The Dullahan

The Dullahan is Ireland's headless horseman, and he is far easier to date than to trace. Everything usually said about him — the head the colour of mouldy cheese, the whip made from a human spine, the black steed, the gates that fly open, the fear of gold, the descent from a beheading god called Crom Dubh — comes from a single modern book, Bob Curran's A Field Guide to Irish Fairies of 1997. Go back to the text that first put the word in print, Thomas Crofton Croker's Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (1828), and the picture changes completely. Croker's headless huntsman rides a white horse, carries no whip at all, and is a dead neighbour looking for company on the road home. The basin of blood belongs to a coach at Doneraile; the whip that puts out the eyes of anyone who stares belongs to that coach's driver, in an account sent to Croker by a lady near Cork. What Irish itself remembers is not the rider but the vehicle: the cóiste bodhar, the headless coach, which has a dictionary entry and hundreds of witnesses in the national folklore archive.

The Dullahan is usually introduced as immemorial Irish tradition. It is easier than that to date, because almost everything told about him can be traced to two printed sources a hundred and seventy years apart, and the older of the two is hanging on this very page: the engraving above is the tailpiece to a story in Thomas Crofton Croker's Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland, and it is signed, dated and paginated. Croker devoted a whole section to "The Dullahan" in Part II of the Fairy Legends (London: John Murray, 1828), pp. 85–152: five pieces — "The Good Woman", "Hanlon's Mill", "The Harvest Dinner", the comic ballad "The Death Coach" and "The Headless Horseman" — with notes. On the name he printed a communication from Edward O'Reilly, "author of the best Irish Dictionary extant": "Dulachan (in Irish Dubhlachan) signifies a dark, sullen person. The word Durrachan, or Dullahan, by which in some places the goblin is known, has the same signification." Croker then contradicted his own authority in the next line: "The correctness of this last etymology may be questioned, as Dubh, black, is evidently a component part of the word." He also noted, drily, that headless people are found everywhere, "although here alone they seem to have a peculiar name". Read them and the modern portrait falls apart, because it is assembled out of them wrongly. Croker's headless horseman is a dead huntsman who broke his neck at Kilcummer hill and now wants a riding companion; he is jovial, he loses a wager, and he is mounted "on the body and legs of a white horse full eighteen hands and a half high". His head, carried under the right arm and finally pocketed in his scarlet hunting-coat, "looked like a large cream cheese hung round with black puddings; no speck of colour enlivened the ashy paleness of the depressed features"; "two fiery eyes of prodigious circumference, with a strange and irregular motion, flashed like meteors", and "a mouth reached from either extremity of two ears". And he carries no whip at all: Croker says explicitly that he rode "unaided by whip or spur, and disdaining the use of stirrups". The basin of blood and the whipped-out eyes are in Croker — but they belong to the coach, not to the rider. In a note to "Hanlon's Mill" (1828, II: 109) he reports a black coach drawn by headless horses running nightly from Castle Hyde to Glanafauna, and driving every Saturday night through Doneraile: "should any one be so fool-hardy as to open the door, a basin of blood is instantly flung in their face." In the note to "The Death Coach" (II: 136–137) he prints "the following account of the Dullahans and their coach", communicated "by a lady resident in the neighbourhood of Cork": "The coachman has a most marvellously long whip, with which he can whip the eyes out of any one, at any distance, that dares to look at him." A long whip — not a spine. The spine is four pages earlier, in the joke ballad, and it is a piece of the vehicle: "Their spokes are of dead men's thigh bones, / And the pole is the spine of the back!" Croker himself, who was collecting comparatively for the Grimms, printed the Danish parallel beside it: Thiele's oppressive lords of Glorup, whose coach blinds anyone who fails to hide his face. The 1834 revised one-volume edition (Murray, Albemarle Street) tightened the section and lost the Doneraile note altogether, and it is that edition, at p. 239, that carries the vignette after Daniel Maclise and William Henry Brooke reproduced here. In 1888 W. B. Yeats reprinted the material in Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry and made the decisive move in a single editorial sentence, filed under the Banshee: "an immense black coach, mounted by a coffin, and drawn by headless horses driven by a Dullahan. It will go rumbling to your door, and if you open it, according to Croker, a basin of blood will be thrown in your face." From Yeats onward the Dullahan is the coachman, so the coachman's properties become his. Yeats's guess at an origin was offered as a guess: "In Norway the heads of corpses were cut off to make their ghosts feeble. Thus came into existence the Dullahans, perhaps." The word itself has an odd record in Irish lexicography. O'Reilly's own dictionary, in the enlarged edition of 1864 with John O'Donovan's supplement, runs dubhlaod, dubhladh, dubhlaighim, dubhlaidh, dubhlaitheach, dubhlan — and has no dubhlachán at all. Dinneen's Foclóir Gaedhilge agus Béarla (Irish Texts Society, 1904) has none either; what it does have, under cóiste, is "c. bodhar, the 'headless coach,' a spectral vision". The vehicle is lexicalised in Irish. The rider is not. The portrait everyone repeats today was fixed in 1997, by Bob Curran and Andrew Whitson's A Field Guide to Irish Fairies (Belfast: Appletree Press), whose text the publisher's own website, Ireland's Eye, put online: "The head is the colour and texture of stale dough or mouldy cheese"; "He uses a human spine as a whip"; "an artefact made of gold may frighten him away, for dullahans appear to have an irrational fear of this precious metal"; and "he is thought to be the embodiment of an ancient Celtic god, Crom Dubh, or Black Crom", worshipped by "the prehistoric king, Tighermas", who "was the first to introduce gold mines to the country", and who demanded lives "the most favoured method of sacrifice being decapitation". Every element of the description on this page before it was rewritten came from that paragraph.

There is nothing to visit, and the map pin on this page should be read with that in mind. It sits at 53.4129, −8.2439, which a reverse look-up in OpenStreetMap resolves to the townland of Curry, in the Ahascragh electoral division of County Galway — a point no source in this file connects with the legend in any way. It is a default for "Ireland", not a location, and it is being left in place rather than replaced by an invented one. The real geography of the sources is southern and northern, not central. Croker's tales are County Cork: Charley Culnane sets off homewards from the little sheebeen at Ballyhooly, along the Blackwater, after a day in Fermoy (the village is at 52.1441, −8.3979 in OpenStreetMap); the Saturday-night coach drives through Doneraile (52.2171, −8.5848), and the ballad names Rathcooney, Glanmire, Tivoli, Ballintemple, Blackrock and the Old Head of Kinsale, all within reach of Cork city. The 1997 account moves the creature to "the more remote parts of counties Sligo and Down" and quotes a storyteller placing it "on the brow of the hill between Bryansford and Moneyscalp" in the Mournes; that testimony is unattributable to any archive I could reach. The schoolchildren's archive puts the coach elsewhere again — Ennistymon House in County Clare, a school in County Galway. All of these are ordinary public roads and villages with no folklore signage, no site and no visitor provision. What can actually be consulted is the paper: Croker's Parts II and III of 1828 and the revised 1834 volume are free and complete on the Internet Archive, and the Schools' Collection testimonies quoted here are transcribed, page-numbered and free to read on dúchas.ie, the National Folklore Collection's site.