Reading all those stories of Crofton Croker's, usually involving babies, hot pokers, boiling water or open fires, about the various ways for dealing with changelings, I remember feeling a sense of creeping horror at the idea that someone at some time genuinely thought it might be a good and necessary thing to do these things. At the back of my mind - not even that far back, really - was the story of Bridget Cleary, burned to death after two nights of torture and mistreatment because her husband somehow became convinced that she was a fairy and his real wife had been taken away. It's a nasty, brutish, sordid story, but Angela Bourke's masterful book works to dispel myths and misconceptions about the case and to put the events in a social, historical and cultural context.

The Cleary's were a relatively well-off childless couple. He was a cooper and she was a seamstress and they lived in a newly-built labourer's cottage at a time that was post-Famine, post-Land War, when progressive and ordered values were gradually asserting themselves across Ireland, conditions for the vast, legendarily-mistreated and long-suffering labouring class of the country were beginning to improve through political and agricultural reforms. A way of life that had employed fairy tales for instruction and entertainment, and belief in which was a complex, ambiguous thing, was being encroached upon. Values were changing. The creameries were replacing dairies, with massive economic and social shifts to small-scale every-day life. Scientific approaches to farming were rendering the fairy tales used to pass knowledge and practice orally through generations obsolete for that purpose.

Bourke cogently and intelligently makes the case that it was this decline and devaluation that seemed to prompt this savage manifestation of folkloric belief and action in a fraught domestic situation filled with subtle undercurrents and tensions. She also links the events to the political situation - Land Acts and Home Rule, as well as the Oscar Wilde libel trial and indecency case with which it was concurrent. Attitudes to the Irish as savage and backward vie with the Irish trying to defend themselves while the fascination with folklore and Irish heritage struggles to come to terms with a grim expression of a their heavily romanticised past-time.

A brilliant, measured, extremely well-written work of non-fiction that gets behind the lurid and sensational facts to form a narrative that provides some insight and understanding.