City of Streams

City of Streams presents folklore and everyday experience in Galway during the 1930s, using material gathered by senior pupils in fourteen National Schools. Guided by their teachers and an Irish Folklore Commission questionnaire, the children recorded memories and traditions from their own communities.

The resulting collection ranges across local beliefs, customs, traditional crafts, weather lore, songs, riddles and remembered experiences of the Famine. It also preserves reports of practical remedies, including raw turnip for heartburn and boiled onion in milk for stomach pain, alongside beliefs about Monday haircuts and foxes as signs of weather. Together, these accounts show how older observances, inherited knowledge and ordinary schoolchildren’s observations shaped life in Galway before the Second World War.