Legacy of Honoria Galwey celebrated at Moville traditional music festival

The Honoria Galwey Festival in Moville has celebrated the work of a local music collector whose legacy is only now being recognised.

Galwey, who lived in Moville from 1830 to 1850, was a song collector who published her works with Boosey and Co in New York.

Her first publication was Irish Folk Songs in 1897 which was followed by Old Irish Croonauns in 1910.

Festival organiser - musician and teacher Clodagh Warnock - and historian Dr Angela Byrne, have extensively researched Honoria Galwey’s legacy.

Honoria began working as a teenager to gather tunes from the locality and to transcribe them in notation, also noting where and from whom she got each tune and song.

“Honoria was a recorder of the living heritage of Inishowen in the immediate post famine era. She was really a historian of Donegal, and materially contributed to the understanding of how people lived in Donegal in the post-famine era,” explains Dr Byrne.

In recent years, Honoria’s work has been performed in Inishowen’s traditional music festival, Feile na hInse, notably in a performance at the National Concert Hall in 2023 attended by President Michael D Higgins.

“There are two strands to what she did,” said Dr Byrne. “She began by promoting Donegal’s natural ecological heritage before she published her folk music. Honoria was one of the first women publishing in science in Ireland.”

Honoria’s article Collections of Sea Shells was published in the Journal of the Conchological Society (Leeds) in 1887. She was the seventh woman to publish in this journal, and the second woman to publish in the broader area of zoology in the UK and Ireland. That article was referenced and quoted again in later publications about marine biology for a few decades.

The festival, held on the weekend of June 18 to 21, was “a positive event that brought music and dance to the streets of Moville, and gave young people the opportunity to share their music with the locals,” said Ms Warnock.

“We have over 100 students and they usually practise and play at home.

“Honoria would have been a community person who collected music locally, and we are trying to square the circle and bring the music back to the people.

“However, it’s music she’s better known for,” said Dr Byrne. “She was corresponding and networking with some of the most important people writing in the broader Gaelic revival. She was sitting quietly in those circles.

“The work she did was translated to a much wider audience - the folk songs she collected in Inishowen were translated by others. Boosey and Co published these reinterpretations of the folk songs, and they were widely published all the way from America to Australia,” said Dr Byrne.

“Later on, her collections were published in big format books intended for everyone to gather round the piano – there are copies in Britain, Australia and America, published by the most respected publishers of music in the English speaking world. Boosey and Co was a massive publishing house, with offices in London and New York. They contain reworkings of the folk songs, with English lyrics put to them,” said Dr Byrne.

“I have been finding them in libraries in three continents. What would the people of Moville think of these new versions of their songs and tunes, with new lyrics being put to the songs they sang for Honoria?”

Honoria now lies in an unmarked grave in the City Cemetery in Derry.

The book Old Irish Croonauns can be found by searching “Honoria Galwey itma” online. Her sister Isabella, poet and journalist with the Derry Standard newspaper, wrote about their lives in Gortgowan in a book of poetry titled Hy-Brasil (available on Google Books). Dr Angela Byrne published Honoria’s biography in the Dictionary of Irish Biography, a freely available online resource. To find it, enter “dib.ie” and search for Honoria’s name.

“We will continue doing more and getting more info about her out there in the future,” said Dr Byrne.

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Songs which were sung during the festival at a performance in St Pius X Church included The Well in the Garden, which she learned from the playing of the blind fiddler, Paddy the Slithers. Paddy would often be seen on the old wooden pier in Moville, playing soulful fiddle music for those emigrating by boat to America and a new life. This was followed by Honoria’s version of Thugamar fein an samhradh linn (We brought the summer with us) and Sweet Inishowen, a song about the Greencastle ferry and the connections between the people of Inishowen and the people of Magilligan.

Other songs performed in the festival included a tune written by local fiddler Hudy Macan, Hudy Macan’s Galoppe, Blackbird and the Thrush – a beautifully haunting melody; The Blackbird, learnt from a Donegal fiddler and The Fairy Dance, now commonly played for our local dancers.