06–Clachans FINAL:01–Anvil.qxd
24/07/2012
16:04
Page 1
Chapter
Clachans: landscape and life in Ireland
before and after the Famine
KEVIN WHELAN
Introduction
A principal determinant of the nineteenth-century Irish settlement
pattern was the rundale and clachan system.1 A clachan (or baile or
‘village’ – Otway called it ‘the village system’2) was a nucleated group
of farmhouses, where land-holding was organised communally,
frequently on a townland basis, and often with considerable ties of
kinship between the families involved. Although the misleading
English word ‘village’ was used to describe the baile, these clusters of
farmhouses were not classic villages, in that they lacked the service
functions of church, pub, school or shop. While the houses might
have adjacent individual vegetable gardens (garraí), they were
surrounded, on the best available patch of land, by a permanently
cultivated infield; a large open-field, without enclosures, with a
multiplicity of ‘strips’ separated by sods or stones, in which oats or
potatoes were grown. Each family used a variety of strips,
periodically redistributed, to ensure a fair division of all types of soil –
deep, shallow, sandy, boggy, dry.
Around the infield, and generally separated from it by a wall or
enclosure, was the outfield – poorer, more marginal, hilly or boggy
ground where an occasional reclamation might be made to grow
additional potatoes. The rest of the townland (or lease holding) was
treated as a commonage. Grazing was organised communally using
the old Gaelic qualitative measure (the ‘collop’ or ‘sum’) to define the
amount of stock that each family was allowed to have on the
pasturage so as not to overstock it. Occasionally, if the outfield
spread into distant mountain pastures, cattle might be moved there in
the summer, attended by young boys or girls who lived in temporary
huts. This was called the buaile (‘booley’), an Irish version of
transhumance, and was especially important for summer buttermaking. The importance of hill pastures is signaled in the wealth of
1
06–Clachans FINAL:01–Anvil.qxd
24/07/2012
16:04
Page 2
Kevin Whelan
hill nomenclature: there are twenty-nine different elements meaning
‘hill’ in the Irish language, and the importance of pastoral words –
bóthar, bawn, booley – should be noted.
The periodic redistribution of strips in the infield guaranteed an
environmental egalitarianism. This ‘rundale’ system, universal on the
poorer lands of the west of Ireland in the pre-Famine period, was a
viable functional adaptation to ecological and demographic
circumstances. The glacially-scoured environment of the west offered
limited arable land, a wet climate, stone-infested thin drift, impeded
drainage, wind exposure and excessive leaching. A collective infield
made sense where tiny patches of glacial drift were smeared on a
waste of bog or mountain, by maximising utilisation of the limited
arable possible on those precious drift pockets. Because it was
permanently cultivated, the infield was nurtured by any available
resources – manure, soot, sand, peat, sods, seaweed – which established
a balanced nutrient flow and maintained the all-important fertility.
Cattle were central to the ecology, as manure was the single most
significant infield input. The amount of cattle that one could graze
accordingly determined the size of one’s infield holding. Manure was
the key to the infield. In Mayo in 1836, the centrality of the cow to
the entire system was stressed: the grazing collops – the number of
heads of cattle that a mountain pasture could sustain – held by a
tenant determined the tillage collops.3 Grazing rights predetermined
(and pre-dated?) tillage ones. Oats cultivation left the stubble available
for grazing from November until March: stock then need to be moved
away from the new crops and rough hill grazing was ideal for this.
This is why the spread of wheat cultivation so strongly impacted on
rundale: unlike spring oats, wheat was sown in Autumn, so land
devoted to it could not be used for the all-important winter grazing.
Organic fertilisers remained pre-eminent. The dung heap beside the
door was not a monument to indolent slatternliness, as casual
ousiders thought, but of persevering industry. The demand for
manure intensified as the population grew, leading to a frantic search
for alternative sources – including lime and seaweed whose use
escalated throughout the eighteenth century. In the absence of
artificial fertilisers, natural ones were valuable. Seasonally renewed
seaweed was especially prized; within five miles of the coast, rundale
villages were noticeably swollen and more frequent, and the cearta
trá (seaweed collection rights) were so vital that a farmer was
described as ‘fear talamh is trá’ – ‘a man of land and strand’.4 The
fractal Atlantic shoreline was an ideal source for seaweed, seafood
and sea sand: a population surge occurred once it was realised that
the potato crop thrived on seaweed. As Ceasar Otway observed,
2
06–Clachans FINAL:01–Anvil.qxd
24/07/2012
16:04
Page 3
Clachans: landscape and life in Ireland before and after the Famine
seaweed ‘has wonderfully increased the growth of potatoes and
consequently of the population’.
Bogs also exerted a gravitational pull on settlement, given their
treasure trove of turf – the poor man’s fuel. With the potato and turf,
there was ready access to cheap food and fuel. Housing could also be
provided cheaply using readily available materials – stones for walls,
tempered clay for floors, ‘wreck’ timber for rafters, oats, bent grass or
reed for thatch. There were few formal barriers to early marriage and
family formation. As the Irish proverb expressed it: ‘Dá mbéadh prátai
is móin againn, bhéadh an saol ar a thóin againn’ (If we had potatoes
and turf, we could take life easy).
In concert, abundant fuel, cheap houses, the potato, the lazy bed
and rundale exerted a striking long-term settlement impact. They
facilitated the population shift from east to west, from good land to
poor land, from port hinterlands and valleys to bogs and mountains.
With the exception of some favoured locations (notably Corca
Dhuibhne and the Burren), the west of Ireland was not an area of old
settlement. New settlement gravitated to the Atlantic littoral, to the
soggy Connacht interior, and to mountain slopes everywhere.
The clachan debate
Ever since their popularisation by Estyn Evans, ‘clachans’ and rundale
have loomed large in Irish historical geography. In a philosophical
vein, John Andrews questioned Evans’s undocumented emphasis on
age-old continuities and the resort to ethnicity as an explanatory
device. His 1974 paper ‘The ethnic factor in Irish historical geography’
emphasized that the earliest known account of these features dates
from 1682 – Henry Piers’s description of County Westmeath. As for
rundale, the first use of the term – discovered by Desmond McCourt –
was in the eighteenth-century Abercorn estate papers; it was later
popularised by Arthur Young’s tour, and the Statistical Surveys of Irish
counties by the Royal Dublin Society.
