School: Wexford (4) (roll number 12524)
- Location:
- Wexford, Co. Wexford
- Teacher: Victoria M. Sherwood
Archival Reference
The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0880, Page 239
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: Wexford (4)
- XML Page 239
- XML “When the Fishermen Defied the Tradition”
- XML “A Night of Terrible Memory”
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
- Once and once only did the Wexford herring fleet go out into the bay on that ill-fated night. It was in the year 1762 and the herrings had come in great shoals to the Wexford coast. All the boats and gear were ready and the weather could not have been finer. On St Martin's Eve the herrings came in-shore and the waters of the bay seemed alive with fish. The fishermen were very poor and they decided to dare the old tradition and to set their nets and to take the harvest of the sea that Providence seemed to have sent them. The long reaches of nets were scarcely in the water when they were laden with fish but before they could be hauled in a wild storm blew up and broke over the bay and swept the fleet to destruction and the unfortunate fishermen into eternity.
- Transcription guide » You are not logged in, but you are welcome to contribute a transcription anonymously. In this case, your IP address will be stored in the interest of quality control.By clicking the save button you agree that your contribution will be available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License and that a link to dúchas.ie is sufficient as attribution.
