I named this jig after the river Dodder, which is the largest tributary of the Liffey. It rises near Kippure in the Wicklow mountains and flows through several Dublin suburbs before rejoining the Liffey near Ringsend. My favourite route to the Friday daytime sessions in O’Donohue’s and the Cobblestone was to walk from Clonskeagh along the nearby banks of the Dodder to reach the Milltown Luas stop.

During the January 2021 lockdown piper Roger O’Keeffe sent a short video to Shay Fogarty’s Meitheal Deardaoin WhatsApp group. It showed the River Dodder in Dublin bursting its banks after heavy rain. He wrote:

‘As the Banks of the Dodder disappear, we need a new tune: The Dodder in Spate.’
I took up the challenge and composed my tune ‘The Dodder in full spate’ that evening. I sent in my score of it the next day, along with a watercolour I had done of the weir at the Dodder in Milltown in sunnier times.

Banks of the Dodder [artwork] / Lisa Shields
Banks of the Dodder, watercolour by Lisa Shields
Piper Dave Fadden then recorded himself playing my tune on the whistle, and posted that to the group. More compositions followed – Dave’s tune called ‘Roger’s dawdle down the Dodder’ and ‘The Rolling Dodder’, a jig from Shay Fogarty. Hugh Magee is also a member of that Meitheal Deardoain group and he picked up my tune from there.

I have a soft spot for the Dublin suburb of Ballinteer because that is where we first owned our own house, in the Wyckham Park estate near Dundrum. That was in the early sixties when it was the last estate on the edge of the countryside. You could walk out into the nearby fields and pick blackberries.