Heritage & Conservation

Mayo Folklore

County Mayo has a rich oral history tradition. Our oral history tradition informs our understanding and appreciation of our material heritage. 

Schools Collection 

The schools collection is a collection of folklore compiled by schoolchildren in Ireland in the 1930s. Initiated by the Irish Folklore Commission, approximately 740,000 pages (288,000 pages in the pupils’ original exercise books; 451,000 pages in bound volumes) of folklore and local tradition were compiled by pupils from 5,000 primary schools in the Irish Free State between 1937 and 1939.

Audit of Mayo’s Oral History Recordings 

The Heritage office will be undertaking an audit of oral history recordings is to determine the nature and extent of material held in national, regional and local repositories and collections. 

Turas Siar Digital Archive 

In 2018, funding was secured from the Department of Rural and Community Development under its Digital Innovation Programme to digitise, catalogue and archive an extensive oral history and folklore collection from the Erris Area, collected over decades by Pap and Catherine Murphy in Turas Siar on the Mullet Peninsula.

The collection contains recorded oral histories, folklore, rare music recordings, genealogy information, photographs, Irish language history, history of place names and their origin.

Further information is available at Turas Siar Digital Archive website.