Soil bacteria secrete chemicals to inhibit or kill competing bacteria, and this particular strain of Streptomyces happens to mess with several disease-causing pathogens that have become impervious to conventional antibiotics. Quinn, who has since moved on to Northern Ireland’s Ulster University, and his former colleagues at Swansea University Medical School in Wales recently discovered that the hallowed Boho (pronounced Bo) dirt possesses unique antibiotic properties-and may provide a new weapon in the long-running arms race against antibiotic-resistant bacteria.Īccording to the Swansea researchers, the soil over Father McGirr contains a previously unknown strain of Streptomyces, a genus of the phylum Actinobacteria, which has produced about two-thirds of all currently prescribed antibiotics.
But legend often reveals truth that reality obscures. “According to legend,” says Quinn, “failure to take back the soil within four days brings very bad luck.”įor those of us who don’t subscribe to fable, this antic County Fermanagh folk remedy may strike a skeptical chord.
#GRAVE YARD HOW TO#
The wooden post beside the priest’s headstone instructs visitors what prayers to offer up to him and how to sample the “blessed clay”: ONLY A SPOONFUL OF SOIL SHOULD BE REMOVED AND MUST BE RETURNED TO FR MCGIRR’S GRAVE ON THE FOURTH DAY. “To dig with,” Quinn more or less explains. On this particular afternoon, the grave is carpeted with spoons-teaspoons, tablespoons, soup spoons, even a grapefruit spoon. James McGirr, where two white posts hold printed information about the “blessed clay.” This article is a selection from the January/February 2020 issue of Smithsonian magazine Buy Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $12 “The soil is believed to alleviate many minor ailments, like flesh wounds and sore throats.” “They will then bring the packets home-taking pains not to speak to anyone they encountered on the road-and place the pouches under their pillows,” Quinn says.
#GRAVE YARD PATCH#
“On his deathbed he supposedly declared: ‘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.’” This led to a curious local custom: Petitioners will kneel beside the plot, remove a thumbnail-size patch of dirt and put it into a cotton pouch.
“The good father is said to have been a faith healer,” says Gerry Quinn, a microbiologist who grew up in the area. Out here in the Boho Highlands, part of the West Fermanagh Scarplands, five miles from the border with the Republic of Ireland, there’s a longstanding belief among parishioners that the earth Father McGirr was buried under had almost miraculous curative powers. I skirt graves marked McAfee, McCaffrey, McConnell, McDonald, McGee.At last, atop a bosky knoll, I reach the weatherworn headstone of James McGirr, a parish priest who died in 1815, age 70. I meander past the Boho High Cross of County Fermanagh, a tenth-century monument whose carvings feature scenes from Genesis and the Baptism of Christ. In this Northern Irish churchyard, burial plots line the paths like little marble farms for the dead. A thin mist billows like a mourner’s veil between the iron gates of Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church, and moisture drips from the yews like tears.
It’s a splendid day for a turn around a graveyard: dark, damp, forbidding.
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