
The Irish Hood (aka. The Kinsale cloak)
Daniel Maclise (Draughtsman)
Portrait of woman with hooded cloak. She is praying, and holding a rosary.
Inscribed in ImageD. Mc.Clise A.R.A.[sic] / H. Robinson. / Printed by Alfred Adlard.
Caption outside of boundaries of image – The Irish Hood.
“When the Irish girl travels, however, if it should be from one cottage to another, she wears a cloak, generally blue, which is, perhaps, the only national dress extant in her country.” Irish women of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries adopted the hooded cloak as a general-purpose outdoor garment. These cloaks varied in colour throughout Ireland, being red in Cork and blue in Waterford, but the material was always a quality melton, which has a wool pile.
The Kinsale Cloak, also known as the West Cork Cloak or Irish Cloak, evolved from cloaks which were worn throughout Europe since at least the Bronze Age. Worn since prehistoric times in Ireland, by the early historic period, the outer wrap garment had become a four-cornered "brat" of almost rectangular shape. In a 1904 discovery in Armoy, County Antirm, Ireland, late Bronze Age tools were found wrapped in a woolen brat sewn from two pieces of wool, giving evidence that cloaks were worn in Ireland as far back as 750 BC.: 15
Likely by 600 AD, the brat had evolved into a cape-like shape of the type worn in the drawing of St. Matthew in the Book of Durrow (dated to shortly after 600 AD), which was fitted at the shoulders and reached to below the knees.
In the sixteenth century, when cloaks became common items of dress in Europe, woolen weather-proof cloaks evolved in Ireland. However, English laws passed during the reign of HenryVIII tried to get rid of the cloak as an item of dress in Ireland. During the Elizabethan Wars, the cloak was especially frowned-upon because it was associated with rebellion: it was both warm and waterproof, and it enabled Irish fighting men to remain out in the hills in the worst of weather. "A fit house for an outlaw, a meet bed for a rebel, and an apt cloak for a thief", wrote Edmund Spenser, an English poet who lived in the Elizabethan era, describing the Irish cloak at the end of the sixteenth century.