As luck would have it I just happened to have a set of Uilleann pipes and a couple of bodhrans in the kitchen cupboard. An old beat up fiddle and even older beat up fiddle player completed the set and together with Javolenus’ magical guitar we set off for the fair.

“She Moved Through the Fair” is a traditional Irish folk song and its lyrics were first published in Hughes’ Irish Country Song in 1909. He claimed to have written the tune to words given to him by the Irish poet Padraic Colum. Many have disputed this and the meaning of the words is also in question.

One interpretation of the song is that a man sees his lover move away from him through a field, after telling him that since her family will approve, “it will not be long, love, till our wedding day”. She returns as a ghost at night, her death is unexplained but she repeats the words “it will not be long, love, till our wedding day”, leading us to believe the couple will be reunited in the afterlife.

Whatever the origins it remains one of the most haunting of Irish ballads