Tag: Townland

A lost village in Lissaclarig

1842 ordnance survey map of Lissaclarig West.

The ordnance survey maps of Ireland are a treasure trove of information. The country had been completely mapped by 1846, this was done by a specialised team and included amongst it some people who were very knowledgeable on the Irish language, people like John O’Donovan and Eugene O’Curry. The maps were updated at regular intervals after that and as a result if closely studied can tell us a lot about the changing face of the Irish landscape over the past 200 years. And with a little bit of close analysis, we can also use the early maps to project back even further and help us speculate in an informed way about what the landscape might have looked like for a century or two before that as well.

The first thing to remember is that the population of the country was a lot less at some points in the past than others. In 1600 the population was estimated at 1 million people. Even accounting for the fact that the rate of urban dwellers to rural dwellers was much different to what it became later, this meant that the population in our townland of Lissaclarig was not very extensive at that time.

Three huge events had a significant effect on the population of the country generally over the coming centuries and to a certain extent they can all be mapped onto the life of our townland.

Firstly, there were the Cromwellian wars, when over a short period of about five years the country was devastated. We do not know exactly what the impact on the ground was here, but it is likely that there were significant effects on the local area. This is made all the more likely when we know that Viscount Muskerry the leader of the Confederate and Royalist forces was the owner of local townlands like Skeaghnore. This would have led to confiscation of land with a likely change in some of the tenant population following the defeat. The population of Ireland is estimated to have decreased by 20% in those years due to the war, starvation and plague and as it was arguably the most traumatic shock the country has ever experienced.

The second great demographic shock to the country came in 1740. Due to a very harsh winter the country experienced a very severe famine, it is estimated that around 300,000 people died in that famine, many of them in County Cork which was badly affected.

The third shock is one that we are most familiar with, the Great Famine, An Gorta Mór in 1846-52 which resulted in 1 million deaths and 1 million people emigrating from the country.

After the first two famines the population of the country grew again, in 1600 there were 1 million people in the country, by the middle of the 1700s that figure had well over doubled and in a tremendous expansion of the population from the late 1700s to the 1840s the population grew to some six million people.

Alongside the ordnance survey maps we have the great historical source, the Griffith Valuation of Ireland. The lands of Lissaclarig, Prohoness, Murrahin, and the surrounding townlands in Kilcoe and Aughadown parishes were mapped for valuation purposes around 1848 during the great famine. Valuers travelled from townland to townland valuing the properties so that the government could have a standard baseline on which to tax that value of property. As well as giving us details of the people who lived in the area at the time the Tenant books which are in place for many townlands list the size and quality for all the houses in the townlands.

We do not have Tenant Books for Lissaclarig but through comparing the returns for the neighbouring townlands and closely studying the OS map we can credibly speculate on the houses in Lissaclarig before the Great Famine.

This illustration of ‘Harrington’s Hut’ is located in Aughadown during the Great Famine. Given the proximity, it would be safe to assume that the poorest dwellings in Lissaclarig would have looked similar around that time.

It is unlikely that there were many if any slated houses in the townland in the 20 years before the famine. The farmhouses in the townland and in the neighbouring townlands were significantly smaller than the ones that became the norm after the famine. Most farmers houses were built of stone with a clay mortar. They were largely single storied with thatch roofs. A farmer’s house was typically about 30ft long, 16ft wide and about 6-7ft to the eve of the roof. They would have had two rooms inside with possibly a half loft that was accessed by a ladder or a straight stair. The out houses such as piggery or cow houses, were low small, and thatched.

A ‘Disused living house’ in Bantry, 1935. In West Cork, it was common practice to tie the thatch down, due to extreme weather of the region.
A dwelling in Glengarriff, 1935. This house is whitewashed and mortared, and shows what many farmers houses would have looked like when lived in.

However, there were also many other houses in the area around 1840. These tended to be small one-roomed cottages built with stone or more often with mud or turf with rough thatched roofs. Some of these buildings had chimneys although many didn’t. The people who lived in these houses lived precarious lives, the land on which they built their huts was the property of the tenant farmer, and sometimes they worked for the farmer and leased a small potato patch from the farmer to feed their own families. These huts were sometimes built along the roadside or on common land. Looking at the original OS map of Lissaclarig there is clear evidence of a small clachan or grouping of small houses in Lissaclarig West to the south of the small ringfort or lios that still stands today. It appears likely that there were at least a dozen if not more houses in an area which after the famine had three family farmhouses.


