Christy Moore recorded this on Whatever Tickles Your Fancy, and has the tune most people are familiar with today. In The Christy Moore Songbook he writes:

"I learned this from Muriel Graves from the Lake District in England in a folk club in 1967. Little did I think that by bringing it back to Ireland I was going to write a page in the annals of folk history and launch Foster and Allen to stardom"!

Sharp published The Sprig of Thyme (and The Seeds of Love) in 1916, in One Hundred English Folksongs with a different tune. A decade earlier George Gardiner had published a different version (in Marrowbones, 2007).