Clurichaun Vs Leprechaun: Ireland's Drunk Fairy Explained

A clurichaun (also spelled cluricaun or cluricaune, said “KLOO-rih-kawn”) is a small, solitary Irish fairy who haunts wine cellars and drinks his host’s best wine. Move house and, the story goes, he moves with you. Thomas Crofton Croker wrote him up in the 1820s as the leprechaun under a regional name. Yeats noted some saw him as the leprechaun “on a spree”.

Everyone has heard of the leprechaun. Fewer have met his cousin astride the wine cask, with a nose that blooms purple like a plum.

That’s the clurichaun. His best-known story is set at Ballinacarthy, a Mac Carthy house in Croker’s south of Ireland. Croker calls cluricaune the Co. Cork name for the creature. That’s my own county, and I’m choosing not to read anything into it.

Much of what’s online about him is copied without a source. So here’s what the old collectors wrote, and where the modern bits crept in.

What is a clurichaun?

A clurichaun is Ireland’s drunk fairy: a small, withered, solitary sprite who haunts wine cellars and drinks the best of the stock. He attaches himself to one household and is very hard to shift.

The earliest printed use I know of is in Croker’s Researches in the South of Ireland (1824). He writes that “Cluricaune or Leprehaune is the name given to the Irish Puck”. He pictures a little old man dressed as a cobbler, with a purse that never runs dry.

The drinking arrives a year later, in Croker’s Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (1825). For his place among the other fairies, see my guide to Irish mythological creatures.

Clurichaun vs leprechaun: same fairy or cousins?

It’s the big question. The old writers simply disagreed.

Croker said they were the same

Croker wrote that the Cluricaune of Co. Cork, the Luricaune of Kerry and the Lurigadaune of Tipperary “appear to be the same as” the Leprechan of Leinster. He thought all these names came from an Irish word for a pigmy.

His cluricaunes even make shoes and carry a lucky purse. What set them apart from the fairies who live in troops, he said, was their “sottish and solitary habits”. Sottish means given to drink.

P. W. Joyce agreed in 1869, listing “cluricane” among the leprechaun’s many names. For the shoemaker himself, see my guide to leprechauns in Irish folklore.

Yeats split them, but only just

W. B. Yeats, the poet behind The Stolen Child, collected fairy lore too. In 1888 he asked whether the leprechaun, clurichaun and Far Darrig were one spirit in different moods. “Hardly two Irish writers are agreed,” he admitted.

He said some thought the clurichaun “merely the Lepracaun on a spree”. He added that the clurichaun was “almost unknown in Connaught and the north”.

So the drunken cousin is real, but he’s a 19th-century idea, not an ancient one. My own take: same family, different night out.

Croker’s clurichaun tales

Croker’s 1825 book has five cluricaune stories, plus one tucked into his notes.

The Haunted Cellar (Ballinacarthy)

Justin Mac Carthy of Ballinacarthy was a hospitable squire who could not keep a butler. One after another, they quit over the wine cellar.

Jack Leary, a lad from the stables, took the job. Down in the cellar he heard a roaring and bellowing “like a mad bull”, and every cask rocked.

Mac Carthy announced he would leave Ballinacarthy the next day, then took the lantern down himself.

He found a little figure “about six inches in height” (roughly 15 cm) astride a pipe, a very large cask, of his oldest port. The sprite wore a red nightcap, a leather apron, long light-blue stockings and silver-buckled shoes. His face was “like a withered winter apple”.

The little fellow asked whether they weren’t moving tomorrow. Surely his master wouldn’t leave “your own little Cluricaune Naggeneen” behind? Mac Carthy saw little point in moving after that.

He stayed, fetched his own wine for years, and lived “to a good round age”.

Why he’s called Naggeneen

Croker’s notes say the name comes from naggin, a small measure of drink about the size of an English gill. That’s roughly 4 to 5 US fluid ounces. Add the Irish ending -een, meaning little, and you get “little noggin”.

An English friend suggested renaming him Flip-nip. Croker refused. Quite right too.

Mr Harris and the cellar sprite

Croker printed a second version, sent by letter from Cork. A Quaker named Mr Harris had a cluricaune who wedged himself into the beer tap if a servant left it running.

The sprite’s dinner was left in the cellar. One Friday the cook left him only part of a herring and some cold potatoes. That night, the letter says, she was dragged down the cellar stairs. She spent three weeks in bed.

Harris was told the sprite couldn’t follow him past a running stream, so he loaded the carts. As the last cart was loaded with casks and barrels, the sprite hopped into an empty one. He called from the bung-hole: “Here, master! here we go, all together!” Harris had the carts unloaded.

Croker’s 1825 text calls the sprite Little Wildbeam. Thomas Keightley’s retelling has Little Wildbean. Croker himself compared the ending to a Danish tale about a house spirit called a Nis.

My short video tells the clurichaun’s story, moving day and all, in about a minute.

The guarding and grudges are old. The Brothers Grimm, summarising Croker in 1826, say he wards off dangers but rages if his food is forgotten.

The video gives him a taste for whiskey, as many modern tellings do. The old stories prefer good wine or beer, though I doubt he’d refuse a drop.

