What happened
The púca (pooka) is one of the most elusive figures in Irish folklore: a shape-shifting spirit that appears as a black horse with blazing eyes, a goat, a dog or a hare. The best-known tale has the púca take drunken travellers on its back and gallop with them through the night, dumping them in a ditch at dawn. After Samhain – 1 November – it was said to spit on or foul the blackberries, which is why children were told not to pick them after Halloween. The púca’s name survives in dozens of place-names, the most famous being Poll an Phúca in County Wicklow: a gorge where the Liffey dropped over a rock ledge into a deep, churning pool. The Civil Survey of around 1654 already records “a mighty fall called by the natives Pullagh Fuckagh,” and a map of 1752 marks “Poolapooka, a remarkable cataract.” Nineteenth-century guidebooks translated the name as “the Devil’s hole” and described a whirlpool without a bottom. In 1939 a dam was built here, and the waterfall lost most of its former force.
Witnesses
The Civil Survey (c. 1654) and the Noble and Keenan map (1752); nineteenth-century guidebook writers and the topographer P. W. Joyce; púca lore recorded by the Irish Folklore Commission in the 1930s.
Explanations and hypotheses
The place-name is a genuine, old record, but – as Ireland’s official placenames database Logainm.ie puts it – “púca in placenames” is “a researcher’s nightmare”: the word poll (“hole, pool”) rarely refers to a waterfall, so the name may have passed to the cascade from the pool at its foot, or simply meant “a foreboding place” from the start. The púca is a folklore figure, not an event with a date; its link with blackberries after Samhain shows how firmly beliefs about an “open Otherworld” survived in everyday Irish life.
Legend A story handed down through generations – it can be neither confirmed nor disproved.
Sources
- Logainm.ie – Púca in placenames, a researcher’s nightmare (2024)
- P. W. Joyce, Fairies and the Names of Places in Ireland (Library Ireland)
- The Illustrated Dublin Journal – Pol-A-Phuca Waterfall, County Wicklow (1862; Library Ireland)
More: Wikipedia (en)