Listening, slowing down, and trying to get a gist of this tune, it seems very hard to play the red circled part… and assuming the C is a Cnat, I’m having problems playing it as fast as it’s supposed to be played.
I also am not familiar with the little bars coming off the left side of the middle notes, of the triplets.
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That is an interesting passage that I use as a variation on the way I usually play the tune. Here’s something that you might try to make the tune easier for you to play. It also adds effect if you get the timing right and can play the D crans as they should be played. Disclaimer–I am attempting to oversimplify what I think I do on this passage as I play a few more grace notes and a swell (er…off the chanter whoops on g with closure) or two than I am writing about…I just want you to be able to get a basic replacement part. I’ll show you sometime. Contact me at glands@comcast.net if you want me to send you a sound file to demo what I am actually doing.
Referring to what you have circled…
first section…play the first a then go to the f# by trilling the g
next bar… play the e staccato by replacing the c with silence then play the g and an e cran to replace the e-c-g
next bar… play the g staccato by replacing the c sith silence then play the next g then play another e cran to replace the next part then you’re ready to finish the tune
I believe the little bar coming of the left side is to indicate that the figure is “dotted eighth, sixteenth, eighth”.
if the whole thing were double barred they would all be sixteenths (and the double bars would be coming off the left side of the last note.
doing that allows you to pick out the middle note as a sixteenth, and not at quick glance get it confused with “dotted eighth, sixteenth, sixteenth”
Close. They are sixteenth notes (semiquavers) but they are not dotted. This version is very close to the way the Chieftains recorded this march on their third album. If you are having trouble picking the tune out from the dots, I suggest you get a hold of this recording. It very clearly gives you dum-tee-dum-dum timing for the section you have highlighted.
djm
yeah, the sixteenths are there because the eighth before is dotted. otherwise it would be three eighth notes.
Oops! Sorry, Antaine, you’re right. I didn’t take your meaning correctly. Still, its a pretty awkward way of notating the phrase. Probably a grace note instead of a half-tied sixteenth note would have given a better impression.
djm
glands! Yes, this helps very much! I’ve been working on it part of the afternoon… and I’ve got the E cran down, finally, but slowly. It’s amazing how frustrated I was, and now I’ve something to work on, adding to the tune. Thanks!
NOW… rolling those bottom Ds. Heather Clarke writes in her Tutor that bottom Ds are almost impossible to roll… but later indicates that bottom D can be cran’d. Seems to me there’s little difference between a cran and a roll (and here I betray my innocence)… since both involve grace notes “decorating” the note. Unless the “cran” is reserved for Bottom D, and E in both octaves. ?? (The roll then involves grace notes above and below the note, while the cran utilizes only grace notes above the note… right?)
djm…you’re thinking like a piper 
i’ve noticed that we seem to like to use grace notes to represent other things that have ways of being represented in standard notation. a sixteenth may be quick, but it is technically not a grace note, and representing it as so would either have you come up short on the counts in the measure or require a dot on the last eighth note of the figure, changing the phrase.
Antane, that would be arithmetically correct, but I still think that sixteenth should be split out, instead of sharing the bar, as it is also missing the stacatto dot.
God help us! Thinking like a piper? What is it they think of? 
djm
Thinking like a Highland piper that is. Basically the entire tune is a 6/8 march and every single group of three beamed notes are played dum-te-dum, dum-te-dum. The measure is played two beats to the bar, the first beat in the measure is left foot down, the second beat is the right foot down. Two downbeats.
Now for the rest of the beamed group. Instead of playing two downbeats, and two groups of evenly timed 1/8th notes (hemi-demi-quasi-poser-dozer quavers or whatever for you folks over the briney) The first 1/8th note of every group of three is held half again longer than usual. That has a dot in front of it. (Should have, but I’ll get to that…) This time has to be taken from somewhere else, and that is the middle note in each beamed group. That has (should have) a flag on the stem (so it will be double flagged counting the beam that makes them all 1/8th notes to begin with) and is now played “late” which gives a march that “pointed” hitch.
The third note is a straight 1/8th note and comes right on the upbeat. The first note is dead on the downbeat, and the last note is right on the upbeat, or if marching, the “up step” or if country dancing, “the up-prancing.” So you see, the basic metric accent is in fact made up of two groups of these beamed clusters of 1/8th notes and once you know the genre, you simply don’t need to even see the dots or cuts (flags) because half the time the moron who notated it left half of either or both out or put them in wrong. Or, if you’re an uilleann piper, you might want to reverse the pointing here and there for effect anyway.
But in actually practice this tune is played more like a Viennese waltz rather than a march. The tune can be played either way while being notated exactly the same. The difference is just how much you steal from those middle notes, how much you then hold the first notes, and the resultant “snap.” Less snap, less stolen time, round it out a bit (probably more like mathematically notated) and you get the more fluid waltz.
