a remote and lonely district in the county of Tipperary, burned his wife Bridget Cleary alive over a slow fire on the kitchen hearth in the presence of and with the active assistance of some neighbours, including the woman’s own father and several of her cousins.  They thought that she was not Bridget Cleary at all, but a witch, and that when they held her down on the fire she would vanish up the chimney; so they cried, while she was burning, “Away she goes!  Away she goes!” Even when she lay quite dead on the kitchen floor (for contrary to the general expectation she did not disappear up the chimney), her husband still believed that the woman lying there was a witch, and that his own dear wife had gone with the fairies to the old rath or fort on the hill of Kylenagranagh, where he would see her at night riding a grey horse and roped to the saddle, and that he would cut the ropes, and that she would stay with him ever afterwards.  So he went with some friends to the fort night after night, taking a big table-knife with him to cut the ropes.  But he never saw his wife again.  He and the men who had held the woman on the fire were arrested and tried at Clonmel for wilful murder in July 1895; they were all found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to various terms of penal servitude and imprisonment; the sentence passed on Michael Cleary was twenty years’ penal servitude.[790]

[Sometimes bewitched animals are buried alive instead of being burned.]

However, our British peasants, it must be confessed, have not always acted up to the strict logical theory which seems to call for death by fire as the proper treatment both of bewitched animals and of witches.  Sometimes, perhaps in moments of weakness, they have merely buried the bewitched animals alive instead of burning them.  For example, in the year 1643, “many cattle having died, John Brughe and Neane Nikclerith, also one of the initiated, conjoined their mutual skill for the safety of the herd.  The surviving animals were drove past a tub of water containing two enchanted stones:  and each was sprinkled from the liquid contents in its course.  One, however, being unable to walk, ’was by force drawin out at the byre dure; and the said Johnne with Nikclerith smelling the nois thereof said it wald not leive, caused are hoill to be maid in Maw Greane, quhilk was put quick in the hole and maid all the rest of the cattell theireftir to go over that place:  and in that devillische maner, be charmeing,’ they were cured."[791] Again, during the prevalence of a murrain about the year 1629, certain persons proposed to stay the plague with the help of a celebrated “cureing stane” of which the laird of Lee was the fortunate owner.  But from this they were dissuaded by one who “had sene bestiall curet be taking are quik seik ox, and making are deip pitt, and bureing him therin, and be calling the oxin and bestiall over that place.”  Indeed Issobell Young, the mother of these persons,