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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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