School: Cros Riabhach
- Location:
- Crossreagh, Co. Cavan
- Teacher: T. Ó Siordáin
Archival Reference
The Schools’ Collection, Volume 1003, Page 421
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: Cros Riabhach
- XML Page 421
- XML “The Dancing Master”
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 old man named Michael Monaghan - who formerly lived in this neighbourhood often told me of a travelling dancing master who once visited the locality and who found many of his pupils some of them "boys" of 40 or over rather slow in following his directions as to the proper foot to lift or put down in time with his "lilting" as he had no musical instrument to accompany the dancing.
He hit on the following plan to make his instructions quite clear. He made each dancer swathe his feet - one foot with a wisp of straw and the other with one of hay and instead of saying "left foot". He said, "Hay foot : "Straw foot" ,when describing the order and number of the steps.
My informant says it was a very successful plan besides being easier on the feet.
- Collector
- Patrick O Brien
- Gender
- Male
- Address
- Crossreagh, Co. Cavan
