School: Séipéal na Carraige (roll number 5478)
- Location:
- Rockchapel, Co. Cork
- Teacher: Donncha Ó Géibheannaigh
Archival Reference
The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0351, Page 207
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: Séipéal na Carraige
- XML Page 207
- XML “Tinkers”
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
- Tinkers come frequently to Rockchapel, they go from house to house selling small articles and begging. The people do not like them and they receive a very different welcome, to the poor old people.
They travel from place to place in bands, some of them young, strong men and women, who are too lazy to work, and if you offered them work, they'd laugh at you. They believe in having a good time, at other people's expense. They have five or six horses and covered waggons. The horses they usually put into a meadow or good field of grass by the roadside, after night-fall.
They sleep under the cars, no one would let tinkers in the house by night, nor would they sleep in a house. They beg food from the people, the women that do the begging. They make a fire of roots by the road-side and cook their food.
The O'Brian's, Coffeys and the Sheridans are the tinkers who visit this district. They are natives of Rathkeale, "the home of the tinkers", and arrive here when going to the fairs and races in Newmarket, Kanturk and Abbeyfeale. The Sheridans are horse(continues on next page)
- Collector
- Michael Walsh
- Gender
- Male
- Informant
- Daniel Quinlan
- Gender
- Male
- Address
- Meentinny East, Co. Cork
