The Bone Fires of Samhain

Cormac Deane
Field Correspondent, The Isles & the Otherworld

Fieldnotes — Hill of Ward, County Meath, late October

Halloween, as it is kept now, carries more of Samhain in it than most people realise. The carved lantern on the step, the fire in the garden, the sense that this particular night sits apart from the rest of the year, all of it descends from a festival the Gaels kept at the close of harvest, long before anyone called it the thirty-first of October.

Samhain marked the hinge of the year. The harvest was in, the herds brought down from summer pasture, and the Gaelic calendar turned from the light half of the year into the dark. It was reckoned one of the two great doors of the year, along with Beltane in spring, and on nights like these the old belief held that the wall between this world and the other grew thin enough to walk through. The aos sí, the people of the mounds, were said to be abroad. The dead, too, were thought to find their way home.

Against this, people lit fires. Hilltop bonfires were raised across Ireland and Scotland at Samhain, and tradition points to the Hill of Ward, the ancient Tlachtga, in County Meath, as a site where a great fire was kept and from which, so the later record claims, other fires across the country were relit. I set that claim down as it is told rather than as settled history; the written sources are later than the practice itself, and how far back the custom of a single central fire truly goes is argued among those who study it. What is better attested is the custom of driving cattle between two fires, at Samhain as at Beltane, to carry them safely through the smoke and into the dark months.

The word itself is worth pausing on. Bonfire is often explained as bone-fire, a fire fed with the bones of slaughtered stock or burned remains, and that reading sits comfortably with a festival timed to the autumn slaughter, when herds too large to feed through winter were culled. Other accounts trace the word differently, to fires built of good wood rather than bone, or to later confusion between the two. I have not found the matter settled by those who study the language closely, and I set it down here as contested rather than certain, which seems the honest thing to do with a word this old.

Out of the fire came other customs that have simply changed their names since. Turnips, not pumpkins, were the first lanterns, hollowed and carved with a face and set to burn at the window or carried on the road, meant to frighten off whatever walked abroad that night, or perhaps to stand in for it. Doors were left on the latch and a place set at table, food put out for a soul that might still find its way home. Young people went house to house in disguise, a practice later generations would call guising, and small games of divination, an apple, a nut cast into the fire, were played to read the coming year.

All Hallows' Eve, when it came later with the Christian calendar, settled over this older night rather than replacing it, and much of Samhain simply carried on underneath the new name. The fire is still lit, somewhere, on the last night of October. It is older than the word for it.

Cormac Deane is a field correspondent of the Wyrdlore Society, reporting from the Isles & the Otherworld. Passage tombs, place-names, and the long argument between them; a habit of reading the landscape through the Irish in it, and of pointing out where a translation has quietly invented a story the original never told.

The rest of the season is gathered in Nights of the Dead.