Following the inability of Tom Martin and his daughter Mary, the Princess of Connemara, to meet the debts on their vast encumbered estate, they were sued by the Law Life Assurance Society and ordered to sell it in its entirety.
It must have caused a stir when the advertisement appeared at the Mart in London in August 1849: that 196,540 acres comprising most of the territory stretching westwards from the town of Galway, known as Connemara, were for sale.
The vendors were almost at a loss for words to describe its attractions, claiming ‘ Any description which can be written would fall short of the advantages which would present themselves to the eye of an intelligent person, in his survey of this truly wonderful district…’
And it goes on the eulogise on the facilities for draining and for road building, where there was an abundance of lime and sea-weed for manure, as well as valuable kelp shores, and innumerable beautiful sites for building…’ and, we note the irony of a special inducement to buy: ‘ that the number of tenants and the amounts of their rents have been taken from a survey….but many changes advantageous to a purchaser have since taken place, and the same tenants by name, and in number, will not now be found on the lands.’ We know that most of the tenants had either been cleared off the land, or had died as a result of famine.
Largely untouched
Yet despite all these temptations the Martin estate was slow to sell. Whereas its neighbours the D’Arcys had developed a town and a port, complete with warehouses, on their land at Clifden; and the extraordinary Mitchell Henry who reclaimed large tracts of bogland, built a beautiful palace at Kylemore, and had experimented with growing medical plants in large glasshouses in a magnificent walled garden, the Martins left their vast estate largely wild, and untouched.
Tim Robinson tells us that when the potato blight struck for four successive seasons from 1845 ‘there was nothing the smallholders, the landless labourers and the fisherfolk could do but plead for a job breaking stones on Government work schemes, and when those were shut down, sell everything they had, including spades, nets, boats, even their clothes to buy food, and then to abandon everything to face the horror of the emigrant ships from Galway or the fever-ridden workhouse in Clifden’.
Into this maelstrom came a young Scottish man, Thomas Colville Scott and his assistant, whose mission it was to access the viability of the estate on behalf of a group of businessmen who were interested purchasers.
It was February 1853, and bitterly cold, when Thomas begins his survey.* Although his job was to value and report on the potential of the estate, his professional surveying gets lost as his pages are filled with the tragic sights he sees. Even though it is five years since the worst of the Great Famine has past, there are ‘rude graves’ in the bogs near Roundstone ‘into which the unfortunate people were flung’. ‘The very dogs which had lost their masters, or were driven by want from their homes…lived on the unburied or partially buried corpses of their late owners and others.’
At Clifden they were mobbed ‘by a swarm of poor squatters… who kept up a constant chatter in Irish’ asking if Thomas had sheriffs’ warrants for their arrest and punishment. Having reassured them that he had nothing of the sort, that he was merely surveying the Martin estate, the crowd ‘seemed to breathe more easily’. Colville Scott notes: ‘Hundreds of these poor tenants have been driven from this part of the property by a combination of soldiers, revenue officers and the constabulary, and hundreds perished in the time of famine..’
The chimney sweep
To his absolute amazement, on one bitterly cold afternoon, they come across a chimney sweep boy, about twelve years of age, and ‘three feet high’. He had run away fro his employer in Galway and had reached this out-of-the-way place, 60 miles distant, ‘without a stitch of clothing, except a belt of sacking, about one foot in width,’ around his waist.
When they met him it was during a thick shower of snow, and the boy was running along with his hands over his shoulders, carrying ‘a little hoe’ under his arm.
‘I stopped him and asked his history. He laughed and told me, adding that he had just swept the priest’s chimney, and was on his way to do the same good office at the constabulary barracks.
‘I asked where he had put his money when he got it, and he said in his hand, but, said I, how will you do when it accumulates?’
‘Oh’, he replied, ‘I’ll fall upon a plan when that occurs.’ Colville Scott arranges to have him scrubbed and ‘enveloped in an old cast-off policeman’s coat, and sent him on his way rejoicing. He was the queerest specimen of humanity I ever saw.’
That boy’s laughter surely haunts us all these years later.
Good looking and cheerful
And then another curiosity: the woman entrepreneur at Barnahallia. She is ‘a most remarkable woman who rents the farm and although only 25 years of age she manages five or six men and as many women’ who were employed thrashing oats and cutting seed potatoes.
‘She had two or three younger brothers, all of whom she seems to keep in due subjection. She sells her own butter, eggs, and corn in Clifden market; and her cattle at public fairs. She has about 40 acres along the bay leading to Streamstown. Her servants have little or no money wages, but she said she cooked for them, and made eggs and barley cake for Colville Scott and his assistant.
‘She is good looking and cheerful and was most kind and sensible’. She heated a large stone in the turf fire and put it under the feet of the two men, to warm them as ‘the day being unusually cold, and the roads covered with ice.
Ten shillings
He is moved to anger after seeing women working in the bog… ‘most of them widows, forsaken wives, and young women, carrying peat on their backs. They are nearly in a state of nudity, and appeared from actual want, to be reduced to a state of idiocy. There is no Irish animation here, but a stealthy and timid look, as if the poor souls were ashamed of their condition, and lost the fantasy hope of escape from wretchedness and misery.. ‘ Good God!’, he shouts, ‘where are the landlords and the responsible powers that rule over them!’.
At Moycullen he hears that Lord Campbell was clearing his land of ‘squatters’ , but, Colville Scott believes, in a humane way. As each tenant leaves his ‘house’ it is pulled down and Campbell pays them ten shillings to help buy a passage to America. ‘This proceeding, although apparently a harsh one, is wise and necessary to prevent a recurrence amongst those unguided people of pestilence, famine and untimely death.’
The mail car takes Colville Scott, and his helper into Galway, where they ‘are soon seated in the splendid dining room of the Railway Hotel, surrounded by commercial travellers, tourists, and tars (sailors ) from her Majesty’s revenue cruisers, all merry and gay, contrasting almost mournfully’ with the scenes they had just witnessed, and left behind.
NOTES:
* Thomas Colville Scott stayed mainly at Ballynahinch ‘castle’ which was occupied by John Robertson and his family on behalf of the owners the Law Life Assurance Society. He also stayed in King’s Hotel, Clifden.
No doubt his very personal survey did nothing to excite prospective purchasers. There were bargains to be had in famine - swept Ireland, but not the Martin estate at this time. Twenty-three years later it was sold to a London brewer, Richard Berridge, plus a few Mayo estates, for £230,000 - nearly a quarter of a million acres at just under a pound an acre.
Colville Scott’s survey was forgotten until it surfaced at an auction in England 1994, and is in the possession of Neville Figgis, Dublin. It was published by the Lilliput Press, as ‘Connemara after the Famine’ in 1995, edited and introduced by Tim Robinson, who is my source for this week’s Diary.
Listen to Tom Kenny and Ronnie O'Gorman elaborating on topics they have covered in this week's paper and much more in this week's Old Galway Diary Podcast.
