A few weeks back I was talking about the Puck Fair in Killorglin, Co Kerry, in the southwest of Ireland. For those of you not familiar with the fair, essentially is a Lughnasadh adjacent festival where a wild billy goat is caught on the mountainside the goat is brought back to the town, and the Queen of Puck, traditionally a schoolgirl from one of the local primary schools crowns him King Puck. They are then paraded around the town looking down on their subjects from a kind of mobile tower that looks a lot like a medieval siege tower without the protective cladding to the delight of a rapturous crowd. It reads a bit like the start of a folk horror screenplay, doesn’t it? And to be fair, it should because there is some pretty heavy pagan fertility symbolism laced through this event. There are some adult themes in the show as we also get into overlordship or Kingship depended upon male claimant making love to the territorial goddess and some of the wilder accounts of Kingship rites as laid out by Giraldus of Wales, that involve the consumption of the marriage to the land in its most literal sense. .

Puck

Geraldus of Wales

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