On to the house all three we go...."

Of their entry to the mysterious house, of the ogre and the witch they
found there, of the horrors that gathered on all sides, when

"From iron benches on the right
Nine headless bodies rose to sight,
And on the left, from grim repose,
Nine heads that had no bodies rose,..."

Ossin likewise tells, and how, overcome, they fell at last into a
deathlike trance and stupor, till the sunlight woke them lying on the
heathery hillside, the house utterly vanished away.

The scenes of all the happenings in the story are well known: the rath
of Badamar is near Caher on the Suir, in the midst of the Golden Vale, a
plain of wonderful richness and beauty, walled in by the red precipices
of the Galtee Mountains, and the Knock-Mealdown Hills. From the rath of
Badamar Find could watch the western mountains reddening and glowing in
front of the dawn, as the sun-rays shot level over the burnished plain.
Clocar is thirty miles westward over the Golden Vale, near where Croom
now stands; and here were run the races; here Find gained the gift of
the coal-black steed. It is some forty miles still westwards to the
Strand of Tralee; the last half of the way among hills carpeted with
heather; and the Strand itself, with the tide out, leaves a splendid
level of white sand as far as the eye can reach, tempting Find to try
his famous courser. The race carried them southwards some fifteen miles
to the beautiful waters of Lough Leane, with its overhanging wooded
hills, the Lake of Killarney, southward of which rises the huge red
mass of Mangerton, in the midst of a country everywhere rich in beauty.