School: Óméith (roll number 3001)
- Location:
- Omeath, Co. Louth
- Teacher: D. Ó Cuilinn
Archival Reference
The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0657, Page 289
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: Óméith
- XML Page 289
- XML “Old Houses”
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
- There are lots of old houses in Omeath many of which are now in ruins. They nearly all consisted of a room and a kitchen. Some, but very few had only a kitchen.
They were all thatched with sods, rushes and corn straw, wheat not being grown in the district. Scallops were used and motar lime and sand on the top ridge. In the inside of some of the houses the rafters could be seen, others had lofts.
The floors were made of mixed clay and sand. Half-doors were and still are common in Omeath. They had a half-door and big-doors. Some had only a half-door and at night they covered the top part with a sack.
In most of the houses long ago the windows were very small, because there was a tax on glass and the more windows they had the more tax they had to pay. Some of the houses just had holes in the wall and at night they covered them with a piece of wood or a sack.
They had a bed in the kitchen called a settle bed and all the children slept in this. They also had a bed in the bedroom. Others had no beds and they slept on bags of chaff on the floors.(continues on next page)
