled to the brim,
and after the manner of a loving cup, made the circuit of the Whig
guests, who owed all to the hero whose memory its legend invoked.

It was now but the transparent phantom of those solemn convivialities
of a generation, who lived, as it were, within hearing of the cannon
and shoutings of those stirring times. When I saw it, this glass had
long retired from politics and carousals, and stood peacefully on a
little table in the drawing-room, where ladies' hands replenished it
with fair water, and crowned it daily with flowers from the garden.

Miss Anne Baily's conversation ran oftener than her sister's upon the
legendary and supernatural; she told her stories with the sympathy,
the colour, and the mysterious air which contribute so powerfully to
effect, and never wearied of answering questions about the old castle,
and amusing her young audience with fascinating little glimpses of old
adventure and bygone days. My memory retains the picture of my early
friend very distinctly. A slim straight figure, above the middle
height; a general likeness to the full-length portrait of that
delightful Countess d'Aulnois, to whom we all owe our earliest and
most brilliant glimpses of fairy-land; something of her
gravely-pleasant countenance, plain, but refined and ladylike, with
that kindly mystery in her side-long glance and uplifted finger, which
indicated the approaching climax of a tale of wonder.

Lough Guir is a kind of centre of the operations of the Munster
fairies. When a child is stolen by the "good people," Lough Guir is
conjectured to be the place of its unearthly transmutation from the
human to the fairy state. And beneath its waters lie enchanted, the
grand old castle of the Desmonds, the great earl himself, his
beautiful young countess, and all the retinue that surrounded him in
the years of his splendour, and at the moment of his catastrophe.

Here, too, are historic associations. The huge square tower that rises
at one side of the stable-yard close to the old house, to a height
that amazed my young eyes, though robbed of its battlements and one
story, was a stronghold of the last rebellious Earl of Desmond, and is
specially mentioned in that delightful old folio, the Hibernia
Pacata, as having, with its Irish garrison on the battlements, defied
the army of the lord deputy, then marching by upon the summits of the
overhanging hills. The house, built under shelter of this stronghold
of the once proud and turbulent Desmonds, is old, but snug, with a
multitude of small low rooms, such as I have seen in houses of the
same age in Shropshire and the neighbouring English counties.

The hills that overhang the lakes appeared to me, in my young days
(and I have not seen them since), to be clothed with a short soft
verdure, of a hue so dark and vivid as I had never seen before.

In one of the lakes is a small island, rocky and wooded, which is
believed by the peasantry to represent the top of the highest tower of
the castle which sank, under a spell, to the bottom. In certain states
of the atmosphere, I have heard educated people say, when in a boat
you have reached a certain distance, the island appears to rise some
feet from the water, its rocks assume the appearance of masonry, and
the whole circuit presents very much the effect of the battlements of
a castle rising above the surface of the lake.

This was Miss Anne Baily's story of the submersion of this lost
castle:

The Magician Earl

It is well known that the great Earl of Desmond, though history
pretends to dispose of him differently, lives to this hour enchanted
in his castle, with all his household, at the bottom of the lake.

There was not, in his day, in all the world, so accomplished a
magician as he. His fairest castle stood upon an island in the lake,
and to this he brought his young and beautiful bride, whom he loved
but too well; for she prevailed upon his folly to risk all to gratify
her imperious caprice.

They had not been long in this beautiful castle, when she one day
presented herself in the chamber in which her husband studied his
forbidden art, and there implored him to exhibit before her some of
the wonders of his evil science. He resisted long; but her entreaties,
tears, and wheedlings were at length too much for him and he
consented.

But before beginning those astonishing transformations with which he
was about to amaze her, he explained to her the awful conditions and
dangers of the experiment.

Alone in this vast apartment, the walls of which were lapped, far
below, by the lake whose dark waters lay waiting to swallow them, she
must witness a certain series of frightful phenomena, which once
commenced, he could neither abridge nor mitigate; and if throughout
their ghastly succession she spoke one word, or uttered one

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