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Folklore of Clare Book Cover (Paperback)

Folklore of Clare Book Cover (Hardback)

Folklore of Clare: A Folklore Survey of County Clare & County Clare Folk-Tales and Myths
by Thomas Johnson Westropp
With an Introduction by Gearóid Ó Crualaoich

Paperback, ISBN: 1 900545 16 0, Price: €12.00
Hardback, ISBN: 1 900545 12 8, Price: €19.00

Thomas J. Westropp, during the course of his extensive survey of the field monuments of Co. Clare, became fascinated by the variety and vividness of the innumerable folk tales still being recited by the country people. He gathered these tales, beliefs and superstitions over many years and wrote them down in a series of articles which appeared in the Journal, Folk-Lore. These articles are now published by CLASP Press as The Folklore of County Clare. This remarkable collection contains folklore relating to forts, raths and historic mounds, to lakes, rivers and wells, to haunted castles and houses, to banshees and the death coach. The traditions Westropp presents have been collected by him from the mouths of the people and not from books or from the notes of others. This volume will reintroduce his work and will restore his name to the respect and the affections of all those - in Clare and beyond - for whom folklore, tradition and popular culture are an important and ever-dynamic aspect of identity and cultural heritage in a world where the local and the global, the vernacular and the cosmopolitan continue, as always, to play upon each other in complex and interesting ways that contemporary cultural research is finding new ways to explore.

Thomas Johnson Westropp was born in Attyflynn, Co. Limerick in 1860. Trained as an engineer, he spent many years surveying the archaeological remains of County Clare. He also had a keen interest in folklore and customs and was elected President of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland in 1916.

Dr Gearóid Ó Crualaoich lectures at the Department of History, University College, Cork.

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Reviews

Chronicon Westroporum,
April 2002

Books Ireland,
April 2002

Irish Times,
April 2001

Books Ireland,
February 2001