Andrews’s ‘The geographical study of the Irish past’ (1977)
challenged the underpinnings of the conceptualisation of clachans, on
the grounds that it underplayed broad regional distinctions, neglected
careful differentiation of economic and class issues, was
chronologically imprecise, and insufficiently grounded in the archival
record.5 Evans, for example, argued that clachans were ‘archaeological
fossils preserving in an impoverished way the characteristics of
ancient Irish society’.6 His student, Desmond McCourt, opined:
Servile cultivators ... living in their clustered kin groups have
remained a constant element through centuries of change and
3
06–Clachans FINAL:01–Anvil.qxd
24/07/2012
16:04
Page 4
Kevin Whelan
conquest, irrespective of changing overlordships. Descendants
mostly of Neolithic farmers ... they continued under the Norman
yoke as the serflike betaghs ... located on their traditional lands
in clustered settlements which ... came through the vicissitudes
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to be mapped by the
Ordnance Surveyors in the middle of the nineteenth century.7
Andrews ascribed these habits of mind to a lapsarian mode of thought:
Many people in this country have felt themselves as exiles from
an Irish garden of Eden and regarded historical research as a
way of getting back into it. They have seen our modern culture,
including our cultural landscape, as a mixture of alien with
indigenous elements and they have longed to get behind that
heterogeneous façade into a world that was pure,
uncontaminated and freshly minted. They longed to find back
there at the far end of the historical rainbow, a crock of twentyfour carat genuine Irish gold. But since this prize could never be
recovered intact from any single historical source, it had to be
reconstructed – as an archaeologist uses broken fragments to
reconstruct a beaker or food vessel – except that in this case
every single fragment, nineteenth century, seventeenth century,
medieval or whatever (just as long as it was not obviously
English or Scottish, or Welsh or Norman, or Viking) had to be
assembled with all the other fragments, from all the other
periods to make one huge Irish geographical pot – what OtwayRuthven calls ‘the native system’. The idea of a single Irish
settlement type with its clachans and its rundale laid out as it
were for all eternity in some platonic heaven is a pervasive one.8
The conceptualisation of the nineteenth-century ‘clachan’ distribution
as being residual derives from an analogical argument with the
distribution of Irish speaking, an indisputable residual. This
residualism did not imply that all western traits were necessarily of
high antiquity, as the example of the potato and the donkey instantly
makes clear. Behind the assumption of age-old antiquity lurks the
Foxite Highland/Lowland model,9 and behind that again, the spectre
of environmental determinism, where, as in Ellen Semple’s
formulation, islands were invariably repositories of archaisms and
cultural impoverishment.10
A more historicised and source-based approach reveals a different
pattern. In 1773, Bernard Scalé mapped in detail 12,800 acres on the
Devonshire estate at Lismore in County Waterford. The seventy
4
06–Clachans FINAL:01–Anvil.qxd
24/07/2012
16:04
Page 5
Clachans: landscape and life in Ireland before and after the Famine
townlands mapped in 1773 offered a cross-section across the
Knockmealdown mountains and the Blackwater valley. Close scrutiny
of the subsequent settlement history is possible by examining the
1841 first edition Ordnance Survey maps.11 West Waterford contained
two of the island’s principal environments: a rich, drift-plastered
limestone lowland in the Bride and Blackwater valleys (‘the vale of
Lismore’) and poorer sandstone uplands on the southern flanks of the
Knockmealdowns, with a high but reclaimable bench or terrace
between 400-800 feet. In 1773, the limestone valley floor had farmers
with English names who held individual leases and inhabited stone
farmhouses rather than mud cabins. Above 500 feet, on the mountain
slopes, farmers had Gaelic names, held smaller farms in partnership
leases, exhibited kin-group affiliations and lived in cabin clusters. The
mid-seventeenth-century Civil Survey demonstrated that the lowland
area was then settled, but that the area above 400 feet was empty.
Between 1773 and 1841, rural dwelling houses increased five times
as fast on the lowlands. On the upland, the density of rural dwelling
houses per unit area of enclosed farmland in 1841 was nearly half as
large again as on the lowlands, despite the poorer fertility. The
initiation of ‘clachans’ was concentrated in the upland region. Rapid
population growth was fostered on the poorer land that was repellent
to the commercial farmer. This expansion was facilitated by the
spread of roads, which allowed lime to be applied to the sour
uplands: lime kilns increased from three in 1773 to over one hundred
in 1841. The only land available for rundalisation and clachans was
that which substantial tenants declined to rent. A sharp divide often
separated zones with single leases and partnership leases.
Commenting on neighbouring County Kilkenny in 1802, Tighe
observed a hill/lowland distinction: ‘In the hilly district are many
small scattered villages composed of farmhouses; in the wheat and
dairy districts, the population is usually in single houses’.12
In 1826, Charles Coote described 3,000 acres in commonage in the
‘mountainous district’ (the Monavullagh mountains) of the parishes of
Seskinan and Mothel in County Waterford. This commonage was
availed of for rearing young cattle and for turbary, but Coote
complained that it was ‘greatly abused by paring and skinning of the
surface sod’. He noted that these areas attracted a ‘considerable
population in its vicinity’.
In the upper reaches of this district, the cottagers reside together,
each house contiguous to his neighbours, altho’ their lands may
be at a distance. These groups of houses are called villages. This
custom is very prevalent throughout the higher grounds in this
5
06–Clachans FINAL:01–Anvil.qxd
24/07/2012
16:04
Page 6
Kevin Whelan
county. No doubt its origin was for the sake of mutual security
and may yet be considered necessary in some places. Was this
mountain to be set in farms divided, I think it is very probable
the cottagers would prefer erecting a village until they would
have their farms much enclosed and reclaimed.13
The Devonshire agent commented on these upland areas: ‘I am
obliged to be governed by the number I find on the land’ – direct
supervision was not feasible in this remote area. The agent used the
mountain fringe as a safety value, placing surplus tenants there. His
other option was the riskier one of eviction and rigorously preventing
subdivision of rundale shares – a strategy certain to spawn a
determined resistance.
‘Subdivision’ clachans tended to have restricted surnames while
‘colonisation’ clachans exhibit a variety of surnames. Displaced
tenants moved to other upland areas of south-east Ireland, above the
500 foot contour, which were not regarded as part of any estate:
Forth Mountain in Wexford and Slieve Grine in Waterford are good
examples. Early nineteenth-century squatting is observable on these
mountains, with squatters sometimes moving over long distances. We
can recognise these areas because they lack traces of clachan
organization, and exhibit instead an incremental adventitious straggle
of cabins. This demographic pile-up also occurred on the functional
equivalent of these poor lands in bog-free lowland areas – the
commons of the east of Ireland. Here, freed of the constraints of
landlord control, squatters colonised the commons in the late
eighteenth century, creating islands of concentrated poverty, as at
Duleek, Navan, Forth Mountain, Tipperkevin, Tirmoghan, Ballymore
Eustace, Kildare, Broadleas, Rathnew, and Garristown.14 These
commons provided laboratory conditions for examining settlement
development where the landlord leash was loosened.
