Blackmountain: The ancestral townland and home of Seán Mac Diarmada's cousins

By Patrick McDermott

Life in rural Ireland in any townland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was far from easy. There were few opportunities for any kind of work outside farming. And few were the farmers who could remunerate anybody to help on the farm.
We are in danger of forgetting the struggle these people had to eke out a living from the reluctant soil, which only answered to the best weather conditions and even then, only too frequently in a poor fashion.
By painstakingly tracing the routine of the seasonal tasks like putting in the potatoes, saving the turf and hay, Patrick Mc Dermott gives us a memorable account of their lives in Blackmountain.
But, he does much more than that: he gives us the names of the last inhabitants of the whole area which was popularly known as Dubh; asks why rural Ireland should be left behind; considers the influence of the Catholic Church, the EU, the future of agriculture and a host of other topics.
Blackmountain is also, significantly, the ancestral townland and home of Seán Mac Diarmada, executed after the Easter Uprising in 1916, and the author discusses the often conflicted attitudes of the inhabitants to this great Irish patriot.
This book is a veritable mine of information for everybody, but especially for emigrants who may look back nostalgically on their early days in Blackmountain.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Jun 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781398401396

Patrick McDermott

The author, Patrick Mc Dermott, is a third cousin of Seán Mac Diarmada, the 1916 Easter Rising leader who was one of the signatories to the Proclamation of Irish Independence. Patrick was born in the townland of Blackmountain, which is the ancestral townland and home of Seán Mac Diarmada’s people. He grew up doing the same farming tasks as Seán Mac Diarmada’s relatives, namely, John and Bizzie Mc Dermott, who remained in the ancestral home, when other members of the family moved to Corranmore, nearer Kiltyclogher. This is where Seán Mac Diarmada was born.

Book preview

Families in Blackmountain during 1930–1950

House No. 1

Mc Dermott (Known as the Eddies)

Parents: Eddie and Kate.

Children: Baby, Celia, Maggie, Nora, Susan, Rosaleen, Sonny, Jim, Gerald, Keven, Michael.

House No. 2

Mc Dermott (Known as the Donalds – Seán Mac Diarmada’s people)

Parents: Daniel (known as ould Daniel) and wife (name unknown).

Children: Thomas, John, Beezie, Francie, Mary. (Possibly more.)

House No. 3

Moore (Lived by the river on Moore’s Hill)

Parents: Christopher and Margaret.

Children: Kit, Jimmy, Nixon, Bob, Susan, Dora, Kate. (Kit went to the USA. Susan and Dora moved away, not sure where and Kate married Bob Hughdie in Barrs. They were Protestant. Johnny Kilkenny, still with us, claims Mickie Donald Bhig (a cousin of Seán Mac Diarmada) was originally in Moore’s place but that he was moved further down Blackmountain to a smaller farm where we knew his son known as Johnny Dermott who was married to Rose Ellen. Johnny died in 1950 and Rose Ellen moved into Manorhamilton. Mickie had two brothers who went to America and weren’t heard about for years until a fellow called Devanney from Glencar came home and told he saw them. I saw a letter written in 1993 from Mickie to them describing the hard life he had under the Landlord Aljoe. The three Moores, Bob, Nixon, and Jimmy who remained at home are central to the John Donald story.)

House No. 4

Clancy

Parents: Johnny and Mary.

Children: Mary Ellen, Bridget, Kate, Lizzie, Tessie, Paddy, John, Michael. (All except Lizzie emigrated to the USA.)

House No. 5

Mc Dermott

Parents: Farrell and Nora (Keaney from Glenfarne).

Children: Farrell, Cormac, Thomas, John, Ann, Bridget and two girls who died of TB. (John remained in Blackmountain and married Ellen O’ Rourke from Glenague and they had two sons John and Denis. John married Mary Mc Morrow and they had five children – Patrick, Annie, Seán, Hubert and Denis.)

House No. 6

Walsh

Parents: Owen and Catherine. (Owen was known as Oweney Power among the neighbours because he was so strong that he was able to carry two stones for the brace in the house from the Barrs’ quarry when the man with him failed to carry his. He was also reputed to have got between the shafts of a cart in Blacklion where he was selling pigs having the loan of a horse from a man who fell out with him and took the horse from him. He is reputed to have pulled it the whole way home. This was the age when physical strength and endurance were in much demand. He was related to Mary Ann Kilkenny (née Mc Manus).)