Master and Man

Billy Mac Daniel accepts a drink from a little man in a gold-laced hat. He refuses to pay, so he must serve him for “seven years and a day”.

The master cries “Borram! Borram! Borram!” and bog rushes turn into horses. They slip through keyholes into gentlemen’s wine cellars.

At a wedding at Carrigogunnell, Co. Limerick, the master plans to carry off the bride if nobody blesses her sneezes. On the third sneeze Billy roars “God save us!” His furious master kicks him onto the supper table and sacks him.

The Little Shoe and The Field of Boliauns

In The Little Shoe, told near Kilmallock, Co. Limerick, a woman’s grandfather catches a cluricaune hammering a shoe in his stable. It slips away, leaving the tiny shoe behind.

Boliauns (Irish buachalán) are ragwort, a common yellow weed. In The Field of Boliauns, Tom Fitzpatrick marks the fairy’s treasure by tying his red garter to one. When he comes back with a spade, every ragwort in the field wears one. Joseph Jacobs swapped in a leprechaun in 1892, and admitted it in his notes.

The wine cellar and the night rides on sheep and dogs

You’ll often read that he rides sheep and sheepdogs by night. It’s a great image, but I couldn’t find it in Croker’s 1825 or 1844 editions.

The sheep come from Yeats’s Irish Fairy Tales (1892). He gives the clurichaun’s occupations as robbing wine cellars and “riding sheep and shepherds’ dogs for a livelong night”. By morning they are “panting and mud-covered”. The púca is Ireland’s other great night rider.

The darker side comes from Nicholas O’Kearney in 1855. In a one-sentence sketch, he pictured a “jolly, red-faced, drunken little fellow” astride a wine butt. A cellar he haunted, O’Kearney wrote, was doomed to bring its owner to “speedy ruin”.

Croker’s Mac Carthy, by contrast, lived to a good old age. Folklore rarely agrees with itself.

The Irish name and spellings

Croker wrote cluricaune, Yeats cluricaun and Joyce cluricane. O’Kearney gave a learned-looking clobhair-ceann (Yeats’s spelling of it). That’s one writer’s guess, not a settled origin.

The Irish word is usually given as clúracán. Ó Dónaill’s Foclóir Gaeilge-Béarla (1977), the standard Irish-English dictionary, does list it, as clúrac(h)án.

It also lists clutharac(h)án, and sends both on to lucharachán: “puny creature, pigmy, dwarf; elf”. His entry for leipreachán, the leprechaun, points to the same word. So the dictionary agrees with Croker: one family.

One more oddity. Píopa clutharacháin, literally “clurichaun’s pipe”, is Irish for an acorn cup (Ó Dónaill’s word is “acorn-bowl”). Croker reported that tiny old tobacco pipes turned up by the plough were said to be theirs, and got smashed in revenge for their tricks.

The word lived on in Cork Irish. The Schools’ Collection at dúchas.ie holds a 1930s story, An Clutharachán, from Baile Mhúirne (Ballyvourney). A man sees one four fists high, in a yellow hat, green coat and red shoes. No drink at all.

Folklore vs modern invention

The cellar, the solitary habits, the shoes, the purse and the moving house are all in Croker. The sheep are Yeats, 1892.

Souring your wine or milk is not in the old sources I checked. Neither is a fixed costume: Croker gives a red nightcap, the Grimms’ 1826 essay a pea-green coat, Ballyvourney a yellow hat. I found no medieval source for him at all.

Clurichauns today

Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman comics introduced Cluracan, a drunken courtier of Faerie, in issue 26 (1991). Douglas Booth played him in season 2 of the Netflix series (2025).

A Naggeneen turns up in Spider Robinson’s novel Callahan’s Legacy (1996). Gamers can play one in the tabletop game Changeling: The Dreaming.

Clurichaun FAQ

Is a clurichaun the same as a leprechaun?

In the earliest sources, yes. Croker and Joyce treat cluricaune as a regional name for the leprechaun. Yeats kept them apart, if only just.

How do you pronounce clurichaun?

Say “KLOO-rih-kawn”. The Irish spelling clúracán sounds much the same. The older form clutharachán is roughly “KLUH-hur-ukh-awn”, with the ch as in Scottish loch.

What does a clurichaun drink?

Wine, mainly. Croker’s Naggeneen sat on a cask of port, and Mr Harris’s sprite minded the beer barrel. Whiskey mostly belongs to modern retellings.

Can you get rid of a clurichaun?

Not by moving house, according to the tales. Mac Carthy announced a move and Mr Harris packed the carts, and both sprites said they were coming too.

What is the Irish word for clurichaun?

Ó Dónaill’s dictionary gives clúracán (or clúrachán) and clutharachán. Both point to lucharachán, a pigmy or elf.

Is Cluracan in The Sandman a clurichaun?

He’s named after one, but Gaiman’s Cluracan is a nobleman of Faerie rather than a cellar sprite. He keeps the old fondness for drink, though.

The Clurichaun: The Leprechaun’s Drunken Cousin in Irish Folklore