These are examples of an overall Irish trend in the pre-Famine
period – good farmland remained more stable demographically than
the marginal land (hill, mountain, bog) surrounding it. Pre-Famine
population soared where there was land available for it to grow, and
where institutional and social controls (preventive checks) were
weakest. This underpins the Irish population paradox: the fastest
growth was on the poorest lands which developed the heaviest
densities, and small, not large, farms were subdivided. These
conclusions for the Munster ridge and valley region have been
replicated by later studies of similar environments.15
Clachans functioned in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries as reclamation units, pushing the settlement limits from 500
6
06–Clachans FINAL:01–Anvil.qxd
24/07/2012
16:04
Page 7
Clachans: landscape and life in Ireland before and after the Famine
feet (1650) to 800 feet (1840).16 Upland was repulsive to large
commercial farmers, and nurtured rundale because there was nothing
else productive to do with it. In 1822, in southern and western
Ireland, ‘the plains, hills and the valleys are for the most part
inhabited by cattle, the bogs and mountains by men’.17 As early as
1729, Arthur Dobbs had noted the pressure on partnership ’villages’
from commercial graziers:
from gentlemen receiving or dismissing whole villages of native
Irish at once; their houses or cabins being generally made of
earth or drystone, there is little difference in the expence or time
employed in erecting or demolishing them; and this is done just
as gentlemen incline to break up their lands and improve them
in tillage, or as they lay them down under grass and enlarge their
sheep walks and grazing farms; and by this means, the poor,
who remove with little trouble, are turned adrift and must
remove to some other place where they can get employment.18
Landlords allowed rundale villages to sprout in marginal areas of their
estates because they recognised the rent-paying efficiency of
partnership leases and the unrivalled ability of hard-working small
farmers to reclaim land cheaply. In a context where technology and
capital were limited but labour was unrestricted, hand tool cultivation
(spade, sickle, scythe) and the garden-like technique of iomairí (lazy
beds) was the most effective reclamation agent. Rundale villages
acted as a mobile pioneer fringe: the spade and the spud conquered
the contours in an island where one-third of the land surface was
uncultivated. These clachans grew in different ways, such as the
subdivision of single holdings,19 partnership leases, or even planned
schemes (as in Mayo and Galway when the ‘Ultachs’ – displaced
Northern Catholics – arrived in the 1790s).
Partnership leases were a form of risk reduction for both landlord
and tenant. Given the meagre resources of mountain and bog, the
landlord preferred co-operation as a managerial device – communal
arrangements for grazing rough pastures, for turbary rights, and for
collection of seaweed reduced administrative costs, saved time and
avoided friction. Poor mountain land repelled large commercialised
tenants and nurtured ‘clachans’ and rundale because landlords could
not attract viable commercial tenants for them. For tenants,
partnership leases allowed them to compete with graziers, to pool
resources like horses, and to manage time-sensitive tasks like hay and
turf-making communally on the meitheal system.20 Co-operative
7
06–Clachans FINAL:01–Anvil.qxd
24/07/2012
16:04
Page 8
Kevin Whelan
management, agreed land use and a joint labour force for certain
tasks were intelligent responses to living in a fragile environment.
This was not ‘primitive communism’: reciprocity not altruism was the
basis of the system.21
However old the tradition of ‘clachan’ settlement, their distribution
in the first edition Ordnance Survey map mainly shows them in
marginal situations, in areas of recent rapid population growth. This
was not a residual distribution, but the most recent layer added to the
Irish settlement system. The McCourt/Evans picture is of a continuous
process of rise and fall, rather than of a once-off rise and fall,
mimicking the exceptional demographic curve between 1600 and
1900. Runaway population growth in the pre-Famine period swelled
the ‘clachans’, transforming them into poverty traps, fractious, insanitary
and unmanageable rural slums. The Famine decimated them.
The Culture of the Clachans
The clachan form should be regarded as a structure of feeling, a
materialisation of cultural values in landscape form.22 Social
solidarities were embedded in tightly woven webs anchored on a
territorial template, which functioned as a storage system for an
inherited repertoire of environmental, social and cultural strategies.
The cultural landscape acted as an archive of material solutions to
recurrent problems. Placenames, considered as narrative triggers,
offered a memory system: the single townland of Cill Ghalligán in
Erris in Mayo contained almost one thousand place names, each with
its micro-narrative attached.23
The cultural moulds of the ‘baile’ system of settlement were
succinctly expressed in the proverb ‘Is ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann
na daoine’. ‘Villages’ in Galway led ‘to such strong attachments,
generally strengthened by intermarriages, that though they may have
some bickering with each other, they will, right or wrong, keep their
companions’.24 In this intimate face-to-face world, communication
skills were highly valued, and a vibrant oral culture was encouraged –
singing, dancing and storytelling were the prized art forms. Vivacity,
gaiety and hospitality were constantly noted as the defining qualities
of this society by pre-Famine visitors. An incident from Mayo in the
1830s illustrates this. A deserted child in the Ballina area passed by
consent from house to house, being looked after for a month at each
in turn ‘as they had agreed among themselves, until it came to a
married couple, who, having no children, adopted it and have since
reared it as their own’.25
Leases to partnership tenants in the pre-Famine period were generally
assigned on a townland basis to one named head tenant, who
8
06–Clachans FINAL:01–Anvil.qxd
24/07/2012
16:04
Page 9
Clachans: landscape and life in Ireland before and after the Famine
subsequently allocated responsibilities within a rundale system.26 In a
remarkable passage that casts considerable retrospective light on the
system, Francis Knox-Gore described the collapse of the ‘village’
system in County Mayo during the Famine:
Many of the persons who went were persons holding in common,
holding a village together. Some of these persons had large
holdings, though they were not strictly speaking, separate from
the rest ... The land was let very often to one individual (a
gentleman – middleman), that man let to three or four persons of
more capital than the ordinary run of farmers, and these again
allowed persons to come in, holding less and less quantities, till
there was a descent of the holding from a considerable one, in a
village to a very small one. The moment the potato disease
came, these wealthier people went away, leaving the minor
persons on the land ... Compared with the poorest class of
people that we have, they were capitalists. The migrants of 184647 were of the farming class and they themselves helped to
cultivate the ground. The first batch who went away were
people who had a good deal of means, £200, £100, £70 or that
sort of thing.27
Contrary to the received image, the typical rundale settlement could
be internally stratified, and that stratification was an integral, indeed
ordering, principle. However, the Famine and selective post-Famine
emigration thinned and homogenised these settlements, transforming
its post-Famine manifestation. Over-reliance on later fieldwork has
conferred a deceptively homogenous, egalitarian and democratic
flavour on the rundale village. Knox-Gore’s commentary also clarifies
the origins of the Rí (king) figure found in many of these
communities – the airgead-rí (money-king), ‘headman’, or ‘maor’ – as
described by John O’Donovan.28 The Rí in origins was the headtenant, responsible for transactions with the landlord and for the
harmonious allocation of sub-rents and duties: his other functions –
social, cultural – accreted around, and derived from, this primary one.
