Distress in the Barony of Erris, Ireland (1830)

To the Editor of the Manchester Mercury.

Sir, — Not doubting but a few remarks connected with the unfortunate people for whom the Rev. Mr. Lyons is now with us soliciting aid, will, with a descriptive sketch of that interesting portion of Ireland, prove acceptable, permit me, as a feeble advocate on behalf of our distressed brethren, to state, for the information of such of your readers as may not be conversant with the subject, that the inhabitants of the barony of Erris occupy as singularly an isolated spot of earth as, perhaps, is to be found in the dominion of any European prince. Casting his eye on the map of Ireland, and finding the large western county of Mayo on the north of Galway, the reader will perceive a mountainous peninsula on the north west corner of the former county, jutting out into the Atlantic ocean. This sequestered spot, the Switzerland of Ireland, is the barony or hundred of Erris.

In giving a brief sketch of its unfortunate inhabitants, the inquiry may naturally be anticipated how so remote a region, and so apparently uninviting, should have become populous or peopled at all. In all countries, however, which have been the scenes of war and tumult, similar isolated spots will be fond similarly peopled; the colonization of such places being readily accounted for by the recollection that in times of commotion (of which poor Ireland has had more than her share form the earlies ages), many have sought safety and quiet in this secluded nook of the kingdom, as was the case with our Cornwall, and many parts of Wales. The principal colonization of Erris was during the subjugating visits of Cromwell’s army: the people are for the most part tenants of petty farms, if such they may be called, but not a few are owners of the spots they lie on; these yeomen possessors of 5 or 10 acres of poor land are on a level in general with the peasantry: grants of land, and tenures in perpetuity of some 100 acres or so, were easily procured in such a district in former days; the subdivision of the property among a large family (there being no occupation but tilling the ground, or going for a soldier or sailor), readily accounts for the number of petty freeholds which a few generations would suffice to create.

An owner of land will, it is true, be in general better off than a tenant, having a rack rent to pay, but the support of each is the same, potatoes; and if they fail, both are alike exposed to starvation. With these the Erris rent-paying peasant supports his family; and, assisted by some oats and hay, and a patch of vegetables, he struggles hard to rear as many pigs and poultry, and to make as much butter from his mountain or bog-fed cows as pays his rent, which is frequently exorbitant, owing to the pernicious subletting system; ploughs are rare, digging is therefore general; and this laborious employment, with planting, hoeing, and gathering the potatoe crop, tending the cow, or cows and pigs, forms his chief employment; while his wife and children find a desultory species of employment with the pigs, the poultry, and the butter churn, together with spinning and the regular unvarying round of potatoes an salt for breakfast, potatoes and salt for dinner, and potatoes and salt for supper, washed down with water or buttermilk, as the case may be. With all this life of privation and hardship, and faring worse than their cattle and pigs (who, by the bye, are all inmates of the cabin floor, as the cocks and hens are of the roof and rafters), the Erris people are cheerful, lively, and happy, so long as the potatoe fails not, and with all generous and hospitable to a proverb.

Inns on their roads are rare; but the traveller finds an inn in every mountaineer’s cabin; an Errisman needs no soliciting; he sees a stranger, and he bids him welcome; if he be above his own rank in life, the best he has is brought out for the gentleman; his horse is housed, and forthwith groomed by the good man of the cabin, or the son, or the daughter, or the children, or a neighbour, or some one; he is sure of as much attention as his rider for his rider’s sake, and in a few minutes he is seen enjoying a hearty meal of oats in the straw, or hay, or grass, or, if nothing else, of potatoes; while the hostess, asking no questions as to whether “his honour” is hungry, takes this and a good deal more for granted, and before he is aware, one of the chickens lately at the door is simmering in the pot or may be a piece of bacon or some eggs, or some such delicacy not common on the family table, while the children are sent off with a thirteener or two, drawn from the rent purse, to buy, or borrow, or beg some loaf, with a bit of tea, or some such thing; while the guest is enjoying his humble repast. If the day be declining, and the place at a distance from any town, he sees his hostess take down from the rafters the large bags made of matting, her home-made chest of drawers and wardrobe (no thanks to the cabinet-maker), in which her best bed linen is kept, and having hung her blankets and snow white sheets round the fire, the former made, perhaps, from the wool of two or three mountain sheep and lambs, the feather bed is opened out, and put into what is called the “stranger’s nook,” by the fire; and as the guager (or exciseman) is an animal that does not trouble them much in that remote quarter, it is possible that before he retires to his comfortable bed, the stranger may have procured for him a drop of mountain dew, “to keep his honour from taking any cold by the journey; and to make his honour sleep, as may be, the hens in the roof will be after waking his honour too soon.”

