School: Fortview, Clones (roll number 15300)
- Location:
- Cluain Eois, Co. Mhuineacháin
- Teacher: S. de Bhál
Archival Reference
The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0946, Page 142
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: Fortview, Clones
- XML Page 142
- XML “Games Children Play”
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
- Nearly all the children in Clones and round about indulge in a lot of games such as skipping, spinning tops, “Hop-Scotch”, “Here’s the robbers coming through, “Down on the carpet”, hide and seek, the winking game and the “Grand old Duke of York”.
In the autumn the children go picking blackberries and gathering chestnuts. They put holes in them and play “Conquers”. They bore a hole in the chestnuts and put a string through them. Then the players try to split each other’s chestnuts. The player who splits the other player’s chestnut wins the game.
At night when the weather is cold, the children get together and they play indoor games. The sit in a circle and one is chosen to start. The chosen one throws a handkerchief at any player he fancies. As he does so he calls out one of the following: “earth”, “air”, “water” and starts to count to twelve quickly If “air” is named the player he has thrown to must name something being in the air, for example a bird, butterfly etc. If “earth” is called, some creature existing on the earth has to be named and the same applies to “water”. If the receiver of the handkerchief fails to think of a suitable word before the count of twelve is reached, that person is out of the game and a word once used cannot be used again.
