'If the four-leafed shamrock was lucky, the hungry grass who quite the opposite, and very unlucky he who trod on it.' In point of fact if you trod on the hungry grass you almost expired of hunger -- for this is where some poor wretch died of starvation in the famine days. The hungry grass is still remembered in Ireland, like the stories of highwaymen and travelling people, of summer pastures, of the typical Irish 'whiteboys, of lost and hidden treasures. Danaher tells all sorts of tales about the beliefs associated with birds, insects and big and little animals, of plants, bushes, trees and stones. Then we hear about dwarfs and fabulous water monsters, and ghosts and witches, about castles and drowned cities.

Kevin Danaher was born in Athea County Limerick in 1915 and educated at University College Dublin and the universities of Berlin and Leipzig. After service as a captain in the Irish army during the Emergency, he became a full-time ethnologist with the Irish Folklore Commission (later the Department of Irish Folklore in University College Dublin). He was as fine a writer as he was a folklorist and his many works include The Year in Ireland (1972) and Irish Country Households (1975, reissued 1999). His research provided the basis for the Folk Park at Bunratty, county Limerick.