Drummond Castle

Drummond Castle is a real Perthshire seat of the Drummond family, a tower house built in the late 15th century a few miles south of Crieff, and the jig that bears its name is genuinely old. It survives in the 1734 manuscript David Young compiled for the Duke of Perth — still kept at the castle itself — and Niel Gow printed it in his Second Collection of 1788, where the melody is already called "old." It later appeared in Kerr's Merry Melodies in the 1880s, and English collections carry it under the title "Matthew Briggs." Scottish in origin, the jig has long been at home in Irish hands too: the Sligo band Dervish recorded it on The Thrush in the Storm.