The Fires of Athboy
Arrival at Athboy
The bus from Dublin left me in a pool of streetlight, where Athboy’s shopfronts wore garlands of paper pumpkins and the pub windows glowed like hearths. A banner thinning in the wind read Fáilte — Púca Festival, and beyond the rooftops a soft orange pulse rose and fell, as if the sky itself were breathing fire.
“You’ll want the Hill of Ward,” the driver said, nodding toward a dark swell of earth beyond the town. “If you’ve come for Samhain.”
I had come for many reasons. For the stories my grandmother told about this place—the “spiritual homeland of Samhain,” she called it. For a grief with no proper name. For the hope of one night when the living and the dead listen to the same wind and remember one another without fear.
In the square, a ceilidh tune spun laughter into the cold. Children in white masks darted between stalls, and somewhere unseen a flute sang like a bright thread in dark cloth. I bought a paper lantern shaped like a crescent moon, its wire handle biting my palm, and followed the river of people out of town, through hedgerows and gates, past the last farmhouse dog who watched us as if we were all walking into legend.
The Hill of Ward
The hill was a sleeping giant, ribbed with shadow. The earthworks circled like old scars, the wind went thin, and the stars leaned close. Torches pricked the rim. Fires were kindled at cardinal points—their flames rising in a hush that felt like a prayer. I had seen photographs of this place, but photographs do not show how the dark hums, how you feel held and watched all at once, how the grass itself seems to remember.
A storyteller stood on a plank stage. She spoke of ancient rites when the year turned and the doors between worlds swung wide; of herds driven between twin fires for blessing; of faces masked to confuse the wandering dead; of offerings left at thresholds for those who would visit. She named the hill’s goddess the way you say a beloved’s name in the dark: Tlachtga. “Here,” the storyteller said, “the old year dies and the new year quickens. Here the living keep faith with the dead.”
The crowd murmured. Someone near me wept quietly. I held my moon-lantern higher and felt my grandmother’s hand in mine as surely as the wire handle cutting my skin.
The Druid’s Shade
When the drums began, the air changed. Smoke from damp wood and herbs—sweet and biting—wound around us; sparks went up like a swarm of golden bees. Cloaked figures in ash-grey robes circled the fires, their steps slow and precise. I told myself they were performers. I told myself many modern things. And then the wind moved sideways and I saw him.
He stood a little apart: tall, lean, hair to his shoulders like a spill of ink and frost. Not quite solid, as if the light behind him could not decide whether to outline his edges or pass through. A torque glinted at his throat, old gold under moonlight. When he turned, his eyes found mine—as if he had been searching.
“You hear,” he said, though his mouth barely moved. His voice arrived like a thought I could not have had alone.
“I try,” I whispered. “I’m here to remember.”
He inclined his head toward the fire. “Then attend. A vow unkept burns longer than any hearth.”
And so he told me—not with sentences, but with the hill itself as his tongue. I saw the old festival blaze to life: shadows thrown tall on the earthwork rings; cattle restless, eyes rolling; people masked with hollowed gourds; women carrying bowls of grain to be blessed; a child’s laughter cut off short; a name cried to the night and not returned. I saw a druid—him—lift both hands as fire leapt, and in the leap was a promise: as long as we kindle light, the dead will find their way home.
“I failed them,” he said, and in the wind I heard a thousand years of ash. “There was a night of storm and invasion. We could not keep the fires. The door swung shut on a widow’s plea and a mother’s last song. The hill remembers. So do I.”
I wanted to tell him it was not his fault. The wind does not listen to mercy. The past is a country with poor roads. But before I could speak, a ripple ran through the crowd. Drums stopped. A silence fell that had weight. A laugh came from the dark beyond the ring—bright as glass, wrong as a smile on a corpse.
The Púca’s Bargain
It stepped into the firelight like a story that had missed its own end: a black horse tall as a king’s war-steed, mane streaming with shadow, eyes lit from within as if coals had learned to look back. Its hooves made no sound. It breathed mist and laughter both. The Púca—trickster, rider of the liminal, dealer in debts you don’t know you owe.
The crowd gasped and then—because modern people are brave in numbers—some clapped, assuming performance. But I saw the druid’s shade draw back, and the hair on my arms rose like wheat in a sudden wind.
“A night for bargains,” the Púca said, its voice a braid of nickers and words. “A night for keeping the old customs fresh. Who among you would ride and forget?” Its gaze slid across faces like a blade across silk—until it caught on me. “You carry a sorrow. Let me lighten you of it.”
I thought of my grandmother. How the hospital hallway smelled of hand gel and endings. How she had whispered, “Go to the hill for me, will you? Tell them I am coming home.” I had said of course and then not known what home meant, or hill, or them. Now the hill stood under my feet and the dead were a room away.
“No rides,” the druid’s shade said sharply, stepping between us. “Not tonight.”
“Ah,” the Púca purred, amused. “The oath-breaker guards again. How diligent.” It shook its mane; sparks flew and did not fall. “Let the living decide. That is their trouble. They always do.”
I did not know the rules, so I reached for the ones I had: respect the dead; keep your lantern lit; do not mock what you do not understand. “What price?” I asked, keeping my voice steady.
Its teeth flashed. “The memory that hurts you most. I will carry it away. You will sleep. The hill will be fed.”