This explains the procedure of a coastguard officer distributing
oatmeal in County Mayo in 1831 who ‘called the heads of the
respective villages before me’ to arrange it.29
The Famine impact
Landlords and agents welcomed the Famine as an inducement to
agrarian modernisation by ridding their estates of a pauper tenantry,
9
06–Clachans FINAL:01–Anvil.qxd
24/07/2012
16:04
Page 10
Kevin Whelan
whose tenacious grip on the land was fatally loosened by the blight.
The agent on the MacDonnell estate, Charles Hamilton, spelled out
the implications of the blight for the tenantry:
The sudden and unexpected failure of the potato crop has
deprived most of the cottiers and small tenants of their usual
food, and the only way in which it is possible for them to gain
the means of living, is by earning wages in money and buying
food in the market.30
As well as killing the cottier system, the Famine would also eliminate
the micro-farmer.
It will now be impossible for a man to subsist upon a three or four
acre farm without getting work, and if he be at work he cannot
cultivate his farm. The only chance of the country being restored to
a state of prosperity, is that as many as can be constantly and
profitably employed by the farmers, should keep their houses with
gardens not exceeding one acre; and that those who cannot be
profitably employed there, should emigrate to America, where
there is abundant room for them to earn their livelihood.31
On the Portora school-lands in Fermanagh, the agent James Benison
suggested that the estate should either evict these pauper tenants, or
pay them a small consideration to relinquish their holdings: ‘The
present opportunity should not be passed by: for should the potato,
of which there is a very large and early planting this year, succeed,
they will cling to the soil with the same tenacity as formerly’. In the
long run, those clearances would accelerate a process that he had
already noted as being underway on the estate in 1848:
Great changes have been effected, all verging towards a
consolidation of farms, which, in my humble opinion, is the first
step towards the improvement of this property; and this being
carried out generally by the removal of the redundant pauper
population, a better and more productive system of tillage will
necessarily follow; so that by degrees, the farms being enlarged,
and each tenant living on his own (not joint property) and liable
for his own rent, their condition would be improved, and the
future payment of rent rendered less doubtful.32
At Ballinruane (near Ballingarry) in County Limerick, the agricultural
expert John Stewart reported:
10
06–Clachans FINAL:01–Anvil.qxd
24/07/2012
16:04
Page 11
Clachans: landscape and life in Ireland before and after the Famine
I walked every farm on the estate, and I must say I never walked
over a more exhausted tract of land … According to my
calculations there are only 5 acres of pastureland for every 20
acres of tillage, so that some of the tenants that hold from 20 to
30 acres of land have only two cows & a horse and no feeding
for them only a little bad hay, and some tenants on the estate
have up to 10 acres of ground & have neither cow nor horse,
and all their land in tillage; now how is it possible that land tilled
to that degree for many years back can be otherwise than in a
very exhausted state. What little manure they gave the ground
was of no good to it longer than the first year, the ground being
so wet.33
These attitudes influenced the government’s decision to import maize
(Indian corn) as the preferred relief food. Maize could not be grown
in Ireland and therefore would have to become a purchased food.
This by itself would eliminate the potato wage that fuelled the cottier
system (the source of cheap labour), curtailing agrarian
modernisation. Farmers would now be forced to pay their labourers
in cash rather than in kind (potatoes), and perforce become more
efficient. Eliminating the potato would liquidate the western microfarmer, another pool of endemic poverty and over-population.
The change from an idle, barbarous, isolated potato cultivation,
to corn cultivation, which frees industry, and binds together
employer and employee in mutually beneficial relations ...
requires capital and a new class of men.34
As well as eliminating the potato and with it the cottier labourer, the
view also developed that it was necessary to wipe out the entire
system of social and agrarian organisation in the west of Ireland,
based on clachans and rundale. The Famine unleashed an onslaught
on the rundale and clachan system, in the belief that only individual
farms would encourage initiative and self-reliance. Clachans should
be dispersed to break the cultural moulds that sustained mutual aid
and thereby fostered a debilitating dependency. Lord George Hill
excoriated the negative effects of the clachans:
Their houses, too, were in clusters, another great evil:
particularly as it so much tended to the spread of fever and other
infectious diseases: in addition to which, the woman’s time was
taken up in wrangling and scolding, the packed state of the little
community affording copious sources of civil war: and, worse
than all, the men were generally far away from their farms.35
11
06–Clachans FINAL:01–Anvil.qxd
24/07/2012
16:04
Page 12
Kevin Whelan
Writing from the same area – Gweedore in north-west Donegal – the
parish priest Hugh McFaden described the inhabitants as: ‘almost all
on an equality. The great majority hold but a cow’s grass, as it is
termed, which average one acre of tilled ground’.36 He then
discussed these ‘scrapholders’: ‘These scrapholders, who mainly lived
and depended upon the potato from the facility of producing that
root by sea manure, are, now that the potato is gone, reduced to the
greatest extremity of destitution’.37 Lord George Hill did not share
McFaden’s concern:
The Irish people have profited much by the Famine, the lesson
was severe; but so rooted were they in their old prejudices and
old ways, that no teacher could have induced them to make the
changes which this visitation of Divine Providence has brought
about, both in their habits of life and in their modes of
agriculture. The use of money for buying food is now better
understood, for when the potato crop flourished it was only
hoarded for the purchase of land, and but grudgingly expended
in either food or clothing; rags and poor living being more a
fashion than a necessity, and therefore not to be regarded as real
indications of poverty. Emigrating – for the wish of doing better
elsewhere – and not the Famine, has thinned the population in
this part of the country.38
These ‘scrapholders’ – the rundale farmers – received no sympathy,
and were dismissed as so much social faeces. William Gregory ‘did
not see of what use such small farmers could be’39 and The Times
praised the Poor Law Act of mid-1847 because it was designed ‘to
compass indirectly the destruction of very small holdings and to
convert the cottier, who is nicknamed a farmer and who starves on a
cow’s grass, into a labourer subsisting on competent wages’.40
Clarendon, the Lord Lieutenant, argued the necessity for ‘depletion’
(wholesale emigration) as the sole cure for the condition of Connaught:
I would sweep Connaught clean and turn in upon it new men
and English money just as one would to Australia or any freshly
discovered Colony – the nearer one can get to that the more
probable will be the solution to the ‘Irish Problem’.41
Behind these conceptions lay the colonial fantasy of the tabula rasa –
a clean Irish state on which the new English values could be legibly
inscribed. Spenser and Petty were earlier proponents of this strategy.42
12
06–Clachans FINAL:01–Anvil.qxd
24/07/2012
16:04
Page 13
Clachans: landscape and life in Ireland before and after the Famine
Horizontal, democratic structures were anathema to a political and
economic system which fetished hierarchy. The whole agrarian mess
should now be swept away as too much junk, the tangible
embodiment of the arrears column in the double entry book-keeping
utilised in the landlords’ rentals. The policy arms to this scenario were
the £4 rating clause (which made landlords responsible for the rates
on all holdings valued at under £4 – in effect, the majority of western
small holdings), and the Gregory quarter-acre clause, which refused
relief to anyone holding more than that amount.
