School: Baile an Ridire (roll number 7887)
- Location:
- Knight's Town, Co. Kerry
- Teacher: Seán Mac Mágha
Archival Reference
The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0479, Page 048
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: Baile an Ridire
- XML Page 048
- XML “The Hedge-Schools”
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
- During the penal times no Catholic was allowed by the English to teach school. Neither were they allowed to have a school for teaching their religion. There were protestant schools in the country but the catholics did not like to send their children to them as they would be taught the protestant religion. Schoolmasters used travel around the country to educate the people. The schools these masters held were called hedge schools.Those schools used to be held in some old house or near a hedge. It was in them that Irish was taught and Latin was taught in some of them also. Some of the hedge schools were very good, and poets were, very often teaching in them, such as Tomás Ruadh O'Sullivan and Brian Merriman.
At one time Tomás Ruadh was teaching school in Portmagee. He used to come from Portmagee, Derrynane to Portmagee by boat and one morning something happened to the boat and he lost his books. He composed a very fine song afterwards lamenting their loss. He also composed "Sé Domhnall Bínn Ó Conaill Chaoin". Several of his songs were in praise of the O'Connells.Another hedge school was held in a house in Chapeltown, but that house was knocked down a few years ago. Mr Fíonán Lynch's grandfather was one of the last teachers there. Another hedge school was held in Carriglea, and another in the house where Mr. Shanahan lives now.
