This is a version of a classic ‘Child’ ballad (no. 13 in Francis James Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads) that my father learned from Paddy Doran in the early 1950s on an occasion when the traveller was illegally encamped in Glencar, then on the outskirts of Letterkenny. Da recorded it for Diane Hamilton in 1955 and it appeared on his first LP, The Man of Songs, on the Folk Legacy label in 1962. It is one of the first songs that I can remember actually setting out to learn when a very small boy, maybe five or six. My sister Maura and I have been singing it like this – half verse about – since we were young children, not today or even yesterday. It’s fascinating to hear our sons, Conall and Séamus, doing likewise all these years later.

*The notes for songs 28-42, if not covered by earlier entries, have been compiled by John Tunney.