By legally rendering the small farmers of the west a parasitic
encumbrance on landlord property, these two clauses in malign
concert became a clearance charter, leading to massive eviction in the
west of Ireland, especially in the poorest counties of Clare, Mayo,
Galway and Kerry. One quarter of a million people were formally
evicted between 1849 and 1854 alone (after the worst was over) and
as many as half a million people were affected.43
The cultural impact
The Famine opened a cultural chasm:
Tá scamall éigin ós cionn na hÉireann
Nár fhan dúil i gcéilliócht ag fear ná ag mnaoi;
Ní aithníonn éinne des na daoine a chéile
Is tá an suan céanna ar gach uile ní
Ní miste spéirbhean bheith amuigh go déanach
Níor fhan aon tréine ins an fir a bhí
Níl ceol in aon áit ná suim ina dhéanamh,
Is ní aithním glao cheart ag bean chun bídh.
There is a pall over Ireland
that has stifled sociability in every man and woman
People no longer salute one another
and the same apathy affects everything.
There is no fear of the finest-looking woman being out late
because the young men have lost their spark.
There is no music or interest in it anywhere
nor any woman issuing a hearty invitation to a meal.44
William Wilde reported from Connacht on the social dissolution inflicted
by the Famine:
The closest ties of kindred were dissolved; the most ancient and
long-cherished usages of the people were disregarded; food the
13
06–Clachans FINAL:01–Anvil.qxd
24/07/2012
16:04
Page 14
Kevin Whelan
most revolting to human palates was eagerly devoured; the once
proverbial gaiety and lightheartedness of the peasant people
seemed to have vanished ... the mind likewise becomes
darkened, the feelings callous, blunted, and apathetic.45
Hugh Dorian described similar effects in County Donegal:
No more friendly meetings at the neighbour’s houses in the
afternoons, no gatherings on the hillsides on Sundays, no song,
no merry laugh of the maiden. Not only were the human beings
silent and lonely, but the brute creatures also, for not the bark of
a dog or the crowing of a cock was to be heard as these animals
had nearly all disappeared ... In a very short time, there was
nothing but stillness, a mournful silence in the villages; in the
cottages grim poverty and emaciated faces showing all the signs
of hardships. The musicians of all and every description
disappeared.46
The post-Famine changes impacted profoundly on clachan culture.
Pre-Famine, each inhabitant was, in the evocative phrase, ‘comharsa
bhéal doraís’ – ‘a front door neighbour’. Before the cataclysm, Carna
in Connemara was full of people: ‘bhíodar ann chomh gar dhá chéile
go mbíodh fir ag comhrá ó theach go teach ann gan thiocht go doras
féin (‘people lived so close to one another that men would chat from
house to house without ever coming to the door)’47. From Donegal,
another commentator noted the social consequences of breaking up
the clachans:
Before the landlords began to scatter the villages and every
tenant had to build his own house on his own land, there were
more facilities for the people congregating together and
perpetuating the old stories by their continued rehearsal. A dullness
pervades country life now, there is scarcely a village to be seen
anywhere, and of course the less people, the more dullness.48
George Hill commented on the extreme reluctance to abandon the
clachans:
The pleasure the people feel in assembling the chatting together
made them consider the removal of the houses, from the clusters
or hamlets in which they were generally built to the separate
farms, a great grievance, and some even were persuaded that
these lonely dwellings would entail expense upon them, as the
14
06–Clachans FINAL:01–Anvil.qxd
24/07/2012
16:04
Page 15
Clachans: landscape and life in Ireland before and after the Famine
following story will show. The agent having observed to a tenant
that one of these settlers appeared to be doing much better since
he had removed from the village, as he could now attend more
closely to his farm instead of idling and gossiping with his
neighbours, was told that he was much mistaken, and that man
‘could not stand it very long on account of the expense, as he
was obliged to keep a servant maid just to talk to his wife’.49
As early as 1845, some landlords implemented this new landscape
policy, including Hill at Gweedore and Lord Leitrim at Milford, both
in Donegal. A contemporary description catches the new system
being implemented on the Leitrim estate:
The country is being divided, into long straight farms, by long
straight fences, running up to the mountains, the object being to
give each farmer a pretty equal division of good and bad land, and
to oblige him to reside on his farm. Formerly the land was divided
by rundale, as it is called; a dozen people possessed alternate
furrows in the same field, something similar to the ridge and
furrow system in England on an extended scale. The system was
necessarily attended with every evil, and improvement precluded.50
The linearisation of landscape created ladder farms over the west of
Ireland, obliterating the earlier informal network of the rundale
system. By contrast, the Irish poor inhabited a vernacular landscape
embodying a moral and historical rather than a legal relationship
between land and people. They inhabited a world of family,
community and memory, in which invisible but powerful filaments of
tradition, kinship and occupation linked them to a living not a legal
landscape. The landlord’s ‘paper and parchment’ (James Fintan Lalor)
claim did not supersede the tenant’s prior moral claim, even if
aggressively backed by the law and coercion.51
The Famine opened a chasm between landlord and tenant, exposing
the asymmetrical relationships between eight thousand landlords and
eight million tenants. The Famine clearances in Ireland should be
seen as equivalent in their impact to the enclosure movement in
England and the eighteenth-century Highland clearances – all three
were assaults on the poor and on alternative cultural formations,
carried out by the gentry, backed by the coercive power of the state,
and implemented in the name of ‘progress’. Demonstrating the broad
reach of these tropes, they were equally espoused by radicals as by
conservatives, with both Marx and Engels viewing the Irish through
their prism.52 As the Famine raged in 1847, The Times congratulated
15
06–Clachans FINAL:01–Anvil.qxd
24/07/2012
16:04
Page 16
Kevin Whelan
itself and its readers on living in a period when ‘Time is ever improving
on the past’.53
Clachans and Celticism
In the post-Famine period, as racial categories became hard-wired, an
emerging Celticism influenced scientific thought. A version of
Celticism emerged to mirror Orientalism – and with a similarly
reductive binary scheme of past versus future, tradition versus
modernity, conquered versus conqueror, subjective versus objective,
feminine versus masculine. Crucially, agency was assigned only to the
second term of the binary: the first was destined for passivity or the
dustbin of history. In his anthropological essay of 1855, ‘The race
question in Ireland’, J. W. Jackson formulated a ‘scientific’ basis for
the negroid characteristic of the Irish Celts, including ‘the large
remnant of prognathism, the imperfect nasal development and other
indications of organic rudeness and imperfection attaching to large
sections of the peasantry’. He concluded that these Irish Celts were a
primitive racial remnant, preserved by their insular remoteness:
It stood out of the highway of events, and so did not partake of
the expansion and invigoration which [the Romans] have
communicated to the remainder of Christendom. It was a moral
fossil, like India, the only difference being that India is a
civilised, while Ireland is a barbarous fossil, but both these
extremities of the Caucasian area have been so shut out from the
influence of passing events during the whole historic period, that
they now present us with the sad spectacle of at least partial
paralysis in all the functions of their higher life, the principal
evidence of returning vitality which they have yet afforded being
rather strong convulsions, painful to themselves and troublesome
to their nurse.54
While the Famine (‘strong convulsions’) might be painful to the Irish
patient and troublesome to their British nurse, it merely followed the
