The narrator sees his lover move away from him through the fair, after telling him that since her family will approve, "it will not be long [love] 'til our wedding day".
She returns as a ghost at night, and repeats the words again, intimating her own tragic death and the couple's potential reunion in the afterlife.
"She Moved Through the Fair" has been found both in Ireland and in Scotland,[1] but pieces of the song were apparently first collected in County Donegal by Longford poet Padraic Colum and the musicologist Herbert Hughes.
[2] John Loesberg speculated: "From its strange, almost Eastern sounding melody, it appears to be an air of some antiquity,"[3] but he does not define its age any more precisely.
[7] Irish singer Paddy Tunney related[8] how Colum wrote an alternate version called upon returning from a literary gathering in Donegal with Herbert Hughes, among others.
A related song, "Out of the Window", was collected by Sam Henry from Eddie Butcher of Magilligan in Northern Ireland in around 1930 and published in 1979.
[11] In the 1990s the tune was used in the winning entry in the Comórtas na nAmhrán Nuachumtha ("Competition for newly composed songs") in Ráth Cairn.
The subject of the song, Bailéad an Phíolóta ("The Ballad of the Pilot"), was a plane crash that took place in 1989 on an unlit runway on Árainn Mhór.
[16] In 1952, folklorist Peter Kennedy recorded the McPeake Family singing a version based on that of Margaret Barry entitled "Our Wedding Day."
In June 2016, the BBC TV series The Living and the Dead premiered a version of the song sung by Elizabeth Fraser in collaboration with The Insects.