A wind from the west frowned across the grass. The druid’s shade looked at me, and in his face there was both warning and forgiveness. He had lost a night and a world because promises broke. He would not command me.
I saw a thousand mornings without the ache of my grandmother’s empty chair—and a thousand nights where the ache kept her woven into me. I thought of the old teaching that offerings left on Samhain were not only for wandering spirits, but for courage: food for the hard choices, light for the difficult road.
“No,” I said softly. “I will keep my sorrow. It is the lantern I carry.”
The Púca’s ears flicked. For a moment it was not a horse at all but a boy with river weed in his hair, a woman with rain in her eyes, a fox whose tail smoked with starlight. “Then take the old bargain,” it said. “Keep your sorrow, and keep faith: light your flame each year, and remember the names. In return, the door between will open as wide as kindness allows.”
“Done,” I said, though I did not know how to seal a vow on a hill. The druid’s shade lifted his hand and—like a parent who approves but does not interfere—set it gently on my shoulder. The fires surged. My paper moon shook and steadied. Somewhere in the crowd a child laughed the way a child laughs when they have just learned a secret and plan to keep it.
The Púca bowed its dark head, and when it rose again there was no horse at all—only a curl of smoke unraveling into the sky.
Ghost Story by the Bonfires: The Ashen Cloak
When the music returned, it was quieter, as if the hill itself were listening for footsteps. People drifted to the edges of the earthworks with cups of spiced cider, speaking in the tender way strangers learn at holy places. A circle formed around a small fire where a local woman in a red scarf began a story. I sat among them, and the druid’s shade stood behind me like a tall memory.
The Tale
“Long ago,” the woman said, “when Athboy was a handful of cottages and the hill’s fire was law, there lived a girl called Roisín whose mother kept an ash-cloak by the door. ‘For the night that runs too fast,’ the mother would say. ‘For the night that stops and stares.’ Roisín laughed, as young hearts do, and wore the ash-cloak to tease her sweetheart across the fields—until a Samhain came with rain like knives and wind like wolves.
“The fires failed that night, and the paths wandered. Roisín lost the lane and found instead a rider on a black horse who promised to take her home if she would only close her eyes and forget to look back. She did not trust him, but the wind was a fist and the rain was a wall. So she made a smaller bargain than he asked: ‘Carry me to the hill gate,’ she said, ‘and I will ride no further.’
“The rider laughed. ‘You will never leave me there,’ he said. ‘But try.’ He set her before him and they flew—the fields a single breath beneath them. When the gate showed, Roisín loosed the pins of the ash-cloak and slipped like a spark from the saddle. The wind caught her, the cloak billowed, and she tumbled into the fire ring where the last embers burned. The rider reared and screamed and could not cross the line of light. ‘I will have you yet,’ he said. ‘Then be patient,’ she told him, for she had learned patience was a kind of fire. She lived a long life and died in spring. But on Samhain a girl in an ash-cloak is often seen at the hill’s rim, laughing softly at the dark.
“If you meet her,” the woman finished, “follow where she points. It’s always toward home.”
The circle sat quiet for a moment, each of us turning the story like a coin in hand. Behind me, the druid’s shade breathed a word that could have been clever or blessed or both.
Later, when the embers lay like a necklace of faint stars around the hill, I walked to the earthwork’s edge. A girl in a pale grey shawl—no more than a flicker—stood there, hair lifted by a wind I could not feel. She looked at me as if we had met before in a dream we both misremembered, and then she pointed, just as the tale had promised. I turned—and saw the town below glowing as if someone had set a hundred lanterns on the ground and taught them to breathe.
Why Samhain Still Matters (and Why Athboy Holds the Door)
We dress as ghosts, we carve faces in pumpkins, we fill our pockets with sweets and our porches with light—not to outgrow fear, but to befriend the part of us that looks for loved ones in empty doorways. Athboy’s hill keeps the old promise: light for the road between, kindness as the only coin accepted across the border. Whether you call this night Halloween or Samhain, All Hallows’ Eve or simply a thin place, it asks one thing: remember.
Remember the names. Remember the fires. Remember that sorrow is not an enemy to be traded away, but a lantern that shows you the path back and the path onward. Keep your flame. Keep faith.
Old rule for a new year: Light a candle for the ones you miss. If you cannot find words, the flame will speak for you.
I walked down from the hill with the crowd, our lanterns bobbing like a little constellation fallen to earth. The druid’s shade did not follow. Some loves wait at thresholds; some keep watch. When I looked back, a line of fire traced the ring so thin I might have imagined it—except my moon-lantern burned a fraction brighter, and the night smelled suddenly of woodsmoke and apple peel, just as my grandmother’s kitchen had when I was small.
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Up Next in Haunting Towns of Samhain
- Bath, England — “The Roman’s Lantern”: Beneath the steam-lit vaults of the ancient baths, a priestess of Sulis-Minerva keeps vigil where the water remembers every footstep.
- Glasgow, Scotland — “The Piper of the Necropolis”: A spectral tune winds through the Victorian dead city, calling the living to follow one hill too far.
- Dublin, Ireland — “The Lantern of St. Michan’s”: In the crypts where the air preserves the dead, a confession waits like a key in a locked door.
