School: Dún Gar (Frenchpark) (roll number 3961)

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1. South of Portahard are Ráth Fhallaigh and Cloigearnach (continued)

   

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   had seized all the cattle for the previous May gale. The donkeys were having a rest, the straddles were hanging on their pegs in the gables, the bottoms were rotting out of the cleeves, the children were crying with hunger.
   I saw them for I was in our own bog for a load of turf with the donkey
   and cart. It was the month of October 1902, a terrible year for rain. Every place was flooded, the floods submerged the roads, but old Thady Callaghan brought out the turf for me in cleeves on his back. When I was ready, he told me wait. He got his donkey, put on the straddle, hung on the two cleeves,
   filled them, and sent his eldest son John to town with them and told him not sell them less than 2/=. In the ordinary course of events they would be sold for 3d or 4d but owing to the orders against selling turf, and to the floods there wasn't a sod in Frenchpark. The pair of us started off. We had reached halfway to where the flood from the river had put a field 4 feet under the road level at that spot under water, had backed up the big mearing drain and flooded the fields on the other side and had submerged
   the road between them to a depth of perhaps [?] 4 inches though I
   thought in my terror coming through that it was as many feet, when we
   met the bailiff's eldest son coming home from Frenchpark with his
   brown leggings covering his nether limbs, a fine overcoat on him, a
   muffler

   (continues on next page)

   

   Transcribed by a member of our volunteer transcription project.

   History Edit

   Languages

   Irish

   English

   Location

   Raheely, Co. Roscommon