iron dictates of racial logic: inferior aboriginal races would
everywhere be ousted by superior civilised colonisers. Colonisation
projects gave a practical basis to this moral law of nature: the English
in Ireland were merely implementing the ‘carrying out of a great
racial law’. A stark conclusion was unavoidable:
Although calmly expressed, this is a terribly cruel utterance. But
what if it be the truth? Euphemistic nonsense and beneficent
16
06–Clachans FINAL:01–Anvil.qxd
24/07/2012
16:04
Page 17
Clachans: landscape and life in Ireland before and after the Famine
platitudes will not alter the laws of Nature, which have to be
fulfilled under ever-increasing penalties, of which some are
being paid by Ireland at the present moment.55
The operation of this mindset can be readily demonstrated by even
the most cursory accumulation of archival descriptions of the clachan.
Jonathan Binns described Tonabrocky, near Rahoon, on the edge of
Galway in 1835:
Tonabrucky is comprised of small thatched cabins on the side of
the steep hill of Crookanabrucky, and is a curious village. The
street is exceedingly abrupt, and serves the double purpose of a
road and the bed of a riotous torrent. The inclosures on the
mountainside contain each only a few perches, and are fenced
by the industry of the inhabitants at their own expense. The
walls are five or six feet high, and notwithstanding their great
extent, considerable numbers of stones which previously
encumbered the ground are unappropriated, and are piled in tall
heaps in the little paddocks. At a short distance, the village and
the surrounding enclosures resemble a honeycomb, nor is there
a tree, hedge, or shrub visible in the neighbourhood.56
Thomas Campbell Foster described the morphology of Carrowmore
clachan in 1846:
Cottages in a cluster, without the slightest attempt at regularity,
and without street or lane, crooked passages in and out between
the cottages being the only means of communication with one
another; the only uniformity being that every cottage had a filthy
cesspool and dunghill close to the door – the tenants were
perpetually squabbling and fighting with one another.57
He also described Menlough near Galway:
There is no church or chapel in the village; no schoolmaster or
doctor, and no magistrate, though the population is as large as
that of many an English town. The way through the village is the
most crooked, as well as the most narrow and dirty, lane that
can be conceived. There is no row of houses or anything
approaching to a row, but each cottage is stuck independently
by itself, and always at an acute, obtuse, or right angle, to the
next cottage as the case may be. The irregularity is curious; there
17
06–Clachans FINAL:01–Anvil.qxd
24/07/2012
16:04
Page 18
Kevin Whelan
are no two cottages in a line, or of the same size, dimension, or
build. The Irish mind has here, without obstruction or
instruction, fully developed itself. As this is the largest village I
ever saw, so it is the poorest, the worst built, the most strangely
irregular, and the most completely without head or centre, or
market or church, or school, of any village I ever was in. It is an
overgrown democracy. No man is better or richer than his
neighbour in it. It is in fact, an Irish rundale village.58
Henry Coulter described the ‘rundale village’ of Derrycoosh, near
Castlebar, in 1862:
The cottages are built most irregularly, here, there, and
everywhere – some parallel with the road, others at right angles
with it. The walls are black, green, and brown – in short, every
colour but white; there is scarcely a clean thatch to be seen;
every cabin has its pond of liquid and its heap of solid manure
directly opposite and within a few feet of the door; the road
through the village is ankle deep in mud; and pigs, poultry, and
children are to be seen running about in every direction. Words
fail to convey an adequate idea of the filthy and disorderly
appearance which this village presents.59
The Oxford educationalist, William Jack, described Dooagh in Achill:
It is one of the most curious aggregations of miserable huts I
have ever seen. Altogether, taking in a dozen houses which
straggled a little towards the outskirts, there were 141 huddled
close, very much as if they had been shaken out of a bag, and
had lain as they fell. There was scarcely anything that could be
called a street, and a stranger set down in the middle of the
village would have found it difficult to get out again. The roofs
rise from walls four or five feet high, built up out of a few
irregular big stones, and the floor is mostly the natural soil. The
people, however, are not so badly off as the miserable look of
their dwellings would lead one to suppose. Most of them rent
two little plots of ground, one in the immediate neighbourhood,
and one on the hill-side, about two miles away – the one for
early and the other for late sowing – and they migrate to the
latter for three or four weeks in the summer or autumn. The sea
comes up to their doors, and if they had nets or organisation, no
doubt they could not fail to make it produce as much as the
land. They form a colony, which appears almost autochthonous,
18
06–Clachans FINAL:01–Anvil.qxd
24/07/2012
16:04
Page 19
Clachans: landscape and life in Ireland before and after the Famine
the members of which find it so difficult to distinguish each
other that they are compelled to resort to patronymics, and
similar makeshifts.60
Even into the early twentieth century, these tropes survived, as in this
1906 description of Dooagh:
The majority of the rude huts or cabins composing Dooagh lie in
a cluster on the right bank of a bubbling trout stream, near its
entrance over the rocks into the sea. They seemed at some time,
very long ago, to have been promiscuously thrown out of a
gigantic pepper-box on the strand, so extraordinary higgledypiggledy placed are they. Being all of a similar singular style of
architecture and size, it is not easy to find one’s way about
amongst them.61
If we consider these descriptions as a whole, we can see that English
commentators were disoriented in the presence of a horizontal rather
than a hierarchical landscape, one that concealed rather than revealed
social distinctions. For them, these settlements were illegible; their
chaos signified the lack of a settled society. Their uniformity
connoted a disturbing democracy, the absence of hierarchical
organisation. By contrast, these writers celebrated a humanised
landscape in England, conceived of as the symbiosis of the natural
and the social. George Eliot’s Adam Bede provides the following
anatomy of a characteristic English village:
The Green lay at the extremity of the village, and from it the road
branched off in two directions, one leading farther up the hill by
the church, and the other winding gently down towards the
valley. On the side of the Green that led towards the church, the
broken line of thatched cottages was continued nearly to the
churchyard gate; but on the opposite north-western side, there
was nothing to obstruct the view of gently swelling meadow, and
wooded valley, and dark masses of distant hill. This road wound
under the shelter of woods, or up swelling hills, muffled with
hedgerows and long meadow-grass and thick corn; and where at
every turn he came upon some fine old country-seat nestled in
the valley or crowning the slope, some homestead with its long
length of barn and its cluster of golden ricks, some grey steeple
looking out from a pretty confusion of trees and thatch and dark
red tiles. And directly below them the eye rested on a more
advanced line of hanging woods ... Then came the valley, where
19
06–Clachans FINAL:01–Anvil.qxd
24/07/2012
16:04
Page 20
Kevin Whelan
the woods grew thicker, as if they had rolled down and hurried
together from the patches left smooth on the slope, that they
might take the better care of the tall mansion which lifted its
parapets and sent its faint blue summer smoke among them.62
Eliot visualises the village from above, as if viewing a carefully
composed landscape painting. The very trajectory of her description
lovingly mimics the social hierarchy, panning from the Green, to the
village, to the church, before reposing finally on the mansion as the
culminating point. Nature itself becomes complicit with social
divisions, eliding the distinction between nature and culture.
