Old Irish customs- Chalk Sunday

You will have heard to the tradition surrounding St Swithan’s Day (15 July) which dictates whether Ireland will see rain or not for the next forty days, probably amongst the most popular of Irish traditions especially as we look annually for some sunshine! But what about ‘Chalk Sunday’? This was the day when bachelors kept there heads down, especially in the south of Ireland where the tradition prevailed. However by the late 1920s the tradition was said to have fallen away. Does it by any chance survive anywhere in the country? Hardly, but this report from the Limerick Leader in 1928 allows to understand what it was:

Sunday last was what would be widely known in rural Ireland some years ago as "Chalk Sunday" a sort of annual festival of jokers whose delight it was to aggravate and annoy others. The name comes from an old South of Ireland custom of marking a cross with chalk on the backs of those well advanced bachelors and spinsters who had not married before the incoming of Lent —"escaped another Shrove," was one way of putting it.

The operation of drawing public attention to the "defaulters" was carried out on the first Sunday of Lent, and, of course, without the marked ones knowing that it was being done. If often brought a black eye to the perpetrator of the joke, and some years Ago it became such a nuisance in the streets of Clonmel, by evening the police tried to end it. The custom has completely died out in most places.

For more information search the pages of the Irish Newspaper Archive (www.irishnewsarchive.com )