School: Cloonacool (roll number 4802)
- Location:
- Cloonacool, Co. Sligo
- Teacher: Seán Ó Blioscáin
Archival Reference
The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0171, Page 109
Image and data © National Folklore Collection, UCD.
See copyright details.
DownloadOpen data
Available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
- XML School: Cloonacool
- XML Page 109
- XML “Notes - The Famine”
Note: We will soon deprecate our XML Application Programming Interface and a new, comprehensive JSON API will be made available. Keep an eye on our website for further details.
On this page
- Judging by the results of inquiries made by the pupils the famine does not seem to have made a very deep impression on the people of this locality. Most of the scholars got no account of it from their parents or grandparents. And the accounts brought by the others were only of a general nature - just the few facts that can be picked up from history books. Only in one case was anything of a special kind brought in.
Patrick Mullarkey of Raforra (?) was able to give us some recollections of his grandfather. There was nothing very new in these - the old man did not seem to have retained any vivid memories of the time. An incident impressed itself so much on his mind that the picture always remained with him. On the same street with him lived a farmer whose wife was one of the victims of the Famine. Old Mullarkey saw the bereaved husband taking out his donkey in the dusk of an evening. He fixed the two creels on the animal, then going into the house he brought out his dead wife in his arms and placed her across the creels - the feet on one creel and the head supported by a bundle of hay on the other. He then mounted himself behind the creels (?) - he was unable to walk and go he brought his sad burden to the graveyard more than three miles away. Old Mullarkey always asserted that the cholera did not appear in this locality. He could not speak for the district on the far side of Tubbercurry; he was quite(continues on next page)
