School: Loughill, Longford
- Location:
- Laughil, Co. Longford
- Teacher: P. Ó Corcora
Archival Reference
The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0768, Page 333
Image and data © National Folklore Collection, UCD.
See copyright details.
DownloadOpen data
Available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
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
- Psalm is got on Psalm Sunday in the Church. It is hung near a Sacred picture, or Crucifix, at a Holy Water Font or at the head of a bed. A week before Christmas the house wives in Ireland decorate their homes with Holly or ivy in celebration of Christmas. There is a sugar-bowl in our house which belonged to my Great Gradmother. It is a 100 years old.
On the night of the 6th of January some people do this. They bring in a cow-dung out of a field. Then they make twelve rush candles, one for each of the twelve days of Christmas. Each person puts a mark on a candle and sticks it in a cow-dung. Then they alight the candles, and recite the Rosary. The first candle to die signifies that the person who marked it would die first. The same is done to the rest till the last one is dead. Then the cow-dung is put over the byre door bring good luck on the cows. This is carried on nowadays in some places.
The Patron Saint of this parish is St Brigid. The local Church and Loughill N.S. are named after. She was disgraced once, and to show that she was pure, she carried coals in her apron from Ardagh to the pound of Killian without burning a hole in it.
- Collector
- Kevin Doherty
- Gender
- Male
