School: Faithche (B.) (roll number 11405)
- Location:
- Faha West, Co. Kerry
- Teacher: Seán Ó Muircheartaigh
Archival Reference
The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0458, Page 050
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: Faithche (B.)
- XML Page 050
- XML “Holy Wells”
- XML “Customs on St Bridget's Night”
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
- (continued from previous page)each of the white-thorn bushes. Some people take a bottle of water out of one of the fonts and they bring bottle of holy water to the font instead.
- St Bridget's Night falls on the thirty-first of January every year. On that night about twelve or thirteen of the gay young men of this district gather and they dress in long white robes and they put masks on their faces. Then they put tall hats made of straw on their heads. Then they make a biddy out of a turnip and they put it on the top of a cross made of timber and they dress it with a white robe. The captain of the batch takes the biddy in his arms and another man in the batch carries a musical instrument. The the whole batch goes from house to house and they play music and they dance in every house. When they have finished dancing the captain asks for money for the biddy, and he gets a sixpence or a shilling in most houses. They go(continues on next page)
