These ballad had a life totally separated from the literary circulation on broadsides - including among the non-literate Travelling people who were unlikely ever to have learned them from print.
This one in particular was particularly popular with English and Scots Travellers, Caroline Hughes being the source of one of the better known versions.
It is quite rare in the south of Ireland, though it has been recorded here.
A particularly sad capturing of it was by Tom Munnelly, who got it from appropriately named small farmer Hughie Clare of County Clare, who sang it onto the tape recorder when he was dying of throat cancer.
Tom often used it as a rare example of one of the fifty Child ballads which were recovered from source singers in Ireland in the latter half of the twentieth century.
Jim Carroll