From nowhere to anywhere! —The Famine Roads of Ireland

From nowhere to anywhere! —

The Famine Roads of the west of Ireland make wonderful walking trails for us along the Wild Atlantic Way today, but ... they were often originally built as famine relief public works projects from March the 6th, 1846, when the Board of Works began funding worthy employment-creating projects in the hardest-hit localities, mostly along the relatively undeveloped, but heavily populated west coast. Ireland was in the grips of a devastating potato blight, which caused unprecedented death and disease amongst the nearly five million poorer people who were so reliant on the potato for survival and to pay the rent on their smallholdings. —
There was no food, there was no work. These road projects, some of them practical, useful and necessary, more of them follies or decorative, or worse, self-serving pork-barrel plans, with no other benefit than the improvement of large estates. —Work was work however, and work put food on the table. Day labourers were paid between 4 and 8 pence per day, just enough to go to the local government-operated food depot and buy a few pounds of Indian Maize, an American corn variety imported to Ireland from the US to provide food for the starving masses.
It was not given out free, even though the starving poor generally had no money whatsoever to buy food with, They had already pawned their clothes and spades and fishing nets just to see them over that dreadful 1846 winter and very wet spring.
Corn prices in early 1846 were set at 1 penny a pound, but when merchants and grain wholesalers complained to Peel and Trevelyan, corn prices went as high as 4 pence a pound. This meal ticket handout has to be viewed in the context of the time. In 1846 Ireland was a net exporter of grains, wheat, and other cereals, being shipped from the vast farms in Tipperary and the south-east to England, while people died of malnutrition and disease on the dockside. Many civil servants tasked with providing some sustenance to the poor were distraught at their lack of resources and food, and at being forced to hold the line Trevelyan had laid down, limiting interference in a market he thought would sort itself out, but which never did. —
Millions of Irish starved while Mr. Trevelyan debated the merits, or otherwise of interfering with the open market. He was a fan of Edmund Burke’s “Thoughts and Details on Scarcity,” a seminal economic treatise, encouraging laissez faire and unfettered market forces, the first sentence of which reads —“Of all things, an indiscreet tampering with the trade of provisions is the most dangerous”—
Years after the famine, the surgeon William Wilde recalled the summer of 1846 in an image of Connemara that evokes Samuel Beckett’s 'Waiting for Godot'.
“Each morning,” wrote Wilde, “ghosts of men [would] travel several miles” through an untreed landscape of untended fields and decapitated hills “to break up comparatively good old road, or commence an unnecessary new one, leading from nowhere to anywhere.” —
While there's no map of these roads per se, many are colloquially known as famine roads. There are hundreds of roads today like those in the photos all over the western seaboard, from Cork, to Donegal, essentially the Wild Atlantic Way today. I took those photos in the Burren in county Clare and in Connemara, near Maam, and near Moycullen.
While we refer to them as 'famine roads', truth is a lot of the current road system today in Connemara and in west Clare and in Donegal, Kerry, Cork, Sligo and Mayo, started off as relief projects, but later on were improved, widened etc and subsumed into our secondary road network. —
Remember, there was no road at all from Ballyvaughan to Galway, no roadway by the seashore, or through the mountains. from Galway to Clifden, no road from Clifden to Leenane and on to Westport, and out to Achill. No bridges, no cutaways, no pathways for any kind of cart to pass from one part of the western seaboard to another. What roads we had in 1840 were at best donkey trails or people paths. —
The British government in 1846 made £50,000 (pounds) available for relief work, for all pf Ireland, for which they invited tendering of proposed local road and relief works, that would prove worthwhile to the communities, and create jobs. Projects were proffered from nearly every county. Most of them were patronage and pork! From county Clare alone they had applications for over £500,000 of proposed works. —
In all by 1850 some £900,000 was spent on these projects, harbours, drainage of rivers, bogs, bridges, canals, road-beds, roads, oh, and lots of walls. —
Ironically, those roads, while they did open up the countryside to transport and trade, it also made the decision to leave Ireland easier, with better roads, poor people now had access by horse and car, or Bianconi coach to the far flung seaports of Galway, Sligo, Derry, Cobh, Cork, Kilrush and Limerick. A million and a half people left Ireland between 1846 and 1860, many of them were the more prosperous and able families, who could afford the cost of passage to the UK, America, Canada, Argentina and Australia.
Emigration has defined the Irish people and our psyche ever since.

I can't believe it's not butter!

Forgotten stashes of dark yellow butter are sometimes found buried in bogs in Ireland, preserved for thousands of years, secreted away in times of plenty, to bide the maker over times of scarcity or hunger.

Though a thousand years old, or more, the butter is still edible and has, I am told, a unique flavour of the bog it was buried in. I don't doubt that!

(Photo is of bog butter discovered in Galway, none the worse for having spend two thousand years under the bog).

They say that the butter takes the flavour of the grass or plants in the field the cow grazes in also. And I don't doubt that either.

