A pause for an interesting historical note on the form from Pete Cooper, (which I came on in researching the origins of Staten Island Hornpipe):

[The Scottish fiddler in Tyneside, mid 1800s] James Hill's music made the most lasting impact. His repertoire included waltzes, jigs, reels and strathspeys, but his hornpipes became famous in his own time, and are played today. With titles like The Cage (referring to the lift that took miners down to the coalface) and The High-Level Bridge (celebrating the two-tier road and rail bridge built across the Tyne in 1848), they seem to confidently embrace the industrial world. Also named after pubs (The Hawk) and racehorses (Beeswing), often in the flat keys, and sometimes, like the new polkas, including both key shifts from one section to another and short chromatic runs, Hill's tunes represent an evolutionary development of the hornpipe form. The introduction of a 'dotted,' or more accurately, 'triplet swing,' rhythm is combined with new bowing patterns, especially the use of slurs across the beat. William C. Honeyman, in his 1898 'Strathspey, Reel and Hornpipe Tutor,' termed it the Newcastle Style. Graham Dixon suggests a three-fold cause for the popularity of the hornpipe. 'A section of the now urban population with rural roots would be used to step dancing to hornpipes. The developing Tyneside theatre and music hall exposed large audiences to the stage hornpipe, and the large Tyneside Irish community with its own musical roots would also be familiar with the hornpipe.' Hill appears not to have attempted to publish his own compositions, but violinist W. B. Laybourn, who lived in North Shields from 1845 to 1858, later became the editor of 'Köhler's Violin Repository', a weekly music magazine, and published many of them. Others were published in 1882 by J. Stokoe in the Newcastle Courant.
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So the dots are a mid-19th century thing... hmm.

~ Becky in Tucson