Elizabeth Andrews gives this tale in Ulster Folklore, 1913, as having happened at Camlough near Newry. A woman was spinning one evening when three fairies came into her house, each bringing a spinning wheel. They said they would help with her work, and one asked for a drink of water.
The woman went to the well and was warned, apparently by a friendly fairy, that the three had come only to mock and harm her. On that advice, as soon as she had given them the water she turned to the open door and stood looking hard at a fort. They asked what she was staring at and she replied that she was looking at the blaze on the fort. At this the three rushed out so fast that one left her wheel behind, which, the story says, is now to be seen in Dublin Castle.
The woman shut the door and put a pin in the keyhole so that her visitors could not come back. Andrews takes the blaze to refer to the signal fires that country people believed were once lit on one fort in sight of the next in time of danger, and notes that the forts or raths were the favourite homes of the fairies.
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