Conclusion
These arguments show how nineteenth-century anthropology conceived
of itself as a science of disappearing societies. The lethal relationship
among knowledge, domination and destruction was nakedly paraded, a
relationship that deepened after the sensational success of Darwin’s On
the origins of the species (1859), which grounded these human
observations in a relentlessly competitive natural world – ‘nature red in
tooth and claw’. As one anthropologist argued in 1881, ‘At the very
instance [primitive societies] become known to us, they are doomed’.63
The high imperial culture surveys the low life below, with the
inexorable confidence of Victorian science. Even at its most
seemingly transparent, the discourse obscures the truth of ordinary
lives; moral and political judgments were embedded everywhere in
ethnographic description. Rather than ‘tradition’64 being a retarded
stage on the inevitable evolutionary path to the modern state, or a
cultural value which confer authenticity on ‘natural’ communities,
tradition is present, interactive and dynamic. Those who seek an
unchanging ‘pure’ traditional past – static, homogenous, functionally
integrated – are constantly confounded by its impurities and its
mutability. A search for the genetic origins of the clachan in racial
stereotypes is doomed to failure.
References
1. Terminology remains a vexed issue here. The term clachan is an Ulster dialect
word borrowed from Lowlands Scots via Scots Gaelic. It came to Ulster with the
seventeenth-century settlers. P. Robinson, ‘The use of the term “clachan” in
Ulster’ in Ulster Folk Life, 37 (1991), pp 30-7. P. Flatrès, ‘L’Habitat agricole
aggloméré en Irlande’ in Chronique Géographique des Pays Celtes (1954), pp
112-24. Evans‘s 1930s fieldwork was in County Donegal, where he presumably
encountered the word. E. Estyn Evans, ‘Some survivals of the Irish openfield
system’ in Geography, 24 (1939), pp 24-36.
20
06–Clachans FINAL:01–Anvil.qxd
24/07/2012
16:04
Page 21
Clachans: landscape and life in Ireland before and after the Famine
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
Caesar Otway, (Dublin, 1839), p. 408.
P. Knight, Erris in the Irish highlands (Dublin, 1836), p. 46.
H. Becker, Seaweed memories. In the jaws of the sea (Dublin, 2000).
J. H. Andrews, ‘The geographical study of the Irish past’ (unpublished paper,
1977). Andrews subsequently combed twenty-six Irish local and regional maps
from 1540-1620 for evidence of early but documented nucleation. Of 180
clustered settlements shown, the leading categories were ‘true’ clusters
consisting solely of cabins (79-48%), clusters attached to a large house (18%), to
a castle (28-17%) and to a church (20-11%). In the case of the identifiable true
clusters, no modern clachan can be found in the townlands that still bear these
names, showing how difficult it us to demonstrate in situ continuity for
‘clachans’. J. H. Andrews ‘The mapping of Ireland’s cultural landscape 15501630’ in P. Duffy, D. Edwards & E. Fitzpatrick (eds), Gaelic Ireland c.12501650: land lordship and settlement (Dublin, 2000), pp 153-80.
Evans, ‘Survivals of the Irish openfield system’, p. 26.
D. McCourt, ‘The dynamic quality of Irish rural settlement’ in R. Buchanan, E. Jones
& D. McCourt (eds), Man and his habitat (London, 1971), pp 126-64.
J. H. Andrews, The openfield system and associated settlements in pre-enclosure
Ireland (unpublished paper, 1977).
C. Fox, The Personality of Britain (1932) emphasised the difference between
upland and lowland Britain. The regions (Scotland, Cumbria, Northumberland,
Durham Pennines, Wales, Devon, Cornwall) of the north and west of the ‘British
Isles’ are characterized by different kinds of archaeology to those found in the
south and east. This is partly a product of geography, but this had an effect on
the human populations who absorbed new ideas rather than allowed them to
be imposed, and where populations fused rather than experienced replacement.
Lowland zone (south-east and the English midlands) had ideas imposed on
them because of their proximity to the European mainland and tended to be
replaced by migrations and colonisation.
E. Semple, Influences of geographical environment (New York, 1911), pp 409-72.
J. H. Andrews, Changes in the rural landscape of late eighteenth and early
nineteenth-century Ireland: an example from County Waterford (unpublished
paper, 1970).
W. Tighe, Statistical observations relative to the county of Kilkenny made in
1800 and 1801 (Dublin, 1802). An essential discussion is J. Burtchaell, ‘The
south Kilkenny farm villages’ in W. Smyth and K. Whelan (eds), Common
ground (Cork, 1988), pp 110-23.
Charles Coote, ‘A report on the present state of that part of the property of Lord
Cremorne, situate in the parishes of Coligan, Kilgobbnet, Fews or Fuse, and
Shishkeeran or Shishkeenan in the barony of Decies Without Drum, as also in
the parish of Templemichael and barony of Coshmore and Coshbride, all in the
county of Waterford with observations on the localities and capabilities of the
estate, from a minute inspection taken in the autumn of 1826’, Dartry Papers,
NLI, uncatalogued.
