Quote Originally Posted by MacSpadger View Post

Richard, interesting post but of course there's no evidence that the "Irish warpipe" ever existed.
I imagine that, just like anywhere else, Ireland had several different types of bagpipe, including the ones that were actually used in war, the simple "no-drones" bagpipes seen in the eyewitness illustration of Irish troops at the Siege of Orlean.
They were playing something... the question is, what was it?

Unfortunately the analogies with other types of things go both ways.

Given how, in mainland Europe, bagpipe species are so diverse, with villages a few miles apart having species with completely different fingering systems, tuning systems, number and type of drones, musical repertoire etc etc (due to people in the old days not travelling around all that much... language varied like that also) I would be surprised if Ireland and Scotland, seperated by water, would have exactly the same species of bagpipe in the 1300-1600 period. Look at the divergence between Irish and Scottish Gaelic.

On the other hand, harps survive from Ireland and Scotland having very similar form and it's known that harpers themselves travelled back and forth. Direct to the pipes, didn't some Highland pipers travel to Ireland for tuition? Which suggests a more or less similar instrument. Fact is, there's very little evidence to go on.

Of course Highland pipes didn't look like they do today anyhow, in the old days. Here's our earliest clear depiction of the Highland pipes. What they looked like before 1714 we can only speculate



Here's a couple old sets





note the similarity to the Spanish pipes, especially this gaita with a y-stock



The interesting thing about highland pipes is how in two important ways they're different from all other known British pipe species
1) having a redunant drone
2) having drones in seperate stocks

Could there be a Nordic influence?? The extinct Scandinavian pipes with two tenors in seperate stocks??