“The Skiapod of Ballymaccus”,

LHQ Gallery, Cork, Ireland

5th June - 24th July 2026

It was on a Sunday, 19th June 1631 that the thing washed up on the shore. I’d never seen the like. We had arrived back from church at around midday to our home overlooking a spit of beach facing Oysterhaven, and we could see it there down below, bedraggled, wet and motionless amongst the grit and shells. Half bird, half human and the size of a wrestler… skin and feathers but with the curious feature of having but only one enormous leg, with an equally enormous foot at the end of it.

John, our eldest, was ready to beat it with driftwood, but I stopped him, for the state it was in did not offer a whiff of a threat to us. We sent Anna on her pony back to Kinsale to summon the Vicar of St Multose, who we knew to be well educated. My wife dribbled water into its mouth whilst it coughed and spluttered, but after twenty or so minutes it gained some consciousness and began to emit words in a language that was alien to us.

By mid-afternoon the Vicar had arrived followed by a host of townsfolk coming to gawk at the creature, who by now was fully awake and voraciously eating a plate of the Sunday lunch we had brough to share with it, though spitting out the parsnips into the grass.

“It is speaking French”, said the Vicar, an Englishman who had been to university and could speak French also. He determined that this fellow was a Skiapod, as much a creature of legend as a hippopotamus or a jerboa. He admitted that although God’s miracles were a consistent surprise to him, he never would have imagined a Skiapod actually existing, and it gave credence to the idea that hippopotamuses and jerboas actually exist too.

They conversed for a while and then the vicar turned to us and relayed the story that this thing knew not where it was born, but that it had been kept in captivity in a hot and sandy country until it had been forced aboard a ship of Barbary pirates bound for Baltimore, as both a mascot and a tactic to terrify the inhabitants of that village. However by the time the Irish coast was in sight, the captain of the ship, a Dutchman by the name of Murad Reis, had accused the Skiapod of eating and drinking more than its fair share of the ship’s provisions and had become maddened by the creature’s constant mockery. Consequently it was pushed overboard into the ocean.

… 

In the days that followed, news reached us about the sacking of Baltimore, and further afield, various conflicted suspicions grew about the creature regarding ill omens and witchcraft. The townsfolk of Kinsale, however, for the most part were taken with a curious affection for the beast, and the vicar, an enlightened man, suggested we hide it in one of our outhouses until the brouhaha emanating from the west of the county had subsided a little.

 Nevertheless, we received a constant line of visitors bringing breads and cakes who would sit and listen while the Skiapod entertained them with mimicry of the curlews and oystercatchers that frequented the creek below.

On the tenth day, a few of us witnessed a deterioration in the health of the creature. Whether it was the onset of an unseasonal coldness or the richness of the diet it’d indulged itself with since its’ arrival, it wouldn’t rise for its morning one-footed gallop around the southern field, but groaned quietly in its bedding. We offered it a brew of meadowsweet mixed with tea and honey in the hope to improve its constitution but solid food was refused.

On the morning of the eleventh day it had gone, unwitnessed. And so had one of the two neamhógs moored on the beach.