The Night the Black Horse Comes

Cormac Deane
Field Correspondent, The Isles & the Otherworld

Fieldnotes — County Wicklow, early November

I first heard the name properly on a wet road above the reservoir at Poulaphouca, where the water takes its title from an older feature of the land, Poll an Phúca, the hole of the púca, a churning pool below a waterfall that the flooding of the valley for the hydroelectric scheme long ago drowned. The man who told me this, leaning on a gate with a dog at his heel, said the water had always had a bad name before the dam came, and that the horse was said to rise out of it on certain nights and take the road for company.

The púca does not belong to one shape. That is the first thing to understand about it and nearly the last thing anyone can be certain of. Across Ireland it is most often a horse, black as turf smoke, with a mane that throws sparks and eyes that hold their own light. In other tellings it is a goat, in others a great black dog, a hare, an eagle, or something that never quite settles enough to be looked at directly. Wales knows a cousin in the pwca; Shakespeare's Puck is thought by some to share the root, though how close that kinship runs is one of those questions scholars argue over more happily than they resolve.

What the horse does, when it takes that shape, is well agreed upon. It waits by a gate or a crossroads for someone walking home late, offers itself to be ridden, and once the rider is up, it runs. Over hedges, through rivers, across bog that no sane horse would enter, faster than anything with four legs has business going, and the rider cannot let go, can only hold on until first light, when the púca stops as suddenly as it started and leaves its passenger, shaken but almost always unharmed, in a ditch or a field far from where they began. I have heard the ride described as terrifying and, in the same breath, as the best night of the teller's grandfather's life, which tells you something about how this creature is held in memory: not a monster to be fled on sight, but a force to be respected, occasionally outwitted, and never quite trusted.

There is a gentler register too. In parts of the country the púca is said to visit farms at night and do useful work, threshing corn or tidying a byre, in the manner of a house spirit, provided it is not thanked or watched too closely. And there is a firm date attached to it. The thirty-first of October, or the first of November depending on who is telling it, is named as the night the púca claims the last of the year's fruit. After that date, blackberries left on the bramble are said to be spoiled by the passing spirit, and no one with sense picks them. In some districts the final sheaf of the harvest was left standing uncut in the corner of the field, the púca's share, a small tithe paid so the rest of the crop would be let alone.

Nobody I spoke with agreed on whether the púca was fundamentally kind or cruel, only that it minded whether it was minded. The versions disagree on almost everything except this: that the wisest thing to do, meeting a black horse on a lonely road after dark, is to speak to it politely and let it choose whether to answer.

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.