For such an amiable and hearty welcome, in a dwelling where the same unvarying hard fare is partaken of by its frugal and abstemious tenants from year end to year end, no return is looked for, no remuneration thought of; but as the father holds the bridle, and the son straightens the horse’s mane, the generous, the warm-hearted Erris mountaineer says, in reply to your thanks, “Your honour’s welcome a thousand times;” while his wife, with a tear almost in her eye, says, “God spare your honour to your family.”

In this sequestered barony are to be found, not the rough and uncouth and coarse featured men and women of some districts in Ireland, but some of the finest men and handsomest women in the world; and what is very singular, a strikingly superior degree of intelligence — but still more singular, although every one can speak Irish, yet the English language is also universally spoken, and with an accent and correctness that surprises this stranger, who has just passed whole districts of the broadest brogue. As fairies and enchanters have ceased in Erris, this singular feature must be accounted from other causes; and accordingly on investigation into its history, we find that some generations back crown lands to a great extent were granted by one of our kings (Wm. The 3d I think, to the ***** family, who induced a considerable number of English families, about 80, with their dependents, to settle in Erris on lands held by them in perpetuity). These families were for the most part very respectable; and being from London and the southern counties, communicated to the old inhabitants, with whom they intermarried, and became amalgamated superior and highly anglicised manners and language, as was the case with the Anglo Hibernian barony of Forth, in the south of Ireland: so that the Erris people have, as has been intimated, peculiar claims to the sympathy of Englishmen, being to a great extent bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh.

A highly intelligent tourist, whose remarks are valuable as being those of a pedestrian (John Bernard Trotter, Esq., private secretary to the great Fox), says of the people of Achill, a portion of the barony of Erris, “They are extremely intelligent, they converse with ease on most usual subjects, have a love for information, are respectful, but not mean to superiors, are tolerably educated, reverence the laws, and are quiet and loyal.” “In Erris we see no green crops, good enclosures, or gardens; it is Nature in her undress. But in the qualification and improvement of the mind, this interesting portion of Connaught excels most parts of Ireland.” Almost all the people speak English and Irish, and both well. This possession of two languages must in itself strengthen the understanding, and make ideas more clear and precise.

But of this singular portion of Erris enough has been said on the present occasion to excite an interest in their behalf; to do justice to the subject would, however, require me to quote largely from the author referred to, and would extend the present communication beyond the prescribed limits. Having, however, much to add respecting this interesting half English half Irish colony, which, I dare say would please many of your readers of either sex, I shall beg a space in your next week’s paper for some more minute particulars respecting this singular people, the geography of whose country is no less singular, separated from the rest of the country by mountains and morasses, to reach this secluded spot, let my reader imagine (as was the case till lately), no regular road, but an imperfect tract across a bog nearly thirty miles in extent.

After labouring through which, the traveller has to content himself with the bed of the river for a road, pursuing its gravelly shore for some distance as the only route. Leaving the river, he begins to ascend the mountains in search of the passes, across which he might well content himself without grieving after the Alps or Pyrenees, whether an admirer of the sublime or the difficult in nature. After wandering through dells and passes, threatening a stop every minute to further progress, the traveller descends, and traversing a plain of some extent, and surmounting another range of mountains and bogs, he arrives in what the natives very properly call the interior; a road recently formed by government now facilitates the pass into Erris; but the circumstances of many of its inhabitants may be conceived, who are distant from any market town, doctor, or dispensary, from twenty to forty miles. It will be pretty evident that many of the common comforts of us Englishmen must be luxuries, by the time they have got freighted over the mountains and bogs into Erris; such an expensive amphibious line of carriage, amounting almost to a prohibition, and forming, with regard to many articles, a formidable blockade; it is pretty evident, therefore, that what the natives of this peninsula want, they must, for the most part, grow.

Cobbett abuses the Irish for not growing wheat instead of the potatoe, and attributes half Ireland’s calamities to the potatoe; he would, however, be somewhat at a non-plus if he were to visit Erris, where any of the children would reply to his anathemas. “But, sir, our land won’t grow wheat.” “What will it grow, then?” “Scarcely anything but potatoes, sir.” Such Mr Editor, is the fact, the major part of Erris is either bog, with a subsoil of water — I was going to say sandy soil, with a charming subsoil of quicksand, not a wit inferior in its lively and locomotive characteristics, to quicksilver or Calais-sand, but which, of course, has one great recommendation, that it requires very little ploughing, and mountain pasture with a most nutritious subsoil, an inch or two beneath it of granite, a trifle harder than steel or marble. A better knowledge of Ireland would have enabled Cobbett to write more correctly about it, and might have tended to convince him that to many parts of poor Ireland, the potatoe is an invaluable blessing. “Thanks to the paraties, or we’d be the worse off in Manchester,” said an honest Hibernian once to me — “Sure its nothing but that, that keeps my countrymen at home;” forty thousand is enough of us, in a conscience, for Manchester or any other English town. In Erris and other parts, it is the main stay of the vessel; what corn and other profitable articles are raised, are drained from them to this country, as though we needed them.

