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The Ballykillduff Protocol

The Ballykillduff Protocol

The Ballykillduff Protocol

or, How I Discovered Ireland’s Best-Kept Secret

You’ve never heard of Ballykillduff?

Good.

That’s how they like it.

It all began one soggy Tuesday morning, the kind where the mist clings to your eyebrows and sheep blink at you like they know something you don’t. I was sent to County Carlow on assignment—a “light piece” about forgotten Irish townlands. Ballykillduff, a name the locals said in hushed tones or not at all, was top of the list.

“You’ll get nothing out of them folk,” the barman in Tullow warned, sliding me a pint of something suspiciously blacker than Guinness. “If you value your memory, don’t go poking round Ballykillduff. The crows’ll follow you back.”

I thought he was joking. Until they did.

The road to Ballykillduff is barely a road at all. More a single-file ribbon of gravel that winds through wind-battered hedgerows, bogland, and curious stone mounds that don’t appear on any Ordnance Survey map.

Just as my signal vanished and the GPS began to whirl like a mad compass, I reached it.

No sign. No people. No dogs barking. Just silence.

And the fence.

At first, I thought it was for sheep. But sheep fences don’t usually have barbed wire, motion sensors, and signs that say:

“PROPERTY OF THE DEPARTMENT OF ANOMALOUS AFFAIRS — TRESPASSERS WILL BE EDITED.”

Edited?

A tractor trundled past, driven by a man in a tweed cap and sunglasses—at dusk. He gave me a nod and mouthed something I could’ve sworn was, “You’ve seen too much already.”

I climbed a dry-stone wall and tiptoed into the fields behind the fence.

That’s when I saw it.

In the centre of a cow pasture was what looked like a small turf shed. But as I watched, the roof split apart and a silent, disk-shaped object—shimmering like heat haze—rose into the mist. It hovered, utterly still, before vanishing with a pop. No sound. No wind. Just gone.

And then, the crows came.

Hundreds of them, all at once. Not flapping. Hovering. Watching.

I ran.

Back in Tullow, I tried to tell someone. Anyone.

But the photos on my phone were gone. My notes were blank. Even my audio recordings were just thirty minutes of gentle mooing and the phrase “The protocol is in effect” on a loop.

A man in a grey raincoat tapped me on the shoulder at the bus stop.

“You’ve had your look,” he said. “We’ll be taking it back now.”

And I fell asleep.

When I woke, I was on a Bus Éireann coach to Dublin, clutching a tin of condensed milk and a pamphlet on Irish round towers.

I tried to return to Ballykillduff the next week. The road was gone. Where it had once turned off the main route, there was now a field of cabbages and a sign that said:

“Nothing to see here. Really.”

I still don’t know what I saw that night. Was it alien technology? A government experiment? A particularly advanced cow shed?

All I know is this:
Ballykillduff is real.
And it’s watching.

*****************************************************************************************

The Ballykillduff Briefing

or, What the Cows Were Really Watching

A week had passed since my strange experience in Ballykillduff—the UFO, the tractor man in sunglasses, and the vanishing field road. I was back in Dublin, nursing a pint of plain and a powerful sense that something had been scrubbed from my brain with a celestial Brillo pad.

Then came the envelope.

Unmarked. Sealed with what looked like a government crest… except instead of a harp, it bore a three-eyed sheep and the motto “Nihil Est Ridiculum” — Nothing Is Ridiculous.

Inside: a train ticket to Kildare and a Post-it that simply read:
“You’ve been selected.”

The Facility

They met me at the station.

Two people: one tall and silent in a wool coat, the other holding a clipboard and smiling far too wide. Their car had no plates and smelt faintly of ozone and Ballymaloe relish.

We drove for hours through winding back roads until we reached what appeared to be… an abandoned dairy farm. Thatched roof, rusted milk churns, and a barn door hanging askew.

But the moment they tapped a rhythm on the side of a milking machine (Beethoven’s Fifth, oddly), the ground opened beneath the cow shed and we descended into… the Facility.

Imagine a cross between a Cold War bunker, a Guinness brewery, and Willy Wonka’s basement. Screens flickered with footage of fairy rings. Men in lab coats analysed hurling results on quantum computers. One room contained a sentient fog bank in a glass tank. Another was just labelled:
“Bagpipes — Do Not Feed.”

The Truth

They took me to the Head of Department: Dr. Nora Ní Sheanacháin, a stern woman with eyes like boiled sapphires and hair that gently floated upwards, as if resisting gravity on principle.

“You weren’t meant to see Ballykillduff,” she said, sipping from a mug that read ‘ALIENS? I MILKED ONE!’

“But now you have, so you might as well understand what it is.”

She gestured to a vast holographic map of Ireland, covered in blinking lights.

“Ballykillduff is our primary rural observatory,” she said. “It monitors electromagnetic field anomalies, ley line leakage, spontaneous fairy emergence, cryptid migration, and the occasional rogue weather pattern with sentience.”

