Thanks all for your very interesting comments about how you'd play 3:2 hornpipes. No one though has answered my main question (unless I've been too dense to understand it) about the theoretical meaning of the time signature. That is three beats to a bar which, to my mind, would sound similar to a waltz or mazurka. None of the music theory I've found on the net mentions 3:2.

Thanks for the reminder of what you'd already told me Brian, as I said higher up this thread I fully intend to get back to the Cobbler's Hornpipe for the next meeting I can get to.

It also seems strange to me that no one really knows what the dances were like. I wonder if the dances morphed into something else when 3:2 hornpipes became less popular?