About the Show

Presented and researched by Nicholas Carolan, director of the Irish Traditional Music Archive in Dublin, Come West along the Road is now in its 11th series, and is the longest-running television series ever on Irish traditional music.

The series consists of 13 half-hour programmes drawn from the first three decades of RTÉ television (1961-1989), with additional material from other television stations, newsreels, feature films, and private film footage. Some material is being shown for the first time, and most of the material in the series has not been seen since its first transmission up to 40 years ago.

Leading exponents of traditional music, song and dance, some long-dead, some in their youth, mingle with wrenboys, set dancers and unknown performers captured in studio or at fleadh cheoil or festivals, to present an entertaining and unique documentation of Irish traditional music in the last half-century. To date, over 2,000 performers have appeared on over 130 programmes of Come West along the Road, and also on seven series of Siar an Bóthar, the Irish-language version of the series on TG4. Two RTÉ DVDs of highlights from earlier series have been published.

The primary focus of the series is on music, but there is also a fascinating dimension of social history to this early material: townscapes and country-side, dress and hairstyles, houses and furniture, and the development of the medium of television itself.

The current series features two special programmes drawn from the archives of Ulster Television (UTV), featuring from the mid-1980s the McPeake Family of Belfast, with Fermanagh musicians and young Belfast musicians who came under the spell of Fermanagh music.