Antrim – Simon Chadwick

Jane McArthur

There are quite a few traditional Irish harpers in the first half of the 19th century, whose names appear in the lists of harp students, but who disappear from the record after they finish their education and become professional harpers. However I think I still want to do a post about each of them. That way we have a place to add any further references that we might find. And it also helps us to start to get to know them as individuals.

Tom Hardy

Tom Hardy was a traditional Irish harper in Belfast in the second half of the 19th century. We don’t have a lot of information about him; we have only a few scattered sources. This means that any attempt to tell his life story will have more speculation and guesswork than hard facts. But I think there is enough to try. We can always come back later to add new information or to correct wrong guesses.

Abraham Wilkinson

Abraham Wilkinson was a traditional Irish harper in the first half of the 19th century. This post is to gather the few references we have to him, so we can start to build a picture of his life.

Is aoibhinn aoibhinn cloigtheach Aontroim

On Queen’s University, Belfast, Special Collections, MS4.29 page 218/216/225/f107v Edward Bunting has made a live transcription notation of a song air.

Beneath the tune, someone has written what I take to be the title for this tune: “is aoiḃin, aoiḃin cleachach aointrim / ah! how handsome the steeple of Antrim is”. I think this may not be Bunting’s handwriting; whoever wrote it seems to have been literate in Irish, writing the letter b with the dot (for bh).

This is a line from the song of “An bile buadhach”. Bunting later published a variant of the tune under that title in his 1809 book. But first of all let us look at the transcription.