This image of a settlement in Inchinossig (1935) might be able to give us insight into what the clochán in Lissaclarig looked like.

Looking closely at the OS maps from the 1840’s and 1890’s it becomes clear there are many other houses that existed in the area before the Great Famine that have disappeared in the later versions of the map in the late 19th century.

In the space of 50 years, we can see the number of buildings reduce by more than half.

The fact that they have left such a light impression on the landscape such that they have completely disappeared and there are no traces of them on the ground today is testament to the poor quality of these houses that were produced cheaply by poor people without the funds to create more permanent homes. One would like to hope that these people survived the Great Famine or got safely away to America or Liverpool or London, but one fears that many of them ended up in the Abbey Cemetry in the mass grave opened up during the Great Famine.

Footnotes

  • The maps were sourced from the ordnance survey of Ireland, using their ‘GeoHive’.
  • All photographs were found on duchas.ie, from their photograph collection.
  • The photo of ‘Harringtons Hut’ came from The Illustrated London News.

Who owned the land?

This is a picture of my family home in the 1980s. It seems like every farmer was approached to buy an aerial photo at that time…

Growing up as I did in this house in the 1960s and 70s, I was never in any doubt as to who owned the land. Fitzgeralds, Collins’, Sheilys, O’Regans, O’Mahoneys, and Whooleys were our neighbours, their land bounded ours. It seemed to me that this sense of ownership was a timeless thing. And yet for the majority of history the people who worked the land didn’t own it, there were always landlords, and not just in the times since the 17th century but back before that time to where the land was owned by the Gaelic chieftains of the area.

So, what’s the earliest we can go? Our townland is called Lissaclarig, it is one of eight townlands in the ancient parish of Kilcoe. The O’Driscolls, the lords of Baltimore, owned the land of Kilcoe alongside the McCarthys. We have a good idea of their story from the 1500s onwards and can make a fairly clear link between them and our townland.

Ordnance survey map of Lissaclarig East & West, County Cork

The last of the O’Driscoll lords in the area was Sir Fineen O’Driscoll. Fineen had given his fealty to Queen Elizabeth I and was granted the title Sir Fineen in return. He was a politically savvy individual and kept on the winning side of many political conflicts of the time, including the Desmond rebellion (1579-1583). After the battle of Kinsale in 1601 however, he found himself on the losing side, having supported the Spaniards when they landed at Kinsale and Castlehaven. He still managed to negotiate a deal and managed to hold onto his lands. However, he was financially stretched and mortgaged his estates which finally ended up in the hands of Sir Walter Coppinger.

Sir Walter’s son Dominic is recorded as the owner of the townland in the 1640s. The fortunes of the Coppingers ebbed and flowed during the 1600s. After the 1641 rebellion and the arrival of the Cromwellians in 1649, they were in a difficult position, given their royalist affiliations. They still managed to hold onto their land through passing it on to another branch of the family who were more politically aligned to the powers that be. However, the family lost the ownership of Lissaclarig after backing the wrong side in the Williamite wars (1689-1691). As a result, the new owners of the land became the Beecher family based in Aughadown House a few miles to the south. The Beechers were on the winning side of that conflict, Colonel Thomas Beecher of Aughadown was aide-de-camp to King William at the Battle of the Boyne.

The Beechers held the land for well over a century during which time the population of the townland greatly increased. It was during this time that many of the fields that are in place today were laid out – a period that saw the growth of the potato as a staple crop. This era also saw a move from pasture to tillage which meant that there were smaller units more intensively farmed that they had been previously.

The Beechers sublet their estate to middlemen and the intermediate owner of Lissaclarig in the 1830s was Samuel Levis. The ancestors of many of the families who still live in the townland today paid their rents to Samuel Levis on the two galedays (rent payment days) of the 25th of March and the 29th of September.

In the early 1850s, the Beecher brothers fell into financial difficulties and their land was sold through the Encumbered Estates court. As a result, the land came into the ownership of Samuel Jagoe, the last landlord in Lissaclarig.

From the 1880s onwards, a series of land acts made it possible for sitting tenants to buy their farms. In the case of our farm, that didn’t happen until 1923.