Rocque’s 1760 map depicted squatter-like cabins, lined up on the commons’
edge ‘like runners alert for the starting signal’. The resulting poverty was
sometimes graphically illustrated – as in the mud cabins shown on Duleek
commons as opposed to the stone houses in the nearby town. See also the
1679-1681 Survey of Naas Commons, TCD Ms 2251.
21
06–Clachans FINAL:01–Anvil.qxd
24/07/2012
16:04
Page 22
Kevin Whelan
15. W. J. Smyth, ‘Landholding changes, kinship networks and class transformation in
rural Ireland: a case-study from County Tipperary‘ in Ir. Geog., xvi (1983), pp
16-35: P O’Flanagan, ‘Rural change south of the river Bride in counties Cork and
Waterford: the surveyors evidence 1716-1851’ in Ir. Geog., xv (1982), pp 51-69.
16. J. H. Andrews, ‘Limits of agricultural settlement in pre-Famine Ireland’ in L. Cullen
and F. Furet (eds), Ireland et France: pour une histoire rurale comparée (Paris,
1980), pp 47-58.
17. K. Trenor, An inquiry into the political economy of the Irish peasantry (London,
1822), p. 3 [RIA HP 1246].
18. A. Dobbs, An essay on the trade and improvements of Ireland (Dublin, 17291731), 2 v, ii, p. 7.
19. Many clachans retained an origin story of evolution from a pioneer family.
MacAodha cites examples in Connemara. Micí Mac Gabhann recounts one in his
Rothaí mór an tSaoil.
20. A. O’Dowd, Meitheal: a study in co-operative labour in rural Ireland (Dublin,
1981).
21. T. Yager, ‘What was rundale and where did it come from?’ in Béaloideas, 70
(2002), pp 153-86.
22. R. Williams, Marxism and literature (Oxford, 1977), pp 128-35.
23. S. Ó Cathaín and P. O’Flanagan, The living landscape. Kilgalligan, Erris, County
Mayo (Dublin, 1975).
24. H. Dutton, Statistical survey of the county of Galway (Dublin, 1824), p. 25.
25. Poor Inquiry, H.C. (1835), p. 368.
26. D. McCabe, Law, conflict and social order in Mayo 1820-1845, unpublished Ph.D.,
University College Dublin (1992).
27. Cited in McCabe, Mayo.
28. C. Ó Danachair, ‘An Rí (the King): an example of traditional social organisation’
in R. S. A. I. Jn., cxi (1981), pp 14-28.
29. Cited in McCabe, Mayo.
30. Hamilton, To the tenantry, broadsheet, N.L.I.
31. Ibid.
32. Cited in B. MacDonald, ‘The Portora school lands. A study in estate management
in nineteenth-century Fermanagh’ in Clogher Rec., xiii (1990), p. 20.
33. John Stewart, Account of farming on the Ballinruane estate, 28 January 1845
[Ms in possession of Fonsie Meally).
34. C. Trevelyan, letter to The Times, 9 Oct. 1847.
35. Hill, Facts from Gweedore, p. 25.
36. H. McFaden (Bunbeg, Donegal) to R. Routh, 9 Dec. 1846, Relief Committee,
Kilmacrenan barony (incoming letters), N. A. 2/441/36.
37. H. McFaden (Bunbeg, Donegal) to Lord Lieutenant Bessborough, 14 Oct. 1846,
Relief Committee, Kilmacrenan barony (incoming letters), N. A. 2/441/36.
38. G. Hill, Facts from Gweedore: reprinted from the fifth edition (Belfast, 1971),
p. 9.
39. R. Gregory, Hansard, third series, xci, 590.
40. Times, 1 May 1847.
41. Clarendon to Reeve, 21 Aug. 1848, Clarendon papers, Bodl., carton 534.
42. K. Whelan, ‘Reading the ruins: the presence of absence in the Irish landscape’
in H. Clarke, J. Prunty and M. Hennessy (eds), Surveying Ireland’s past:
multidisciplinary essays in honour of Anngret Simms (Dublin, 2004), pp 263-94.
22
06–Clachans FINAL:01–Anvil.qxd
24/07/2012
16:04
Page 23
Clachans: landscape and life in Ireland before and after the Famine
43. Timothy O’Neill, ‘Famine evictions’ in C. King (ed.), Famine, land and culture
in Ireland (Dublin, 2000), pp 29-70.
44. ‘Amhráin an Ghorta’ in C. Ó Gráda, An drochshaol: béaloideas agus amhráin
(Baile Átha Cliath, 1994), p. 73.
45. W. Wilde, Report on census (1841).
46. H. Dorian, The outer edge of Ulster: a memoir of social life in nineteenth-century
Donegal, ed. by D. Dickson & B. MacSuibhne (Dublin, 2000), p. 124.
47. Ó Gráda, An drochshaol, p. 80.
48. E. McCarron, Life in Donegal 1850-1900 (Cork, 1981), p. 19.
49. Hill, Facts from Gweedore, p. 42.
50. Cited in J. H. Andrews, A paper landscape. The Ordnance Survey in nineteenthcentury Ireland (Oxford, 1975), pp 218-9.
51. J. F. Lalor, ‘A new nation’ in The Nation, 24 Apr. 1847.
52. [K. Marx and F. Engels], Ireland and the Irish question (reprint New York, 1972).
53. Times, 17 Sept. 1847.
54. J. W. Jackson, ‘The race question in Ireland’ in Anthropological Review, vii, 24
(1855), pp 54-76.
55. Ibid., ‘Race question’, p. 71.
56. J. Binns, The miseries and beauties of Ireland (London, 1837), i, pp 404-6.
57. T. C. Foster, Letters on the condition of the people of Ireland (London, 1846),
p. 108.
58. Foster, Letters, pp 292-3.
59. H. Coulter, The west of Ireland: its existing condition and prospects (Dublin, 1862).
60. W. Jack, ‘Report upon the state of primary education in the west Connaught
districts’ in Reports of assistant commissioners, P. P. (1870), xxviii, part 2, p. 350.
William Jack, fellow of St. Peter’s College Oxford and professor of moral
philosophy at Manchester, was a former inspector of schools.
61. J. H. Stone, (London, 1906), p. 349.
62. G. Eliot, Adam Bede [1859], (London, 1994), pp 28-9.
63. Cited in J. Fabian, Time and the work of anthropology. Collected essays 19711991 (Philadelphia, 1991), p. 84.
64. H. Glassie, ‘Tradition’ in Jn. Am. Folklore, cviii (1995), pp 395-412.
23
06–Clachans FINAL:01–Anvil.qxd
24/07/2012
16:04
Kevin Whelan
24
Page 24