Fair day: The story of Irish fairs and markets

Until very recently the local fair was an important event all over rural Ireland. Besides the essential business of buying and selling livestock and their produce there was abundance of entertainment on offer around the fair green, with ballad singers, dancers, hucksters, and tricksters vying with each other for an audience. The fair thus fulfilled and important social as well as economic function and, indeed, the few fairs which survive today - the Ould Lammas Fair at Ballycastle and the Puck Fair at Killorglin, for example - draw large crowds more for their entertainment value than for their agricultural significance. In Fair Day, Patrick Logan traces the development of fairs in Ireland from their earliest days in the middle ages down to recent times, relating the activity of a typical fair day to the evolution of agriculture and farm practice in the country. His account is both authoritative and lively, drawing on personal recollection and his own long experience of participation in fair all over Ireland.