In 1825 26 year old Bridget Cleary disappeared from her house in rural Tipperary. At first, some said that the fairies had taken her into their stronghold in a nearby hill, from where she would emerge, riding a white horse. But then her body was found in a shallow grave. her husband, father, aunt and cousins were arrested and charged, while newspapers in nearby Clonmel, and then in Dublin, Cork, London and further afield attempted to make sense of what had happened. In this lurid and fascinating incident, set in the dawn of the twentieth century, we wirness the collision of town and country, of superstition and scepticism, of old and new. The torture and burning of Bridget Cleary caused a sensation in its own time and continues to reverberate more than 100 years later.
