The ‘levelling of Bracknagh’ and famine-time eviction in Offaly

PHOTO: Dr Ciarán Reilly

In June 1851, 169 years ago this month as the Great Famine came to an end, Charles Trench, agent for the second baron Ashtown, oversaw the clearance of over 700 people from the village of Bracknagh, close to the King’s County/Kildare border.

In the process, Trench’s team of ‘wreckers’ completely decimated the landscape forever. Despite the obvious desolation caused by the clearance, somewhat curiously the event was not recorded in either local or national newspapers. Likewise, at nearby Hollywood House the local rector John Plunket Joly had little to say about the clearances remarking only in his diary on 20 June that ‘most of the houses of Bracknagh were pulled down’. Thereafter, the clearance of Bracknagh faded from popular social memory as the inhabitants of the village were scattered throughout the country and elsewhere.

This year marks the 175th anniversary of the Great Irish Famine, which began following the arrival of potato blight (or phytophthora infestans) in August 1845. Despite the passage of time and all that has been written in the intervening period, there is still much to learn and understand about what happened during those years. One area which is worthy of further examination is that of eviction. Associated with the Famine more than anything, historians have long concerned themselves with ascertaining the exact numbers who were evicted. For many, the accepted figure is close to 250,000 families, or a million people.

For a variety of reasons, King’s County was one of the counties most affected by eviction and clearance, particularly during the years 1849-1851.

The continued failure of the potato crop by 1849 placed landlord and tenant alike in an even more precarious situation. By August of that year, according to Lydia Goodbody of Clara there was ‘scarcely a green potato stalk to be seen’ in King’s County. The same writer also noted that ‘every living animal is disappearing from around the cottages; there being no food for them so that pigs and fowl of all kinds become scarce’. Moreover, heavy frost and rain in King’s County had a disastrous effect on the harvest of 1849 and a depression in agricultural prices followed. In that year alone King’s County had the highest rate of eviction in Leinster when some 619 families, numbering 3,255 individuals were evicted. That increased in 1850.

Eviction was a feature of daily life in King’s County since the Famine commenced. Significantly in King’s County, it was not just large landowners who were evicting tenants.

They included, for example, in December 1846 Joseph Dwyer a Dublin merchant who owned just twenty-five acres near Parsonstown (Birr) evicted fifteen families amounting to over 100 people.

At Moneygall, the agent Stephen W. Minchin carried out a number of evictions on his brother’s estate at Cooraclevin but did allow the evicted tenants the growing crops in an effort to encourage them to emigrate.

Many of the tenants owed upwards of three years rent. The scenario was somewhat similar with the middlemen. Largely because they had themselves rents and arrears to pay, middlemen were often less sympathetic to the plight of their under tenants.

In June 1846, for example, a middleman near Shinrone took matters into his own hands and forcibly evicted his under tenants setting fire to their cabins.

In December 1848 George Greeson oversaw the removal of thirty-one families at Lemanaghan, near Ballycumber while levelling five houses in the process. Of those evicted twenty-six families were subsequently allowed to re-enter their properties as caretakers.

Many of these tenants had not paid rent for three to five years. At the townlands of Newtown and Fadden, near Parsonstown, eighty-two families were evicted in one month alone. In the village of Crinkle, where arrears amounted to almost £209, one quarter of the tenants were given notice to quit. Tenants at Lumcloon, where their plight was exacerbated by their failure to plant crops during 1848 as it had been lost to flood the previous winter, were also removed.

In March 1849, twenty-seven families, comprising 126 people, were evicted from Forelacka, Kinnitty for arrears of rent. Two months later at George Walpole’s estate at Glosterbeg, near Brosna twenty families were evicted. Henry Sheane evicted tenants at the Bell estate at Banagher who were over five years in arrears and were deemed ‘unsatisfactory tenants as their buildings were very much dilapidated’. In 1850 A.L. Bride, a small landowner in the south of the county evicted forty-eight families and levelled eight houses.

These were the evictions that generated interest and publicity from local newspapers and elsewhere. Yet, there were other evictions which went unnoticed. These included the eviction of six families at the Westenra estate at Sharavogue; eight families on the O’Moore estate at Cloghan; six families on the Bennett estate at Annaghmore and five families on the Cox estate at Clara among hundreds of others.

These are just a sample of the evictions carried out in King’s County during the Famine, forming part of the quarter of a million homesteads which were destroyed. Evictions in King’s County continued unabated in 1853. Throughout the county over 100 families, consisting of over 600 or more people were evicted. The evictors included Lord Ashtown, Andrew Gamble, the Revd J. Alexander, A.W. Maxwell, A. Burchal, Andrew Armstrong, Sergeant Green, Mrs Hutchinson, John Pilkington, J.H. Drought, J.C. Westenra, Lord Rosse and Henry Kemmis.

Another landlord called Winter evicted thirty-one families some of which subsequently emigrated to Australia.

Yet, for each of these examples we know little of the individual plight of those who were evicted or their families. In this, the 175th anniversary of the Great Famine, it's time to begin to explore these local issues further. Going back to the ‘levelling of Bracknagh’ in 1851, while some local lore poured scorn on the Trenchs nothing survives of the inhabitants who were obliterated.

Dr Ciarán Reilly from Edenderry is an historian of 19th & 20th Century Irish History at Maynooth University.