“Right,” I said. “Of course.”

She narrowed her eyes. “The cows are trained. They’re not watching you. They’re recording you.”

It all clicked into place.

The UFO I saw wasn’t extraterrestrial. It was interdimensional—a probe sent to measure disturbances caused by an incident in 1847, when someone accidentally opened a rift by playing the Uilleann pipes backwards during a céilí.

“That’s when the Department was born,” said Dr. Ní Sheanacháin. “In a bog. By accident. Most of our departments start that way.”

The Protocol

She handed me a small metal device that looked like a harmonica mated with a badger.

“If you return to Ballykillduff, carry this. If you see the crows again, play the B-flat note and lie flat. The cows will handle the rest.”

“Handle what?” I asked.

She paused.

“The rewriting. Or the hiding. Whichever is safer.”

I left the facility two hours later.

They didn’t wipe my memory this time. They said they “liked my curiosity.” Or maybe they just needed a new patsy to distract from whatever was happening near Bantry Bay, where the sea was glowing slightly mauve and humming Danny Boy in reverse.

And now I tell my story wherever I can. Quietly. Carefully.

Because Ballykillduff is watching.
And so is the Department of Anomalous Affairs.

And if you ever hear a cow moo in Morse code…

Run.

************************************************************************

An earlier case…

📁 CASE FILE #1952-087: The Banshee Echo

D.A.A. Archives – Ballykillduff Division
Classification: ULTRA-MILK (Top Secret + Dairy)
Incident Type: Temporal Echo / Auditory Apparition / Acoustic Loop Disturbance
Location: Ballykillduff Upper, County Carlow
Date: 3rd November, 1952
Status: Inconclusive. Ongoing auditory containment protocols remain active.

📋 SUMMARY:

At approximately 03:17 a.m., local farmer Séamus “Shaky” Byrne reported hearing a sustained banshee wail echoing across the lower boglands of Ballykillduff. The sound repeated at precise 17-minute intervals for three nights, despite no atmospheric conditions to support acoustic reflection.

This anomalous “Banshee Echo” had the following unique properties:

  • It grew slightly louder each repetition.
  • It reversed direction—originating from the north, then east, then underfoot.
  • All recordings made of the sound spontaneously reversed themselves at playback, forming a voice whispering:

    “Don’t dig.”

🧑‍🌾 PRIMARY WITNESS REPORT:

Farmer Séamus Byrne (statement recorded 4 Nov 1952):

“T’was like the cry of a woman, right enough, but loopin’ itself like a gramophone caught on sorrow. It were followin’ me. Even inside the house. My potatoes wept. Even the dog wept. Meself, I just took up knitting and prayed.”

“When it came from beneath, I near dropped me flask.”

🔬 FIELD AGENT OBSERVATIONS:

Agent Finnegan O’Groats, Senior Anomaly Interlocutor:

  • Discovered hoofprints in concentric spirals where no livestock were kept.
  • Observed steam rising from cold puddles with no known thermal source.
  • Threw a standard-issue parsnip into the centre of the echo field. It vanished. A choir of faint “Mná na hÉireann” harmonics followed.

🧠 PSYCHOACOUSTIC FINDINGS:

Department audio specialist Dr. Patsy McCrackle noted:

  • The frequency of the banshee cry corresponded to precisely 628 Hz — matching the resonant pitch of a forgotten Iron Age burial cauldron recently unearthed 3 miles away and hastily reburied when it started rattling itself.
  • Locals reported identical dreams involving a woman with no face stirring porridge with a human bone.

🐮 COW SURVEILLANCE UNIT RECORDINGS:

CSU #42 (“Mooishe”) was stationed nearby.

  • Recorded 5 hours of silence.
  • Playback revealed:
    1. The words “Who dug up Mór?” whispered in Old Irish.
    2. CSU #42 mooing… in reverse.

Unit was decommissioned and given early retirement in Kilkenny.

📍POST-INCIDENT ACTIVITY:

  • The wailing stopped exactly at dawn on the third day.
  • That evening, a lone turnip levitated 6 inches, performed a slow rotation, then exploded into fog.
  • Ballykillduff’s local post office received 14 identical letters with no address, containing only a single phrase:

    “You heard her. You’ll hear her again.”

🧾 CURRENT CONTAINMENT:

  • A 9.3-metre circle of bleating stones installed to absorb repeat echoes.
  • All residents issued tin-lined earmuffs during equinoxes.
  • Field Agent McGroats currently patrols with a hurley and a bell.
  • Ongoing study into emotionally volatile root vegetables suspended after the 1973 Turnip Uprising (see Case File #1973-029).

FINAL NOTES:

The Ballykillduff “Banshee Echo” remains one of the Department’s most perplexing sound-based anomalies. It is not believed to be a traditional banshee, but rather a residual frequency remnant from an event long erased—or deliberately buried.

And according to the latest CSU reports…
The echo is growing fainter.
Which means it’s about to return.

 

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