School: Leamh-choill
- Location:
- Drumsillagh, Co. Roscommon
- Teacher: Cáit Ní Ghadhra
Archival Reference
The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0232, 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)
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
- As this district is almost a peninsula, having the Shannon on East and South and the Boyle River on the West, with Loch Eiden, stretching northwards, it is natural to expect that the chief sports and pastimes were boating and fishing and the shooting of wild geese, wild duck, curlew, snipe etc. Otters or water dogs were often caught. Deer used to frequent the woods on the banks of the Boyle River and various stories are told about the 'poaching' of those deer.
Very few people in this district owned horses in olden days, so there were no horse races. Father O'Gara, however owned a wonderful horse and he was skilled in horsemanship. It is said that he climbed twenty stone spiral steps on this horse, thus escaping the priest-hunters at Ballindoon Abbey.
The following are some of the 'Local Heroes' of 'sporting' circles.
About the year 1850 a man named Michael Shannon lived in the village of Cootehall. He was a man who was very fond of sport and if he was beaten in anything he always took it like a sportsman. One day he was visiting John Beirne who lived on the lakeshore. Tommy Murray was also visiting in Beirne's. In the course of conversation Murray said that he(continues on next page)