The Irishman may have a beam in his eye, but the English has also a moat; England drains Ireland for corn and cattle, and is keeping constantly about 100,000 idle or dispensable horses. In hay and oats, &c., a horse is estimated to consume the produce of 4 1/2 acres. Now an Irishman easily cultivates an acre of land in potatoes, which, if the crop turn out well, will keep twelve persons; allowing seven pounds each a day. Consequently, every horse averages to consume as much as would support fifty-four Irish peasants. At the same time the land that grows hay and oats for horses, is quintuple the value of that which suffices for the poor Irishman’s potatoe. Now one way to bring rents down, and to let him get a portion of his support off a better spoil, and produce certainly here suggests itself to Englishmen, who, by the way, shew their consideration also in consuming some hundred thousand oxen per annum; now any butcher will tell my reader, how many people an ox, when slaughtered, will keep for a week or tend days; and as every ox, before he buys him, eats the produce of about ten acres, or say five wheat acres, which five acres would grow about 160 bushels of wheat; it might be instructing to ask the family baker how long that would keep the people who devoured the ox, which give about 700lbs. of nutriment: the wheat would give about 10,000lbs.

To return to the poor Errisman, we have seen the condition of those who are yclept small farmers, what must be the mere cabineers, the labourers? With them, at this moment, most pitiable and wretched beings, what bread is a rarity, cheese a delicacy, meat a luxury, and tea, coffee, and groceries, &c., novelties; barley bread and oatmeal they may sometimes get, but the potatoe is their dependence. When a people are happy and cheerful, “tojours prêt, toujours gai,” quiet and content with such fare, and such an existence, when this would satisfy them, does not every benevolent heart respond, “and shall we let the people of Erris die of hunger, when this is all they ask to keep them alive; shall we who have abundance, leave the dying children of Erris (who claim a kindredship with Englishmen,) a prey to famine and disease, its sure attendants” their all is gone through an unfavourable season of bad weather; and, starvation and fever is at this moment killing by the most cruel of deaths, hundreds of our fellow countrymen, in the peaceful vallies and quiet mountain villages of unhappy Erris; those amongst them who had the means, have already done their utmost, and are deriving their own provisions, dear bought from a distance.

No poor laws exist in Ireland, no friendly poorhouse, no gentry of great opulence reside in the remote peninsula of Erris, a tract of exclusively humble cabins; the whole country if Ireland is poor as she is lovely, and each parish in it has enough to do to support through the winter its own poor. In such a state of things a worthy and intelligent clergyman, who has long been a blessing to the district, has undertaken a long journey to our land of comparative plenty and of humanity, and at a time when Manchester is subscribing liberally for the brave citizens of Paris, she will not let this visit and call from her own fellow subjects but in vain; the greatest bigot, and most hostile to poor Ireland, will not stop to talk about better systems, better enactments, better agriculture, or what not, when he contemplates the haggard and famine worn forms of the sons of Erris wandering along he shores seeking for a few shell fish, or feeding on weeds, to keep the flickering flame of life alive; when the dying mother, stretched on the wretched couch of her now pestilential cabin, is seen extending the last morsel to the already infected little ones, for whose sake she has fasted ’til life has waned away; when the dead bodies of these unhappy peasants (lately blythe, healthy, and contended,) are examined, and their stomachs found to contain nothing but grass and mountain berries, what heart can resist the call of suffering humanity.

“Oh, sirs,” say these poor creatures, “we allow all you can say against our country or ourselves, but oh save us now, and legislate for us after this dreadful calamity is over; save us and our little ones alive.” So shall the blessing of him that was ready to perish be on the head of generous Britons. If my humble pen could add aught to such a scene, it would picture the departure of the good parish priest of Kilmore for happier England. It would trace the intense anxiety of every class, as he bade them farewell, and would record the prayers and blessings offered for the success of his mission; but I leave to abler hands to describe the affecting scene, and to tell of the mothers uplifted hands, and the father’s silent prayer, as he passed by their cots on his errand of mercy, may we not conceive that the language of many a mute tear would be — “Go and buy us a little corn that we may live and not die, both we, and thou, and also our little ones. And God Almighty give you mercy before the man.”

– Apologizing for trespassing so far on our valuable columns, I am, Sir, yours, BENEVOLUS. Brook-street, Chorlton Row, Sept. 8th, 1830.

Manchester Mercury, 1 Sept. 1830, page 4.

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