A bit of history

Waiting for the sale over the winter months left us with time for a bit of historical research, which turned up lots of interest. We knew the structure was in the vernacular style typical of nineteenth century Connaught cottages - thick rough stone walls with a single ridge thatched roof and a basic three room layout (bedroom at one end, hearth in the large central room, a byre or store at the other end with a raised platform above it). More of the structure later...

Digging into history, the township wasn't mentioned in Lewis’ 1837 Topographical Dictionary but did appear as a hamlet of houses and farm buildings on the first series Ordnance Survey 6” map (1837-1842), just before the great famine (an Gorta Mór) of 1845-1852. The cottage was clearly visible (with its neighbour) and with boundary walls corresponding to the plot. It appeared as an ‘L shape’, most likely as two or three rooms and a cow barn to the side.

O’Donovan’s Field Name Books (commissioned for the OS in 1838) described the townland as 'occupied by 6 cotters. Rent £2. 2s. pr. acre. No tenure. Soil very good producing potatoes, oats and wheat. Cotters wretchedly poor and houses poor looking'. The second-series OS map (1888-1913) showed that almost all of the townland cottages had disappeared after the famine years, only one or two remaining in addition to ours.

We had some luck in knowing the name of the family that had lived in the cottage and, from their relatives, that they'd been there as long as anyone could say. We've been known to do a bit of family history of our own and the information meant we had a fair chance of finding them in the old Census records. Sure enough, they were there. The 1901 census showed us the family of an old Irish-speaking farmer, born in the early 1800s. There were also church records for their births and marriages in the village.

The house was recorded in 1901 as a private dwelling of three rooms, occupied by one family (seven people), constructed with stone walls and a thatched roof, with three windows to the front and two out-buildings. We found the same family there in the 1911 census, the house described with three out-buildings listed as a cow house, a piggery and a fowl house. The second series OS map, from around this time, suggested the cow house was attached to the cottage in an L-shape with the two smaller structures separate.


This was all a bit of a sideline to planning work on the cottage but it gave us a better picture of how the place had been and the people who had lived there.