Dr Gillian Kenny

These places teemed with invisible life and the fairy folks were just as capricious and unpredictable as the land and weather itself.

Life, both seen and unseen, was always on a knife edge in medieval Ireland.

And so over centuries, people developed the means to manage those relationships, to engage with the land as a goddess, to try and mollify her,

Experts emerged whose skills allowed them to intercede with the she to keep the peace and opportunities were found to magically redirect the stress and fear that was a constant companion to many.

For example, if you hated your neighbour and wished to harm them but couldn't, what better way to relieve the stress than to take yourself to the place of the cursing stones and do that.

So magic matters, from understanding the types of charms women chanted over sick children to figuring out just how a great saint used magic to enchant a woman into loving a man and on to absorbing how magic was such a standard part of life that the lawyers put safeguards and punishments in place.

from looking at all of this we can tell lots about how and why the society used magic which in turn tells us loads about the nature and balance of power and belief in ireland how social change gender roles and about how human beings understood and charted their responses in times of both crisis and plenty magic lasted a long time in ireland until the 20th century anthropological students were still visiting and writing theses on banshee belief

In 1999, famously, a campaign was run not to disturb a fairy bush in Clare while a road bypass was being built.

Have those beliefs now gone?

A lot of them, sure, but perhaps not all of them.

And maybe that's not a bad thing.

Irish farmers won't interfere with a fairy fort even today.

Does that speak to a backwardness?

No, of course not.

Ireland's a modern, educated country.

But in a Western world which has lost its connection with nature and its spirits, we might ponder the value of lingering, powerful guardians of the land who we dare not interfere with.

It seems to me that that's not at all a bad, magical belief to hold on to.

You just want to watch yourself tonight.

That's all I'm saying.

You think you hear a fox, man.