Over the Moor to Maggie

Though it's a session reel now, the tune first reached print as an untitled hornpipe, turning up that way in R.M. Levey's "First Collection of the Dance Music of Ireland" (1858) and, around the same time, P.M. Haverty's "One Hundred Irish Airs." Its earliest titled setting is in the 1865 Gunn manuscripts of County Fermanagh, where it goes by "Rakes of Abeyfale," after Abbeyfeale in the far west of Limerick. The Clare uilleann piper Willie Clancy is closely associated with the reel and recorded it in 1967; an older version of the same melody survives in jig time as "Leg of the Duck."