Keep calm and breathe! It's not a snake!

Last week we posted a video sent into us by eight-year-old Cathal Murray from Mullingar who filmed what seemed to be, for all intents and purposes, a snake.

Described as 10 inches in length with a forked tongue, Cathal was requesting the help our readers to see if they could shed any light on his unusual find, and offer up a plausible explanation for what he found slithering at speed around his grandmother’s garden in Woodland’s Avenue in Mullingar.

And as usual our readers never fail to disappoint.

It’s turns out that the creature is in fact a slow worm, a species which was introduced to the Burren illegally around 25 years ago, and which is now a common sighting as many of our readers reported having seen them.

The slow worm is a legless lizard and is completely harmless to humans. They are most active around dusk and prefer well vegetated areas with dense ground cover.

Slow worms can grow up to 21 inches in length surviving on slow moving prey, like slugs and worms, and hibernate underground from October to March.

And so, St Patrick’s legend of banishing all snakes from Ireland, lives on and untarnished!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0FTNSNV_4s