The Schools’ Collection, now part of the National Folklore Collection, gathered stories and descriptions from children across Ireland in 1937–38. It includes material from County Longford schools and preserves the words of people whose memories might otherwise have gone unrecorded.
On Dúchas.ie you can browse by school and place. Longford material includes contributions associated with Taghshinny, Colehill, Forgney and Kenagh. Some pages preserve the name of the collector and the person who supplied the story.
Not everything is a ghost story. There are accounts of farm work, games, local cures, weather signs, fairs and the names people used for fields or roads. Beside them sit tales of fairy forts, hauntings and old ruins. Read together, they show what mattered enough to pass on.
The handwritten originals deserve attention. A transcription may miss a word or an unusual spelling, and a remembered incident may have changed in the telling. Those details are part of the collection’s value, not problems to be smoothed away.
Folklore is not the same as proof
Label legendary figures, supernatural explanations and remembered events as oral tradition unless documentary or archaeological evidence independently supports them.
Avoid presenting historical memory as a single community viewpoint; accounts may differ sharply between neighbouring families or parishes.
Try a five-minute search
Choose a school, select a named theme such as local place names or fairs, then note who recorded the story and where. Compare with Longford’s field name books or old newspapers to see how the same place appears in other kinds of evidence.
Dúchas is a research collection, not a fact-checked account of every event described. Name the storyteller or school where the record provides that detail.
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