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travelers who bring money into the country and spend it, they are rare. Few one sees on these roads who are not natives, except the anglers going to the lakes, or them geologist men who go about the country cracking stones, like the poor divils ye see at the way-side, except that no road seems any the better for their labor.” Terry Moylan A GALWAy PIPER AT HOME, C. 1890 THE CHIEF AMUSEMENTS of the peasantry [of Killary, Co Galway, on the Mayo border] are going to the village fairs and having dances in their cabins. The fairs are principally held in the summer, and the dances mostly in the winter. They begin about nine or ten in the evening, and keep it up to the early hours of the morning. Sunday nights are the favourite times. As they are orderly and sober, this dancing is a very harmless amusement. I have seen four of these dances, which generally take place when a piper or fiddler passes that way. The last dance but one I was at, was held in one of the smaller cabins. In this limited space there were six people jigging and five or six looking on. The piper was playing, accompanied by his son on a tin whistle, his wife hushing a baby in the corner, the eldest daughter, with her weird face and shock of red hair, peeping out near her, and three or four small children, also of the piper’s family, were lying in a bed built in the wall, and being chastised every now and then for being awake! Besides this small crowd, there were two pigs under the bed, a cow and two calves reposing on some dried heather or sedge, and several fowls roosting on the rafters above. The whole picturesque scene was partially shadowed, and partially lit up by the glow from the peat fire and the dim light of a small oil lamp. Some few can do a polka, or a sort of lancers, but the most usual, and the most popular, dance is the monotonous jig. It is performed by two rows of people facing each other, and doing a kind of shuffle on alternate feet, varied by occasionally changing sides. When a couple wish to finish, they cross hands, turn each other round once or twice, and then retire. The chief merit of the jig seems to be in who can keep it up the longest for the two who are the last to stop are applauded by the on-lookers. Those who join in the dance give a penny or twopence to the piper, according to their means. A travelling musician can always depend upon the hospitality of the natives, as he journeys from place to place. The Irish pipes differ in construction from the Scotch pipes, and when the player is standing he props up on a stick his right knee, against which he presses the longest wooden tube to keep the air in, and to produce a certain note... I don’t believe the majority of the peasantry here know the meaning of ‘Home Rule’, and they listen with equal indifference to their piper playing ‘The Wearing of the Green’, ‘St Patrick’s Day’, or ‘God Save the Queen’. As long as they can jig through life leisurely, they don’t care what the tune is or who pays the piper. B.S. Knollys, ‘A Glimpse of Galway’, Belgravia: A London Magazine vol. LXXVIII (1892): 190–203; reprinted in Little’s Living Age, Boston (6 August 1892): 353–5. From an ethnographic piece by an English writer who spent time in Killary c. 1890–91. Nicholas Carolan,

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2014-02-14T00:00:00

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