Desolation of Ulster during the Famine - The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps)
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of a cathedral; then the Bay of Galway, once thronged with Spanish and Irish ships, carrying wine and gold,—but now, it appears, dangerous and fatal (statio mala fide carinis) to steamships bound for America. Westward from Galway, and round the circuit of Connaught, the scene becomes savage and wild, with innumerable rocky islands,—deep inlets, narrow and gloomy, like Norwegian fiords,—and grim steep mountains hanging over them. But the most desolate region of all is found in Ulster. As you travel northwards from Killybegs, by way of Ardara, Glenties, and Dunglow, you pass for nearly forty miles through the dreariest region of moor and mountain that is to be found within the five ends of Ireland;—wide tracts of quaking-bog, interspersed with countless dismal lakes, intersected by rocky ridges, and traversed by mountain rivers roaring in tawny foam to the sea. The two or three wretched villages that lie along this road give to a traveller an impression of even more dreariness and desolation than the intervening country; a cluster of ragged-looking, windowless hovels, whose inhabitants seem to have gathered themselves from the wastes, and huddled together to keep some life and heat in them; a few patches of oats and potatoes surrounding the huts, and looking such a miserable provision for human beings against hunger in the midst of those great brown moors; hardly a slated building to be seen, save one or two constabulary and revenue police-stations, and a court-house in Glenties, for dealing out "justice," and close by that a certain new building—the grandest by far that those Rosses people ever saw—rearing its accursed gables and pinnacles of Tudor barbarism, and staring boldly with its detestable mullioned windows, as if to mock those wretches who still cling to liberty and mud cabins—seeming to them, in their perennial half-starvation, like a Temple erected to the Fates, or like the fortress of Giant Despair, whereinto he draws them one by one, and devours them there:—the Poor-house.
This is the estate of a certain Marquis of Conyngham: and for him those desolate people, while health last, and they may still keep body and soul together, outside the Poor-house, are for ever employed in making up a subsidy, called rent; which that district sends half-yearly to be consumed in England; or wherever else it may please their noble proprietor to devour their hearts' blood and the marrow of their bones.
So it is; and so it was, even before the famine, with almost the whole of that coast region. The landlords were all absentees. All the grain and cattle the people could raise were never enough to make up the rent; it all went away, of course; it was all ...continue reading »
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