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Halloween Bonfires and the Tail-less Black Sow

By Weird Burial Stories Editorial Desk · 2026-10-17

The sacred Samhain fire that relit all of Ireland is one seventeenth-century history, and both Britannica and Ronald Hutton doubt it. The fires that can be dated are a Scottish ban in 1589 and, much later, a Welsh race home from the embers ahead of a tail-less black sow.

By C. V. Wooster

The bonfire is the part of Halloween that sounds ancient, because fire is a good picture. The picture of one druid flame on the Hill of Ward, and every Irish hearth relit from it, is a particular book. Geoffrey Keating, a seventeenth-century priest and historian, is the source. Encyclopaedia Britannica's Samhain entry says he cited no sources, and that the assertion might itself be folklore. Ronald Hutton, in a 2024 essay in Folklore, says the tale occurs only in that one very late text, that its provenance is unknown, and that its value is very doubtful. The fires that survive in a dated record are smaller and later. One is a prohibition in Stirling in 1589. Another is a Welsh custom, written down from the eighteenth century onward, in which the last person to leave a dying Halloween fire might be caught by the tail-less black sow.

What can be said about a Samhain fire

Britannica is cautious in the way a reference book should be when the early evidence is thin. Celtic peoples, it says, possibly lit large bonfires on Samhain, believing the fires offered protection from supernatural beings. "Possibly" is the word. The full scope of ancient practice, the same entry says, remains unclear, because evidence is sparse. Irish tales of the tenth and twelfth centuries mention Samhain as a date. They do not describe a national fire drill. Evidence for Samhain fires in Ireland is thin, Britannica adds, and stronger for Beltane in May, which might have led to some confusion between the two festivals.

Keating's version is the one that escaped the caution. Hutton summarizes it from Keating's history of Ireland: every Samhain Eve, druids gathered at Tlachtga, near the center of the country, and all the Irish had to rekindle their own fires from that one. Hutton's reading of why the story was useful is political as well as antiquarian. It let Keating promote an image of a traditionally united Ireland in the face of Protestant English conquest. A story that serves a seventeenth-century argument, and that no earlier source contains, is a weak witness for a prehistoric rite. Britannica spells the historian's name Jeffrey. Hutton, and the usual English form of Seathrún Céitinn, uses Geoffrey. The book is the same book. Sir John Rhys, in 1892, still treated the Tlachtga fire as support for a Celtic New Year, which is how the tale entered the lecture circuit Hutton traces in the essay on Samhain and All Hallows.

What the documents do contain is a ban. Britannica notes that in 1589 there was a prohibition of "hollowmass" fires in Stirling, Scotland. A town telling people not to light Halloween fires is evidence that someone was lighting them, in that burgh, in that year. It is not evidence of a druid assembly on an Irish hill a thousand years earlier. Rhys, quoted by Hutton, reported that bonfires at Halloween were known in Wales "till recent years" as of 1892. That is a nineteenth-century observation of a custom then still in memory. It is a different kind of fact from Keating's origin story, and it should be kept in its century.

Nos Calan Gaeaf, and the sow without a tail

Wales has the bonfire custom with the best folklore file, and the file is late. Amgueddfa Cymru, Museum Wales, describes Nos Calan Gaeaf, the eve of the winter calends, as the night when spirits were said to roam. The ghosts of the dead, it says, were to be seen "at midnight on every stile." Two common apparitions were the Ladi Wen, the white lady, and, mainly in North Wales, the Hwch Ddu Gwta, the tail-less black sow, tied to the bonfires. As the fire died, people chanted "Adref, adref am y cynta', Hwch Ddu Gwta a gipio'r ola'." Museum Wales gives the English as "Be sure you are the first at home, the tail-less black sow is sure to roam." The museum's character card says the same thing in plainer clothes: at the end of the night everybody must run home, because if they linger their souls might be taken by the sow.

A man sometimes played the animal. BBC News, in 2018, quoted Juliette Wood, a folklorist at Cardiff University. At the end of the festival, she said, one of the slaughtered pigs, usually a man covered in a cloth or an animal skin, would rise, supposedly out of the flames, and chase the children. The rhyme said the pig would catch the last child home. Wood's reading of the meaning is the one to attribute, not to promote into a fact. It has "roots in beliefs about the souls of the dead, people and animals," she told the BBC, "but on a practical level it was probably just a fun and effective way of getting children to bed." The soul reading is her interpretation. The chase is the custom as she describes it.

An older Welsh witness, for a different fire rite, is Thomas Pennant, copied by William Hone in the Every-Day Book of 1826. In North Wales, Pennant recorded, each family lit a fire called Coel Coeth on All Saints' Eve. Each person threw a marked white stone into the ashes. If a stone was missing in the morning, its owner was expected to die before the next All Saints' Eve. Hutton, citing Rhys in 1892, adds that in Wales women had until recently gathered in parish churches on this night for rites to find out who would die in the coming year. Hutton's own caution, in the same essay, is that Calan Gaeaf has no such importance in medieval Welsh literature as May Day and its eve. The stiles, the sow, the stones, and the church rites are eighteenth- to twentieth-century records. They are not a medieval Welsh funeral liturgy. They are what people in Wales later said the night was for.

A legend, a ban, and a race

The honest order is the order of the paper. Keating's national fire is a seventeenth-century assertion with no source behind it, and two modern authorities, Britannica and Hutton, say so. Stirling's 1589 ban is a municipal act against a fire that existed then. Welsh Nos Calan Gaeaf is a recorded custom of ghosts on stiles, a chant, a man in a skin, and a stone in the ashes that was read as a death omen. The sow's link to the souls of the dead is a folklorist's reading. The link to ancient Samhain is the part that has not been shown. Manx Hop-tu-Naa, the other island night in that week, has the same problem with the words "Celtic New Year," and Hutton handles it the same way: the turnip night. The English parish that rang bells for the dead, and was told to stop, is a different sound on the same calendar: All Hallows' bells.

A bonfire story with one source is still a story. It is not a hearth tax. The Halloween fire you can actually cite is the one a Scottish town tried to put out, and the one Welsh children were told to outrun.

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