Have you been at Carrick?

Have you been at Carrick?, also given as Were you at the rock? or occasionally Were you at Carrick?, is the English name of a popular slow air originating in Ireland. The various titles are translations of the first line of the Irish text, An raibh tu ag an gCarraig. "Have you been at Carrick" is the translation originally made in the 19th century by the Derry-born Cork poet and Young Irelander, Edward Walsh.

The song was well known by the first half of the 19th century, though most authors assume an earlier origin. Early versions of an Irish text, with translations, were printed in Walsh's Irish Popular Songs (1847) and John O'Daly's Poets and Poetry of Munster (1849). O'Daly firmly ascribed an 18th-century origin to the song and said it was written by Dominic Ó Mongain, a poet and harpist from County Tyrone, in honour of the society beauty Eliza Blacker of the townland of Carrick in the parish of Seagoe, County Armagh; she later became Lady Dunkin, on marrying Sir William Dunkin of Clogher. Walsh said only that he believed the song to have a "southern" origin, noting that Carrick was a common element in place names, while the song-collector Patrick Weston Joyce confirmed that he had commonly heard it sung in Munster.

Walsh described the text as follows: "In this truly Irish song, when the pining swain learns that his absent mistress is not love-sick like himself, he praises the beauty of her copious hair, throws off a glass to her health, enumerates his sufferings, and swears to forgo the sex for ever; but she suddenly bursts upon his view [...] and he greets his glorious maid with such a welcome as an Irish lover alone can give!" The version given by Walsh has six stanzas, or verses, in both Irish and English texts.

An alternative translation was made by Walsh's contemporary James Clarence Mangan under the title The Lass of Carrick.

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