School: St Mary's, Buncrana
- Location:
- Buncrana, Co. Donegal
- Teacher: Máire, Bean Uí Bhraonáin
Archival Reference
The Schools’ Collection, Volume 1111, Page 387
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: St Mary's, Buncrana
- XML Page 387
- XML “Flax”
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
- The flax is sown on the lea land, and the land must be pretty dry.
This crop is very queer, it grows thickly and at the the top a blue flower grows.
When the flax is ripe, great crowds of women - young and old go out to pull it up, and when it is pulled, it is tied in small sheaves and carted to a large hole of water in which it is buried, and covered with sods.
Retting takes place, and after ten or twelve days the beets of flax are taken out of the hole. and left to drain on the edge of the flaxhole.
It is then spread lightly on the grass, and here it remains for about fourteen days. Then it is lifted and tied in beets and stooked. In a fortnight it is stacked. Later is is scutched.
The flax is beaten with a wooden thing shaped like a(continues on next page)
- Collector
- Patrick Armour
- Gender
- Male
- Address
- Ballymacarry, Co. Donegal
- Informant
- Mr Patrick Mc Ginley
- Other names
- Mr Patrick Mc Ginley
- Paddy the Irishman (local name)
- Gender
- Male
- Age
- 80
- Occupation
- Soldier
- Address
- Fahan Lower, Co. Donegal