Ultimately, if you left all the cuts and dots out you’d still leave it beamed in groups of threes, and the player would simply, familiar with the various genres, decide which formula to apply and out would come the tune, quite intuitively and easily.
Jigs are read/played in the same way, two groups of three, that’s the way the phrasing inherently goes. Once you have the basic rhythm you actually read each beamed cluster as a word, not as individual letters.
GHB players for instance constantly read beamed clusters of grace notes, four, five, six or more at a throw (pun intended) as a single “movement” not as individual finger motions or notes. So the way a tune is beamed together is quite helpful when done properly.
As far as the section mentioned, well, it is one of the most mindless musical, if one can call it that, phrases ever composed, if we can submit that is was composed, so the best way to figure this out is as suggested, listen to it played, look at how it’s written, then ignore both and play it the way you want. In this case the phrasing of the tune itself is so rambling and random sounding, you’ll have to make sure your measures come out even and your beats in each measure come out even.
The little bitty notes are gracenotes, they don’t exist, usually the have three flags on them, supposedly you steal time from the note before it but it is not a set time you count. (And that’s not always true either.)
And I didn’t even mention the ending phrase that sounds like the record is hopping a groove over and over again…the net effect of which is that of a graceful but very drunken dancer who after some eloquent measures gradually collapses to the floor, thrashes about like a fish on the dock a moment to regain his feet, and then graciously launches time and time again into what he can maintain of the dance. And then, finally, it’s over as one final time the dying trout twitches to its death in one last long-held spasm of hard D, and I don’t have to listen to it any more.
Royce
Gee, Royce, for a minute there I almost thought you didn’t like the tune.
djm
This is a good tune, esp. for learning the pipes, because it stays in the lower octave except for an occasional upper E. This is the first tune I ever played on my first chanter.
There’s another way to ormament this tune at the beginning, it’s more of a da-de-dum do da-de-dum (or) da-de-dum do dum, with similar emphais in other sections as noted by O’Neill, and more reminiscent of the Chieftains version, as I recall from a 1,000 moons ago.
Nice impossible-to-play low C’s in that. This is a good example of a tune which was played on the pastoral pipes, which had the foot joint to get a low C (but couldn’t play stacatto, on the knee); then, after the foot joint had been removed, the tune was retooled to compensate for the loss of that low note. It was analyzed in an article in the Pipers’ Review. I think Paddy Moloney played E-G-c E(3, E-G-c E(3, too. An arpeggio and a cran. Mindless. He squeals the chanter big time, too.
There’s a jig version of this in G, also. Rory O’Moore.
Sorry, I’m not too good with abc, but I think its more like: E-c-G-E-D-E, E-c-G-E-G-E, D-Dcran, D-Dcran, D-Dcran, D-Dcran.
djm
I always just cheated on the low C by rolling the low E while the fiddler hit the C, or hitting a low D and back up to E if playing solo.
I’ve never heard a version of the jig, Rory O’Moore, that made me ever think of Rory of the Hills (AKA The King of Laois) in any way . BYW, I learned Rory O’Moore from my grandfather. He never knew the name of it, and neither did I, until I heard it played by fiddlers, at Centrum in Pt. Townsend, for New England contra dances.
Royce does hate the tune. Trust me. We’ve taunted each other about this before. It reminds me of the pealing of bells in a carillon, for which he’ll mock me, and then I mock him back for his churlish ears of cloth. But his characterizations of the tune amuse me, and so I have seen fit to spare Royce the headsman’s mercies. 
BTW, wasn’t it O’Carolan’s hated rival, the one he beat up in a pub, who composed the tune? I forget his name.
I like to use the regular Cnat in place of the low.
The “other harper” was David Murphy, harper to Lord Mayo, and composer of the tune “Tiarna Mhaigh Eo”, not of “Ruairí Óg Ó Mordha” (aka “Rory O’More”, “King of Laois”, “High King of Laois”, “Rory O’Moore”, etc.). Murphy was not really a competitor so much as a conceited twit who had performed for King Louis XIV of France, and therefore thought he was qualifed to put all other Irish composers down.
Murphy found himself staying at the same inn as O’Carolan one night, and suggested to the company at hand that all O’Carolan’s compositions were like bones without the beef. O’Carolan reportedly grabbed Murphy by the hair and dragged him around the room, making out that Murphy’s screams were a new air of O’Carolan’s composition, and added, “Put beef to that air, you puppy.” The other members of the company had to intervene, as O’Carolan had no intentions of stopping until there was no drop of blood left in Murphy (per the Memoirs of Arthur O’Neill).
Party on, Turlough!
Yes, that’s it. Sorry, I’m still a bit bleary yet, today. Thanks!
Lorenzo, this may indeed be a good learning tune, but damn, those crans are driving my fingers crazy. Moloney makes it sound so easy… inspite of that sqwak in there!