School: Drumatemple (C.) (roll number 7055)

Location:
Drumatemple, Co. Roscommon
Teacher:
Treasa, Bean Uí Chuinn
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The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0260, Page 308

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The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0260, Page 308

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  3. XML “Famine Times”

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  1. In "Black"" '46 and '47 a shower of hail-stones fell in July and beat all crops to the ground. Men were making the road from Farm to Ballymoe when the shower of hail-stones fell. The water rose so quickly that the men's tools were swept into the River Suck about a mile away. The work-men ran to the houses near by. The water rose so high that they had to stand on the tables in the houses.
    After this the Famine came. It swept families away. At that time there was only one donkey cart in this district owned by Mr Micheal Green, Bookla. That donkey and cart often went five times to Killcroan graveyard every day with the dead. It was driven by Mr Edward Fallon, Cloonee. The sick were stretched on the floor on "wads" of straw. When one of them would die a neighbour would push in a coffin. Then the sick would turn it on its side and scramble the corpse into it. A sheet was wrapped round the corpse because there were no habits at that time.
    In the year '45 there was an abundant crop. Potatoes were piled in heaps against ditches in the field. A horse crate filled was bought for 10d. The children were pulling the bloosoms off the heaps of potatoes in Clonee farm when they were going to school. In Knockcdonell farm some people rooted out some of the stalks that
    (continues on next page)
    Transcribed by a member of our volunteer transcription project.
    Topics
    1. time
      1. historical periods by name (~25)
        1. the great famine (~4,013)
    Language
    English
    Collector
    Janie Mc Neill
    Address
    Cloonadarragh, Co. Galway