There was a great famine in Ireland in the years 1846 and '47. It affected the district very much. The old people still point out sites of houses occupied in the time of the famine and they are now in ruins. There is the remains of one house in Corkishduff which was called the "Stirabout house" and the reason why it got that name was because the people that lived in it that time supplied porridge to the people.
The potatoes decayed in the ground and they were not worth digging. If a man went out to dig potatoes he would not get a bucketful in the day.
The food that the people had in the time of the famine was raw tops of turnips, and nettles and dandelions and they were got dead in hundreds lying in fields and on the side of roads with their mouths facing the grass where they died when eating it.