School: Tobar Ruadh
- Location:
- Toberroe, Co. Galway
- Teacher: Séamus Ó Cinnéide
Archival Reference
The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0040, Page 0177
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: Tobar Ruadh
- XML Page 0177
- XML “Farm Animals”
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
- Mostly everybody round here has names on their cows and calves. The majority of the people name them after the places and fairs where they bought them. They also name them after their colour. When people around here are driving stock they use a lot of Irish words but the most common word they use in Irish is "Gabh amach annseo". They also say "How-How" which is a very common word.
The people round here usually call the cows-stable the cow-house or the bothán. In other parts of the country they call it the byre but that word is not used round here. The people round here give either fodder or rushes as a bed to the cows. They also tie their cows with a chain which is fastened on to the rack in which they eat the hay.
When a cow would have a calf long ago the people believed it would bring luck to tie a piece of a red cloth on to the cow and sprinkle holy water on it and put three grains of salt in the cloth. The people also believed that the cows used to be milked during the night by somebody. There was a woman living round here long ago and her cow had no milk one May morning. She went to a blacksmith(continues on next page)
- Collector
- Mary Comber
- Gender
- Female
- Address
- Cloonbar, Co. Galway
- Informant
- John Walshe
- Gender
- Male
- Age
- 37
- Address
- Cloonbar, Co. Galway
