Bibliography
The standing references behind the journal's editorial work, annotated.
Below is the working reading-list the journal draws on, organised by topic. Where a book or paper has shaped multiple articles on the site, it appears in the most relevant section with cross-references where useful. The annotations are short editorial notes rather than full reviews; readers wanting more detail on a specific source should follow the WorldCat or publisher links and consult the texts directly.
The list is current as of mid-2026 and is updated as new pieces enter the journal's working reading. Suggestions of additions — particularly for less well-represented topics like the Welsh tradition and the contemporary bataireacht literature — are welcome at editor@thewalkingstickjournal.com.
Stick-making craft
Theo Fossel, The Stickmaker's Handbook
The standard practical guide to British stick-making, drawing on Fossel's experience as a Cumbrian working maker and on the tradition of the British Stickmakers Guild. Covers wood selection, seasoning, shaping, finishing, and the working variations of stick form. The book is not specific to the Irish tradition — Fossel's frame of reference is largely English and Scottish — but the practical content is broadly applicable across the British and Irish stick-making world.
Andrew Jones, The Sticks Book
A more contemporary practical guide than Fossel, with stronger emphasis on the show-stick and decorative-stick traditions of the British agricultural-show circuit. Particularly useful for readers interested in Welsh and Lowland-Scottish stick-making. Available through the British Stickmakers Guild's network and through specialist craft suppliers.
British Stickmakers Guild publications
The Guild publishes a quarterly journal and various technical leaflets covering specific aspects of stick-making (heat-bending, horn handle fitting, ferrule replacement, traditional finishes). Membership is open and the publications are the most current source for working-craft information. The journal draws on these for technical claims about contemporary practice.
Irish folklore and tradition
Niall Mac Coitir, Irish Trees: Myths, Legends & Folklore (Collins Press, 2003)
The single most useful synthesis of the Irish tree-folklore tradition in print. Mac Coitir works through each of the major native Irish trees — oak, ash, hazel, blackthorn, hawthorn, holly, and others — gathering the surviving folkloric, mythological, and place-name material from sources including the Folklore Commission's parish-by-parish collections, the medieval *Auraicept* tradition, the Royal Irish Academy's manuscript collections, and the *Dindshenchas* place-lore. Has shaped large parts of the journal's blackthorn, oak, and holly reference pages, and the Blackthorn in Irish mythology piece.
Estyn Evans, Irish Folk Ways (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957)
A classic synthesis of the Irish material-culture tradition by the Belfast-based geographer and folklorist E. Estyn Evans. Covers the full range of rural Irish material life — housing, fishing, agriculture, craft, ceremony — with a chapter on rural craft that includes stick-making in its broader context. Older than most of the contemporary scholarship but remains a standard reference for the working integration of folklore and material culture.
Patricia Lysaght, The Banshee: The Irish Death-Messenger (Glendale Press, 1986)
A scholarly study of the banshee tradition that includes substantial material on related folk-figures (the Cailleach, the *Sídhe* generally), and on the regional folkloric structures that the journal's Cailleach piece draws on. Lysaght's work is part of the wider University College Dublin folklore-collection tradition.
Eddie Lenihan, Meeting the Other Crowd: The Fairy Stories of Hidden Ireland (Penguin, 2003)
A storyteller's compilation of contemporary Irish fairy-belief, drawing on Lenihan's own collected oral histories from the south-west of Ireland. The most useful single source for the modern observance of the lone-thorn-tree taboo (Lenihan led the 1999 campaign to spare the Latoon fairy thorn from the M18 motorway route), and for the broader question of how older folk-beliefs survive in contemporary rural life.
Dúchas — The National Folklore Collection of Ireland
The digitised version of the Folklore Commission's Schools' Collection of 1937–38, in which primary-school children across rural Ireland recorded local folk-traditions from their elderly relatives. Roughly half a million pages of material, searchable by parish, topic, and informant. The single most useful primary source for early-twentieth-century Irish rural folk-tradition; the journal's May bush, fairy-thorn taboo, and blackthorn folklore pieces all draw on it.
Faction-fighting and bataireacht
Patrick D. O'Donnell, The Irish Faction Fighters of the 19th Century (Anvil Books, 1975)
The standard scholarly synthesis of the Irish faction-fighting era. O'Donnell draws on assize records, broadside ballads, and oral tradition to reconstruct the named factions, the ritual structures of the contests, and the social and political pressures that produced and ultimately suppressed the practice. The journal's Bataireacht and history pillar rely heavily on O'Donnell's work.
Glen Doyle, published bataireacht material (Doyle Clan System)
The most extensive contemporary published curriculum for bataireacht as a martial-arts practice, drawn from the Doyle family lineage carried to Newfoundland with the diaspora. The journal references this material in its bataireacht piece with appropriate cross-referencing flags; the Doyle material is closer to a working martial-arts manual than a historical treatment, and works best when read alongside O'Donnell's historical synthesis.
Antrim Bata school
A parallel surviving lineage of bataireacht, based in Northern Ireland, with its own published curriculum and online introductory material. Useful as a check against the Doyle material, and as evidence that the bataireacht tradition has more than one surviving thread.
Woodland and forestry
Oliver Rackham, The History of the Countryside (Dent, 1986)
The standard scholarly history of British (and, by extension, Irish) woodland and rural-landscape management. Rackham's work on coppicing, on the history of woodland clearance, and on the long-term ecological and economic patterns of British and Irish forestry is the foundation for most contemporary thinking on these topics. The journal draws on Rackham extensively for the hazel and oak reference pages, and for the Wicklow-clearance material in the Shillelagh village piece.