(Photo; This is a leather firkin or barrel that was found a few years ago in a bog in Kildare)Today, Kerrygold, the butter brand owned by Irish dairy farmers, has become the first Irish food brand to reach the momentous milestone of exceeding an annual retail value of $1 billion of exports. Be it ever so humble, butter pays the Irish handsomely, even today.

We Irish have had a long love-affair with our butter for thousands of years. During the 18th and 19th centuries we infected every corner of the world with our butter infatuation and an unlikely industry sprang up. One of our biggest exports for over two hundred years was Irish Country or salted butter. Cork, a bustling port, had a 'Butter Market' or 'Butter Exchange', exporting butter of a very high quality to all parts of the British Empire from around 1700. Cork, a major shipping port, controlled 66% or Irish butter exports to Europe and 80% to America and especially to the Caribbean.

Butter was transported to Cork by horse and cart from as far away as Limerick and Kerry to the Cork market for export on ships. Cork merchants supplied much of the British Empire with staples, salted beef fn pork, salted fish, and salted butter. Farm-made butter was transported by farmers by horse cart to the market for sale. Hundreds of carts made long journeys every week to sell butter through the Butter Exchange. The road from Killarney to Cork is called 'the butter road' for this reason.

Some butter buyers bought up locally-produced butter in the far-flung outlying towns, like Dingle, Listowel and Caherciveen, too far for a farmer to drive a horse and cart in one day. These were unofficial butter markets like the one in the photograph. The same happened in Clare and Tipperary and as far north as Galway, Donegal and Sligo.

The men milked the cows, but the women made the butter. It was a laborious job, loading the separated cream from fresh milk into recently sterilised wooden churns and turning or pounding the churned cream, to separate the fat form the skimmed milk, and make butter.

There were lots of 'pisheogs' or superstitions attached to churning. If a stranger entered a house while churning was going on he or she had to lend a hand or they would be accused of 'stealing the butter'.

There were churning songs and rhymes too, that went with the ritual.

Milk had a short shelf life, of maybe 3 or 4 days. Butter could last a year or longer. Salted butter could last a decade. Selling home-made butter was the only way many farmers survived, fed their families and paid their rent. Butter moment was the staple of the 19th century farm.

Butter jobbers (middlemen-buyers) would buy the butter locally from the farmers at these local markets, without much competition, setting the price as they saw fit, and no doubt getting a good bargain. That bulk-bought butter was then carted in wooden casks or firkins (a firkin is a 1/4 barrel, with a volume of 10.8 gallons), to Cork, where the butter was graded by quality and sold on for a profit for the middle-man.

Unfortunately by the late 19th century butter production had been mechanised and standardised in much of the world and the market for Irish butter dwindled. Centrifuge-separated blended milk-fat made a more standard butter, that was less salty and had less moisture. Salty butter went out of fashion. New packaging, indeed individual pounds of butter were packed and branded. The old firkin measure fell out of favour for the smaller, lighter, branded packaging.

By 1894 a co-operative movement was founded in Cork, the IAOS (Irish Agricultural Organisation Society) that would revolutionize dairy production in Ireland and provide the farmer with a fair price for milk. The immediate effect of the co-ops was that locally-made butter began to die out and big co-op dairies began collecting milk from farmers for the industrial production of milk, butter, cheese etc.

The Cork Butter Exchange closed in 1924. It was located in the building called 'The Firkin Crane', a beautiful still extant building, erected in 1855. It was a rotunda or round, domed building, that housed the crane or weighing scales that was used to measure the quantity of butter in each 'firkin' or cask.

Butter made from the milk of Kerry cows, was famed for that particular cow's high milk-fat content and deep yellow colour. Kerry's golden butter was the preferred or 'gold standard' for butter all over the world for two hundred years or more, and was sold at a premium.

Kerry Foods branded their premium and very popular butter pat as 'Kerry Gold', and the rest is history. We still love our butter, though the cholesterol scare has frightened many away from one of our oldest and healthiest foods.

Firkins of butter ready for export at the Butter Exchange in Cork

A wooden firkin, or quarter barrel, or 9 imperial gallons. Butter was sold by the firkin, which weighed 56 pounds (25 Kilograms). 

My favourite treat? Piping-hot new season potatoes, still in their jackets, swimming in melted butter. One big golden mush of paradise!

Touring Connemara in 1914 by rail and by charabanc

A pre-1924 MGWR Touring Car, or charabanc ("char-à-banc", usually in Ireland it is pronounced sharabang), en-route somewhere between Clifden and Westport, although the photo says Recess, suggesting that perhaps the touring party were being taken to the Recess Hotel, partially visible in the background, or to the Recess Railway Station. 

No white lines in the middle of the road back then, probably around 1914. It prompted me to write this little story. Sit back and enjoy. 

From 1895 to 1935 Galway city was connected to Clifden by the Midland Great Western Railway line. The MGWR had some 538 miles (866 km) of rail, linking Connacht to Leinster, with lines ending in Westport and Clifden, which towns were in turn, linked by touring car. This particular car in the photo connected the two train termini, Clifden and Westport, so rail passengers could go by train to one, or the other town, and then, connect to return home on the other train line, via a 'jaunt' on the charabanc 'touring car'.

