School: Ballinakillew (roll number 8433)
- Location:
- Ballynakillew Mountain, Co. Donegal
- Teacher: Mary K. Nutt
Archival Reference
The Schools’ Collection, Volume 1031, Page 465
Image and data © National Folklore Collection, UCD.
See copyright details.
DownloadOpen data
Available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
- XML School: Ballinakillew
- XML Page 465
- XML “The Dress of Long Ago”
Note: We will soon deprecate our XML Application Programming Interface and a new, comprehensive JSON API will be made available. Keep an eye on our website for further details.
On this page
- In olden times people could not go into shops to buy the material. They had to make it on the hand looms in their own homes. The material was rough and coarse, and the fashionable people of nowadays would not like to wear it. Then for wool to knit their socks and stockings they had to make it out of the wool of the sheep’s back. First they carded it and made it into nice little rolls, and then they spun it on old spinning wheels. They made white yarn and black yarn and sometimes they mixed the two together and made gray yarn. They had no such thing either as silk stockings, only hand-knit ones summer or winter. They were as happy and contented as they are to-day. The shoes were also very heavy and coarse they knew nothing about fine shoes of any description or strap shoes. The people went a lot in their bare feet. A cousin of my grandfather used to tell how the people went off dressed to church with a pair of white corduroy trousers and a blue braided coat.
- Collector
- Sadie Mc Clay
- Gender
- Female
- Age
- 17
- Address
- Laghey, Co. Donegal
