Glenviggan thunder-spade

thunder-spade

Source term: bull-roarer (Gunn's exhibit label); possible bull-roarer (Evans)

thunder-spade: a local Co. Londonderry/Tyrone/Armagh-Down name for a children's toy bullroarer, probably a popular variant of the older names thunder-spell/thunder-spale (spale/spell/spall = a wood or stone chip); Irish cuirin buirthe, "little roaring board" (per Brendan Adams).

In spring 1963 a turf-cutter in James McBride's bank at Glenviggan, near Draperstown, brought up a long yew blade with an unusually long handle, forty inches down in the peat. A schoolmaster exhibited it as a bull-roarer 'resembling the Australian turndun and Greek rhombos'; an old man in the district had recognized it as a 'thunder-spade,' a children's toy from his own boyhood. Three fire-smoothed hourglass holes survive — one neat, at the tip, two crude and unexplained at the shoulders — leading one specialist to suspect instead the hilt of a broken wooden sword. Estyn Evans held his ground: 'until a better explanation is forthcoming I prefer to regard the discovery as a bull-roarer.' Peat near the find spot, gathered two years later, puts the surrounding bog at roughly 110 BC — a date on the ground, not the blade.

the two at the shoulders are crudely made, irregular and unmatched. Their purpose is a mystery … at any rate the sound emitted did not appear to change when I covered them with selotape.

Evans 1975: 16-18

Particulars

Object

A yew-wood blade with a long integral handle: 7.5 in. overall, of which the handle takes 3.25 in.; just under 2 in. wide and 0.2 in. thick. Three fire-smoothed hourglass perforations survive — one neatly made at the tip, two crude and mismatched at the shoulders, their purpose unexplained.

Function

Identified locally as a children's 'thunder-spade.'