Oliver Rackham, Trees and Woodland in the British Landscape (Phoenix Press, 1990)
A companion to The History of the Countryside, focusing more directly on individual tree species and their economic and ecological histories. The chapters on oak, ash, and hazel are particularly useful for the journal's wood-reference pages.
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew — Plants of the World Online
The current standard reference for plant taxonomy, distribution, and accepted scientific names. The journal cites POWO for the binomial and family classifications of each of the major stick-woods (blackthorn, oak, holly, ash, hazel).
Woodland Trust — A–Z of British Trees
The most accessible English-language reference for ecological information on individual native British and Irish tree species. The journal's wood-reference pages cite the Trust's species pages for ecological and folkloric information that is broadly accepted but not specific to a single primary source.
The Wood Database (wood-database.com)
The most accessible reference for technical wood properties (density, Janka hardness, working characteristics) for most commercial and many non-commercial timber species. The journal cites it for density and hardness figures across the wood-reference pages, with `[VERIFY]` markers where the figures are working-trade approximations rather than primary timber-laboratory readings.
Forest Research (UK) — Pest and disease resources
The UK government's forestry research body. The journal's references on ash dieback (the timeline of the European spread, the UK confirmation in 2012, the qualitative pattern of mortality) are drawn from Forest Research's pest-and-disease pages.
Forest Research pest and disease
Lexicography and language
Oxford English Dictionary
The standard reference for English-language etymology and historical usage. The journal cites the OED for the etymology of *shillelagh* (with first-cited use in Francis Grose's 1785 *Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue***), for *swagger-stick*, *walking-stick*, and other relevant terms. The OED's etymology of *shillelagh* presents both competing theories — derivation from *sail éille* and from the Wicklow place-name — and treats the question as unresolved.
Niall Ó Dónaill, Foclóir Gaeilge–Béarla (1977; updated electronic version at Teanglann.ie)
The standard modern Irish–English dictionary. The journal cites this for the Irish-language etymological elements (*sail éille*, *bata*, *bataireacht*) that appear in the etymology and folklore pieces.
Damian McManus, A Guide to Ogam (An Sagart, 1991)
The standard contemporary reference for the ogham alphabet, including the tree-letter associations that the journal's Auraicept piece draws on. Replaces the older Calder edition of the *Auraicept na n-Éces* as the working reference for English-speaking readers.
Diaspora and Irish-American history
Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (Oxford University Press, 1985)
The standard scholarly synthesis of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Irish emigration to North America. Miller's quantitative figures, his treatment of the cultural transmission of Irish identity in the diaspora, and his framing of the gradual diaspora-Irish/Irish-Irish divergence inform the journal's American-Irish diaspora piece.
Hasia Diner, Erin's Daughters in America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983)
A complementary scholarly treatment focusing specifically on Irish women in the American emigration. Useful as a check on the male-dominated framing of much of the diaspora-stick literature; the gendered dimensions of Irish-American gift-giving and family inheritance practices are partly addressed in Diner.
Museum and archival collections
National Museum of Ireland — Country Life division (Castlebar)
The Country Life division at Turlough House holds the major surviving collection of Irish rural-craft and folklife material objects, including period sticks, faction-fight memorabilia, and related craft items. The journal's references to museum-collection material (particularly faction-fighting period objects) are drawn from this collection.
National Museum of Ireland — Country Life
Imperial War Museum (London)
Holds the standard collection of British military-history material, including the Ernest Blaikley portrait of Major H. Hesketh-Prichard with swagger stick used as the hero image of the journal's swagger sticks piece.
Imperial War Museum collections
Wikimedia Commons
The journal's public-domain and CC BY-SA image sources are largely drawn from Wikimedia Commons, with full per-image credits in the captions. The Otto Wilhelm Thomé botanical illustrations of 1885 (used for blackthorn, oak, holly, ash, and hazel) are particularly useful as a consistent visual style across the wood-reference pages.
Online resources, miscellaneous
- CELT: Corpus of Electronic Texts (UCC) — the digitised corpus of medieval Irish manuscripts, including the *Auraicept na n-Éces*
- Logainm.ie — the Irish placenames database
- Dictionary of Irish Architects 1720–1940 — useful for the architectural history of estate villages including Shillelagh
- History Ireland — the popular-scholarly Irish historical magazine, with archived articles on faction-fighting, the Famine, and related topics
- National Parks & Wildlife Service, Ireland — the source for Coolattin Oak Wood Special Area of Conservation status
Notable absences
A reference list is most usefully evaluated against what is not on it. The journal acknowledges several gaps in its current reading that future article work will need to address:
- The Welsh-language craft-vocabulary literature on stick-making is under-represented in the current bibliography. Contributions from Welsh-speaking readers on regional craft material are particularly welcome.
- The contemporary bataireacht academic literature beyond the Doyle and Antrim Bata material is thin. Several family lineages have surfaced in recent years that deserve better treatment than the journal has yet given them.
- The regional Irish maker tradition outside Kerry — there are working makers in Cork, Donegal, Clare, and elsewhere whose work the journal has not adequately documented.
- The collector and antique-stick literature — the secondary-market reference material for vintage British and Irish sticks is handled by a small number of specialist dealers whose published material is not always easily accessible.
Suggestions for additions to any of these sections are welcome at editor@thewalkingstickjournal.com.