Charabancs. Funny word eh! The name derives from the French, char à bancs or "carriage with wooden benches". It had 'benched seats' arranged in rows, looking forward, commonly used for large parties, whether as public conveyances or for excursions. It had a retractable canvas roof and the side windows were made of mica (a thin layer of quartz-like stone). The motorised touring car took over from the Bianconi horse-drawn carriages that had plied the roads of Ireland until the arrival of rail and eventually motorised horseless cars.

If you look closely, you will see that the touring car's registration plate number is 'IM 180'. For you young 'uns out there, car registrations in Ireland were done alphabetically by county. So Antrim was IA, Armagh IB, and eventually, Galway IM. Them when IM was all allocated, they want to AIM, then BIM, and so on to ZIM. Later on, maybe in the late 1960's Galway went to ZM, then AZM, BZM etc... until all that system was scrapped in the 1990's and we went to the current registrations of just G.

I happen to have access to the Irish Motor Directory for the year 1914 for cars and motor-cycles registered in Ireland. Nationwide (32 counties) in 1914 there were a total of 20,211 cars and 4,438 motor-cycles. Galway had only 189 cars and 163 motor-cycles registered in the county in 1914. Northern Ireland, Dublin and Cork had the bulk of all cars in the country.

If you look closely at the page below, you will see the entries for IM 179, IM 18o and IM 181. They are three char-a-bancs, and all three are registered to the Midland G. W. Railway in Broadstone (now Phibsboro in Dublin) where the registered office of the MGWR was located.

This page of car registrations from the Irish Motor Directory in Galway in 1914, showing IM 180 the charabanc owned by the MGWRy which is shown in the old photo at the top of this story. 

It's not often that I get to tie one piece of evidence to another..I'm actually kinda chuffed! 

The other car and motor cycle owners on this page are quite interesting including The Right Hon Lord Killannin of Spiddal, J. A. B. Trench of Clonfert, Harry Usher of Loughrea, Tom Cawley of Cawleys in Craughwell (motor-cycle), Maurice Sweeney of Loughrea, and James J. Ward of Eyre Square (the former two had garages and several cars). 

By far the most interesting car-owner listed on this page is the notorious land agent, landlord and Galway Sheriff, Mr. F. M. Shawe-Taylor of Castle Taylor, Ardrahan, (IM 165) who was killed in an IRA ambush on the way to Galway on the 3 of March 1920. The killing took place at Egans Pub in Cashla, near to Carnmore Cross. This in turn led to an increased RIC and military presence in the area, more and more unrest, shootings and reprisals which brought in the dreaded Black and Tans and Auxilliaries to the area, leading directly to the death of RIC constable Timothy Horan in an ambush at Castledaly, the Black and Tan shooting of innocent civilian Ellen Quinn at Kiltartan (1 November 1920), a pregnant mother of six and a tenant of Lady Gregory; murder by the Black and Tans in Galway of Fr. Michael Griffin (14 November 1920); killing of Tom Egan and the gruesome torture and murder of the two brothers from Beagh, Gort, Patrick and Harry Loughnane. In addition, there were numerous incidents of violence, many of which were recorded with horror by Lady Gregory in her journal, who remarked that "the country has gone wild since the killing of Frank Shawe-Taylor." I guess he had no luck with that car!

Anyway, I digress. Back to the Connemara Charabancs. I think it's likely that the three touring cars (IM 179, IM 18o and IM 181) were based in garages in Westport and Clifden, so as to meet all trains. The days of grand touring were upon us and the novelty of seeing the 'Wild West' of Ireland by train and charabanc must have been irresistible. The poster even mentions going to Achill, so the third car was likely based there. These posters were put up in railway stations and rail carriages all over Ireland and were no doubt, very effective marketing, long before the Irish Tourist Board started to promote Connemara. I love the 'Book of Kells' font and artwork on the poster.

It has to be appreciated however, that touring on such a vehicle through Connemara in 1914 would have been uncomfortable, cold, bumpy (imagine the roads), noisy, slow and sometimes dangerous, as the touring cars were quite high and when loaded with passengers, were apt to list too far on sharp bends and sometimes tipped over. 

The charabancs were phased out by the mid 1920's, though these saw service in Connemara right up until 'The Emergency' or WWII in 1939.

And now for the trivia piece of the story. I don't know if any Irish charabanc survived, but if I am not mistaken, the bench seats from one of these three charabancs ended up in Ryans Hotel in Cong, as part of the bar furniture. They were there fairly recently. They may still be there for all I know! This photo shows Ryans Hotel on the right, around 1910.

The Galway-Clifden railway line can be see paralleling the road, on the lake shore. (The lake is called Glendollagh) This is probably roughly where the 'Connemara Giant' statue sits, outside Joyce's Craft Shop in Recess in Connemara today. The car is travelling in the direction of Galway I think.
And that folks, is all she wrote. 

I hope you enjoyed this story which was prompted by my seeing the photo of the touring car by the lake on Whites Auctions pages. 

That's it...I'm off for a pint. Brian Nolan.