"The Galway Shawl" is a traditional Irish folk song, concerning a rural courtship in the West of Ireland.
[1] The song has been popularly recorded by many ballad groups in Ireland and is now commonly adapted to a waltz time so that people can dance to it.
The narrator sees a girl wearing a bonnet with ribbons and a Galway shawl around her shoulders.
The man plays some hornpipes and the girl sings them as she cries tears of joy.
The song ends as the narrator bids the girl farewell as he's bound for County Donegal.