Ulster Folk Ways: Based on the Collections of the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum: No 20 (The Irish heritage series). This item is unavailable.Ulster Folk Ways: Based on the Collections of the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum: No 20 (The Irish heritage series)

Popular culture and the pattern of traditional life in Ulster are full of paradoxes: facets of culture deriving from diverse regions of Europe, yet a way of life that is distinctively northern Irish, much more than the sum of its parts; conservatism that allows the survival of older ways of life, yet an environment that breeds individual inventiveness - witness Dunlop of the pneumatic tyre, Ferguson of the integrated agricultural machinery system and Martin of the aircraft ejector seat, Ulstermen all. Intense pride of locality and community contrasts with a fierce sectionalism that has frequently erupted in communal violence; yet visitors commonly remark on the immediate friendliness of all Ulster folk. Intimacy of landscape and of personal contacts within the local community, whether the community is urban or rural, goes along with a pattern of life until recently characterised in its material aspects by stark simplicity, but marked in its spiritual connotations by complexity, particularly in verbal and musical aesthetic forms. The oft-repeated categorising of Ulster as a cultural desert ignores the reality of indigenous cultural mani- festations.