Ned of the Hill: A Song History
"Éamonn an Chnoic," or "Ned of the Hill," is an Irish-language folksong, known in many versions, tied to Éamonn Ó Riain, or Edmund O'Ryan, a rapparee (an outlaw raider) in Tipperary in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.[1] The folklorist Ray Cashman writes that he came from a fairly well-off family at Knockmeoll Castle, Atshanbohy, whose lands had already been cut back in Cromwell's campaign, and that after 1691 he stayed in Ireland and kept raiding; a proclamation putting a £200 reward on him dates from 1702.[1] Donal O'Sullivan's Songs of the Irish (1960), as the Joe Heaney Archive summarizes it, likewise sends him on the run after the Irish defeat by William of Orange in 1691.[2] Much of the rest is tradition: a story taken down at Borrisoleigh school in Tipperary for the 1930s Schools' Collection makes him an Upperchurch man, educated at Louvain, who fought beside Sarsfield at Limerick,[3] and oral tradition ends with a foster-brother or cousin named O'Dwyer killing him in his sleep for the reward, only to learn that Ned had already been pardoned.[1]
Francis Seymour Haden, A Sunset in Ireland, etching and drypoint, 1863. An Irish landscape, shown for the Irish outlaw of the song; it is not Tipperary.
Sources differ on how solid the history is: the Traditional Ballad Index found no mention of O'Ryan in six general histories of the period, and it cites Dáithí Ó hÓgáin's suggestion that the song may be older than the man and may even have given him his name.[4] Singers' notes disagree as well, some blaming his losses on Cromwellian seizures and others on the Jacobite defeat.[5] The air appears in the appendix to Walker's Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards (1786) and in O'Farrell's National Irish Music for the Union Pipes (1804), and in later collections.[6] Francis O'Neill called it a tune "of great antiquity" known all over Ireland.[7] Samuel Lover, the Anglo-Irish novelist and painter, published his own short literary ballad "Ned of the Hill" in 1839,[1] and a nineteenth-century note in the hand of the barrister Matthew Crawford, now at the University of Edinburgh, tells O'Ryan's story as an introduction to a song about the loss of his young mistress.[8]
Joe Heaney sang it at Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger's home in 1964, a recording Topic issued in 2000, and Jean Redpath (1975), Kate Rusby and Kathryn Roberts (1995), and others have recorded it since.[5] The Pogues' "Young Ned of the Hill" (1989), written by Ron Kavana and Terry Woods, borrows the legend but is a different song, aimed at Cromwell.[1][4] Janene Millen and Shawn McCurdy include it, in DAD tuning, in From Ditties To Dirges, a mountain dulcimer collection of 31 tunes, mostly from the British Isles, with 26 song sheets for singers.[9]
Sources
- Cultural Analysis (Ray Cashman): "'Young Ned of the Hill' and the Reemergence of the Irish Rapparee: A Textual and Intertextual Analysis".
- Joe Heaney Archive (Cartlanna Sheosaimh Uí Éanaí): "Éamonn an Chnoic".
- Dúchas.ie, The Schools' Collection: "Ned of the Hill" (Borrisoleigh, Co. Tipperary).
- The Traditional Ballad Index: "Eamon An Chnuic (Ned of the Hill)".
- Mainly Norfolk: "Ned of the Hill".
- The Traditional Tune Archive: "Ned of the Hill (1)".
- The Traditional Tune Archive: "Eamonn a' Chnuich".
- University of Edinburgh Heritage Collections: "Note detailing the story of Edmond O'Ryan or 'Ned of the Hills' in the hand of Matthew Crawford, 19th century".
- Janene Millen And Shawn McCurdy: "From Ditties To Dirges".
- Image: Francis Seymour Haden, A Sunset in Ireland, etching and drypoint, 1863. The Cleveland Museum of Art.