[7] It was a precursor of what are now known as uilleann pipes, and there were several well-known makers over a large geographic area, including London, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Dublin, and Newcastle upon Tyne.

Although the term "pastoral" is not historically found outside Geoghegan's London context, it is evocative of a style of music played at the time.

The opera featured an “en masse” dance led by a pastoral pipe and the scene was engraved by William Hogarth (1697–1764) who clearly shows a bellows blown bagpipe[12] similar to the one later depicted in the Geoghegan tutor.

[13] The pastoral pipes were regarded in a classical or neo-baroque setting, played by gentlemen pipers and spread across the upper circles of polite society as the instrument of choice.

An established bellows pipes with an extended range is noted to be played across Scotland no later than 1760 in the “Complete Theory of the Great Highland bagpipe” by Joseph MacDonald.

[14] Lovers of Ossian felt a kind of enthusiastic rapture when they beheld the guests seated, and the bards arranged in the flower-decked hall of Fingal; when they heard the sweet harmony of the harps (clarsach) and the Union pipes and the song of the bards they heard also the warlike sound of the shield of the hall of Fingal.The first reference to the instrument in Ireland is provided by John O'Keefe in 1760 as an instrument of polite society[15] and the emerging pastoral and prototype union pipe influenced the folk tradition of the 18th and 19th century in Scotland and Ireland.

In modern Uilleann pipes, the player will move from the lower to the upper register by stopping the chanter momentarily while increasing the bag pressure, causing the reed to double-tone.

[17] Later examples include a slide on the foot joint to change the lower leading note from flat to sharp as required and on a further set an on/off mechanism is fitted to control the drones with the two regulators fitted neatly to the top of the common stock and the addition of key in "e" to increase the compass of the chanter in the second octave.

This must be crafted so that it can play two full octaves accurately, without the fine tuning allowed by the use of a player's lips; only bag pressure and fingering can be used to maintain the correct pitch of each note.

[16] The fall from grace of the open chanter was slow to take effect as pastoral pipes with removable foot joints were still being made till the 1850s[19] and played until after the First World War.

[5] Some of the oldest surviving instruments date from the 1770–1790s, notably James Kenna of Mullingar, Hugh Robertson of Edinburgh[20] and later Robert Reid of North Shields.

The evolution of the union and uilleann (a term originating in 1904 by Irish nationalists) pipes was also driven by competition between makes; throughout the late 18th and early 19th century, pipemakers in Aberdeen, Dublin, Edinburgh and Newcastle competed and copied each other's ideas and innovations.