There have been violent storms before and since the Big Wind of Sunday 6 to Monday 7 January 1839, but it was generally agreed at the time that nothing comparable could be remembered by the oldest inhabitants of this island.
It began with people noticing that despite a period of dull, cold weather, with light snow showers in the afternoon of that Sunday, it became noticeably warm with a light breeze. By late afternoon it was noted that the air ‘felt like air in a hot house’. About 9 pm strong westerly winds swept over the entire country, developing into hurricane force which raged from about midnight until it finally subsided at about 5am the following morning.
Six days later the Dublin Evening Post commented that England appears to have escaped the worst of the ‘violence of the hurricane and its deplorable effects’, whereas Ireland has been its chief victim where ‘every field, every town, every village felt its dire effects, from Galway to Dublin - from the Giant’s Causeway to Valencia, it has been, we repeat, the most awful calamity with which its people were afflicted.’
There have been deadly storms in more recent times, February 1957 or Hurricane Debbie in 1961, with gusts up to 93 knots, but nothing captured the imagination as the ‘Oíche na Goitre Móire, ná Deireadh an Tsaoil - The Night of the Big Wind, or the End of the World’.
Sea birds swept inland
Newspapers of the time had plenty to write about. All comment on ‘the roar of the wind’, it was like ‘thunder or artillery’. In Kilbeggan the hurricane commenced about a quarter past eleven: ‘there was first a rumbling sound, like thunder, which was followed by a rushing blast of wind, which swept through the town like a tornado, and shook the houses so much that the glass and delf were broken, by being thrown down from their shelves…the gale continued with unabated fury for four hours…(Tuam Herald, Jan 19 1839 ). There were reports of ‘a completely built stack of oats lifted clean up, foundation, thatch and all, and after performing sundry wild gyrations, was again laid down safely and uninjured at a considerable distance away from it former locality’…. ‘An immense stack of turf was lifted a foot from the ground and dashed to pieces’. even more astonishing was the ‘blowing of water out of the canal near Kilbeggan’. When visited the following morning the canal ‘was nearly dry’.
In Kerry, sea birds were found dead 90 miles inland. Along the west coast herrings were found six miles inland, ‘lifted bodily out of the sea and blown through the air the whole way’.
‘Large numbers of fish were swept out of the lake and distributed over the fields at Lislea’.
Trees torn up
The loss of farming stocks of all kinds ‘has been terrible. Many of the most thrifty and industrious husbandmen, whose haggards and homesteads were filled with unthreaded corn on Sunday night, found themselves without a sheaf of grain in the morning’. The Galway Weekly Advertiser reported that ‘large ricks of corn and hey were blown away a mile from the haggards’.
Trees, 10 or twelve miles from the sea, were covered with salt brine. Practical all the great demesnes and estates, most of which were well-wooded, suffered major losses. ‘Not a single demesne escaped, and ‘tens of thousands of trees have been snapped in twain, or torn up by the roots…roads were blocked by fallen timber’.
‘Upwards of 50,000 trees of the largest ash, oak, elm and larch were torn up on the property of Mr Kirwan of Hillsbrook, Co Galway; and Garbally Park, near Ballinasloe, the seat of Earl Clancarty, ‘was left almost without a tree standing’. (One of the consequences of the disaster was a dramatic fall in the price of timber. The plight of one timber merchant was reported that on Saturday January 5 he would have gladly paid £300 for a load of timber. But on Monday January 8, he could purchase the same amount for £40 ).
‘Fire fell from the clouds
One of the added horrors of the storm were the instances of fire, fanned by the wind. Most rural dwellings were lightly thatched, easily ignited when the wind fanned the turf embers in the hearth below. The Tuam Herald reported that people saw ‘fire falling from the clouds’. In Loughrea 103 houses were destroyed of which 71 were burned. Fifteen houses were burned in Gort, 13 in Ballinasloe, and more than 100 in Athlone.
In Castlebar, very few houses escaped damage. ‘The poor of course, as being the most numerous, have been the greatest sufferers. Tens of thousands of their wretched cabins have been swept away or unroofed - and many, as we have seen, have become a prey to the flames.’
Ships hard hit
Since the storm came so unexpectedly at night, ships at sea, or exposed to the full force of the westerly gales, were hard hit. If they managed to reach harbour many rode out the storm; but Limerick suffered an estimated £30,000 in damages when shipping in port was dashed violently against the quays at Wellesley Bridge (now Sarsfield Bridge ). The Galway Patriot reported: ‘Our shipping, some dismasted, some on their beam ends, some cast high and dry on a rocky shore, and all evidently greatly injured.’
Newspapers at the time widely over estimated to final total, but modern scholarship estimates the number of deaths in Ireland during the storm was probably 90 people, included 12 men of the Roundstone coastguard who were drowned during that night. Surely many others died from injuries later.
Night of Epiphany
The trauma of the 1839 storm was soon to be eclipsed by the much greater tragedy of The Great Famine. Nevertheless, what became known as The Big Wind has remained part of the national consciousness to the present day. Michael Burke of Esker, near Athenry, Co Galway, composed a poem or song, Oidhche gaoithe móire, reputedly in the days following the storm. Here is the first verse:
Oíche na Gaoithe Móire ,
Ná Deireadh an Tsaoil
Ar oíche ceann an dá lá dhéag,
Béidh cuimhne grind go h-éag
Is iomaí milte d’éag,
I mbaile, muir’s tír.
Oíche gaoithe móire,
Oíche stoirme’s dóite,
A déan (? ) dílte, crainnte a’ stróiceadh
Agus obair ag na satir.
The Night of the Big Wind
Or The End of the World
The night of Epiphany
Will be clearly remembered forever,
Many thousands perished
At home, at sea and abroad.
It was a night of Big Wind,
A night of storm and burning,
That caused floods, tore trees to shreds,
And made work for craftsmen.*
NOTES: * Collected by Ciarán Mac Mathúna of RTE, from Éamon MacAoidh of Dooega, Achill. Sources this week include Lisa Shields and Denis Fitzgerald, Meteorological Service, Dublin.
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