About Folklore & Science
I am a teller of folk tales. These are great tales of love, hate, jealousy, loyalty, devotion, family, feuds, lust, and every human emotion, often told on an epic scale.
I am also jealous of the tellers of the guy who made up a story a few thousand years ago. Someone made up a story, told it at a gathering probably next to a bonfire. Mesmerized the audience with the tale. And we are still repeating the tale many centuries later. I would love someone to remember one of my stories 10 minutes after I told it.
These stories are not always entirely fiction, and there are elements of truth to many of them. I’m always fascinated by the many instances in which historians or archaeologists or anthropologists verify elements of folklore. Those are the instances in which folk lore and history intersect.
This is a story about one of those instances in which the ancient people and folklore were spot on, much to the surprise of us in the 21st Century.
It is also a story about DIRT – specifically, dirt in a small hamlet in County Fermanagh, Ireland.
The hamlet is Boho (pronounced Bo) which means hut. It is in Northern Ireland, less than a half dozen miles from the Republic of Ireland.
There are Neolithic stones in the area, nearly 4,000 years old. Markings on the stone are believed to be early writings, although they’ve yet to be deciphered. The area is believed to have had religious significance, not only to the Neolithic or stone age people, but also in later years, particularly when the druids were there.
Druids were the learned people in ancient Ireland. They were a combination of teachers, priests, judges, and, to extent, healers. There are many stories through the ages of people afflicted with various ailments coming to Boho. The druids had the sick roll around in the dirt, or sprinkle dirt on their wounds. Sometimes this would work, sometimes it would not, but this didn’t stop people from trying the remedy.
Medical treatment has historically intersected with religion and spirituality in this way. People couldn’t explain why some people got sick, and how or why some sick got better. They looked to religion, or the gods, for explanation.
This practice in Boho stopped, or at least slowed down, when Christianity reached Ireland. The church had a monopoly on miracles and miracle cures. People were cured by power of prayer, or holy water, or some other acceptable church practice. Anything else was paganism. If the cures didn’t work, then it was God’s will who, as we all know, works in mysterious ways. No one could be cured by the dirt of Boho, it was presumed.
There was, though, a Catholic priest in Boho, named James McGirr. Father McGirr died in 1815 at the age of 70. He was well aware of the ancient legends of the miraculous dirt in the village. He actually witnessed it, as people still came to Boho and were cured by the dirt.
Father McGirr came to believe in the magic dirt, not as an ancient pagan remedy but as land blessed by God. He gained some local renown as a faith healer by sprinkling dirt upon the afflicted. This sometimes worked and sometimes did not.
Father James McGirr is buried in a graveyard near his parish church. On his deathbed, he said: “After I die, the clay that covers me will cure anything that I was able to cure when I was with you while I was alive”.
And this became a local custom. People came to his grave, removed a small amount of dirt, and took it home. They put it under pillow or rubbed the dirt on a wound. Even today, the grave is covered with small spoons. The spoons are there so that people can remove a small amount of dirt.
All of this remained in the category of folk lore and folk remedies – yet another quaint Irish custom.
This changed a few years ago with the work of Gerry Quinn, a microbiologist who grew up in the area. Quinn was certainly well aware of the legends. As a young man he studied antibiotics and antibiotic-resistant bacteria. For a time, he was a post-graduate student at Swansea University Medical School in Wales.
While a student, and while visiting his aunt in Boho, he asked if he could test some of her clay. She of course said yes, but she also gave him some dirt from James McGirr’s grave. Quinn took the dirt back with him to Wales.
By way of background, antibiotics are any substance that is active to inhibit the growth, or destroy, bacteria.
Streptomyces is a particular type of antibiotic. This is somewhat of an oxymoron, because streptomyces is itself a bacteria. It is a non-mobile bacteria, meaning that it cannot move away from danger or to somewhere more habitable. It has thus evolved a defense mechanism: Streptomyces produces an antibiotic to kill any competing organism in its immediate vicinity. So while it is itself a bacteria, streptomyces produces a substance which can kill, or at least inhibit, other types of bacteria.
Streptomyces is found in the soil. Researchers at Swansea studied dirt from Saudi Arabia, Tibet, Brazil, and many other places which had a unique combination of climate and soil, in often inhospitable settings. The difficult part of this research was keeping micro-organisms from soil samples alive in the lab.
That is precisely the project which Gerry Quinn was working on and precisely what led him to gather samples from Boho. Quinn knew that the area was one of the few alkaline grasslands in Northern Ireland. It produces a unique array of plants. The geology is called scarpland – a series of ridges with gentle slope on one side, and steep slope on the other, and with low bogs in between. Because of local geology and low-intensity farming, area looks much like it did thousands of years ago.
What did Quinn and his colleagues discover?
They discovered a strain of streptomyces previously unknown. It is still not known to be anywhere else in the world. It is a strain which does quite well in inhibiting certain superbugs – strains of bacteria which are not inhibited by other antibiotics and which have evolved defenses to many other antibiotics.
The microbiologists named this streptomyces – Streptomyces myrophorea. Myrophorea is ancient Greek name for the myrrh bearing women who found the tomb of Jesus after the Resurrection. Myrrh is particularly fragrant, often used cover up strong odors. The microbiologists gave it this name because of the distinct alkaline fragrance of the Boho streptomyces
I would have called it Streptomyces Boho, but that’s just me.
Here’s one more factoid in this story of the intersection between folk remedies and modern science. A sign by the grave of Father McGirr says that only one spoonful of soil should be removed, and that the soil should be returned to the grave on the on the fourth day. Spoons are provided for convenience. According to legend, bad luck falls upon anyone who fails to return the soil.
Gerry Quinn removed soil from the grave for his micro-biological studies, and he kept the soil far more than four days. But after he and his colleagues completed their research, and published a paper about it in a scholarly journal, Quinn returned to Boho and placed his soil samples back on to the grave of Father McGirr.
Is it any wonder that some of those ancient people afflicted with an illness or with an open wound could be cured by rolling around in the dirt of Boho? What the scientists in Wales discovered is something that Father James McGirr and the ancient druids already knew, centuries before.