Folklore commission microfilm is a snapshot of a different era

Folklore is not simply an affirmation of fact but a trust in a story about the broad traditions of our tribe. It is a warm satisfying diversion from the concerns of everyday life. We don’t quite have to believe it while nevertheless ‘taking it on board’.

In the archival library in Dundalk I was directed to the microfilm of the Folklore Commission of 1937/38. When school children nationwide were supplied with pencils and notebooks and charged to quiz their elders about local stories, cures, harbingers of the weather, in short, lore and piseogs of all kinds, I couldn’t get over what a good idea it was. A very economic take on what was attempted a hundred years before.

Then Lieutenant Thomas Aiskew Lorcom was the administrator of the Ordnance Survey in Ireland and he envisaged each Ordnance Survey map to have a published appendix on Commerce, Geology, History and culture.

He started in the parish of Templemore in County Antrim, recording crops and soil types as well as constables, dressmakers, grocers, libraries, pawnbrokers, ladies of allegedly easy virtue and much more. However the cost of £1700 proved exorbitant and the enterprise was scrapped.

But only in its ‘full blown’ capacity because the Ordnance Survey through its archive of letters and Name Books gives us a wonderful insight into the Ireland of the time. Lorcom was so committed to Irish culture that on his arrival he trawled Dublin to find someone to teach him Irish, and there he met and befriended John O’Donovan one of the greatest Irish scholars of all time.

A man was subsequently employed by the Ordnance Survey to translate townland names. O’Donovan was a tireless scribe of letters back to Lorcom in Dublin. They are a treasure trove (in vivid and humorous vein) of the country he passed through and the people and problems he met. Conscious of the ash tree’s place in Irish mythology he writes from Rathfriland: April 13th 1834 ‘I was never so disgusted with any little cur, whelp or pup’.

This of a clergyman who is adamant that the ash is not a native plant. Then he lauds a young man he meets as ‘(a very intelligent fellow) who said ‘The way sir to prove whether a tree is or is not a native one is to cut it down and if the stock should bud again, it is a native plant’. 

From Dundalk, 20th February 1836, he writes of his inability to contact his assistants P O’Keefe and T O’Connor who were collecting place names in south Armagh.

‘They are as difficult to find as Redmond O’Hanlon when a reward was offered for his head’ (Redmond O’Hanlon the famous rapparee operated from the hills around Slieve Gullion in the 1670s. His legend stretches to him bamboozling his pursuers by reversing his horses shoes.)

And now to the 1937/38: Schools Scheme notebooks held on the microfilm reader. The North Louth stuff is (for me) fascinating. Cures, Funny Stories, Weather Lore, Fairy Tales, local happenings…. each account telling us where and from whom it was collected and verified with the child’s name and age.

The handwriting is at all times legible and often exquisite, especially the notebooks in an Irish form. Of the funny stories I like the one about the girl from Wynne Terrace, Dundalk who on rushing to catch a bus had to forgo her breakfast and found herself seated with fellow travellers clutching her hot water bottle instead of her bag.

And the man (name and address given) who was fond of a drink and was told by the priest that he would turn him into a rat should he again break his pledge.

On relapse he became understandably alarmed at seeing said cleric approach his house and exhorted his wife to ‘keep an eye on the cat’. We are told that ‘Cooley experienced the famine in all its rigours. The potato variety during the black years of 46, 47, 48 was West Red and this strain completely failed.’ Of the fairies ‘There was a little man dressed in red sitting in a hawthorn bush.

He got smaller and smaller as we examined him, until he eventually disappeared,’ And that to ‘Put creeping insects into a scarf and tie round the neck, is a cure for a sore throat.’

While ‘If the cat sits on the hearth with her back to the fire or the cricket sings loudly, this is the sign of a storm.’ And as I have only scraped the surface of this great opus I look forward to finding some of the little scraps of lore that I learned on my side of Carlingford Lough.

‘The three borrowing days’, the first three days of April (often hasky) are borrowed from March’ ‘The other months curse a fair February and that makes them bad’. And at night - when crossing a fairy domain (to protect yourself from their mischievous wiles) - turn your coat inside out!