Children: One son, John.

House No. 7

Kilkenny

Parents: Oweney and Ann Mc Dermott from Barrs.

Children: Johnny, Tommy, Paddy and Ann. (Tommy married Mary Ann Thomas Tady (Mc Manus) and they had five children: Johnny, Paddy, Oweney, Mary Alice, Annie.)

House No. 8

Walsh

Parents: James (cobbler) and Mariah.

Children: One daughter, Lilly. (Lilly married Jimmy Cormac Mc Sharry and had five children: Maura, Betty, Sarah, Annabelle, Shane. James died first and Mariah and Jimmy died about the same time after which Lilly moved to Camderry where Jimmy’s brother lived.)

House No. 9

Walsh

Parents: Tommy and Ann (Mc Sharry).

Children: Tom, Jimmy, Pa, Mary, Margaret (Babby).

House No. 10

Clancy

Joe (a bachelor).

House No. 11

Parents: Johnny and Rose Ellen. (Johnny is a cousin of Seán Mac Diarmada and is known as Johnny Donald bhig. His father was Mickie Donald Bhig. They had no family but Larry Feeney and Keven Cleary lived with them for a period.)

House No. 12

Mc Morrow

Parents: Dinny and Anne.

Children: Owen, John (who went to Australia), Maggie, Mary, Patrick, Denis

House No. 13

Burns

Parents: Tommy and Ann (Kilkenny).

Children: A large family, all of whom died of TB except Mary who Married Tommy Cullen from Corranmore, Seán Mac Diarmada country.

House No. 14

Mc Morrow

Parents: John & Bridget.

Children: Michael Joseph, Thomas Hugh, Charles, Patrick, Mary, John, Martin.

Maps: Manorhamilton and environs

Map of area of Leitrim around Manorhamilton taken from Atlas and cyclopedia of Ireland (1900), p.181. (Source: Wikimedia Commons.)

Map of the area of Blackmountain and Lissnagroagh.

Key

Road to Kiltyclogher.

Ruins of the ancestral home of Sean Mac Diarmada in Blackmountain. (His cousins John and Bizzie Donald were the last residents).

Moore’s House.

Laneway into the ruins.

Jack Hughie Dinny’s (Mc Morrow) gateway entrance to Blackmountain.

Corr na bhfeannóg river.

Road to Manorhamilton.

Introduction

There are 640,000 townlands in Ireland. Most are of Gaelic origin, predate the Norman invasion and have names of Irish origin. However, some townlands, names and boundaries come from Norman manors, plantation divisions, or late creations of the Ordnance Survey. This is the smallest unit of land division in the country, but it is the most important as it is the area where the huge population of over eight million were squeezed in prior to 1847, the year the great famine commenced. It often happened that when a new member got married, he was given a few acres in a corner of the farm and a hastily-built shack to get him started in his new life.

In this book I’m attempting to describe the way of life of such a people in one of those townlands, namely, Blackmountain, which is situated between Manorhamilton and Kiltyclogher, five miles from the former and three miles from the latter, near the old school, Twanyinshinagh, where Hubert Mc Morrow now lives.

But this is not just any old townland. It is the ancestral townland and home of Seán Mac Diarmada’s people. Seán, as many know, was the second signatory of the proclamation of the 1916 Rebellion in Ireland, an event which was a watershed not just in Ireland but all over the world. It inspired people everywhere to shake off the yoke of slavery and imperialism and seek independence. Seán has been described as the mind of the 1916 Rebellion – that without him the rebellion would not have happened. He recruited and organized those who took part in it.

The Mac Diarmada family in 1890. Sean is in the middle row, on the extreme left

There was no omen when Patrick Donald Mc Dermott left Blackmountain at the end of the eighteenth century to start a new life in Laghty Barr, Corranmore, close to Kiltyclogher and County Fermanagh that a son of the clan would one day die so that Ireland might live, as Seán himself put it.

But the emphasis is otherwise than on Seán in this book, noble though his deeds have been. His relatives who were left behind in Blackmountain eking a bare living on poor land and the neighbours among whom they lived is what this book is about.

I grew up among them in the early years of the twentieth century and shared their trials and tribulations and engaged in the daily tasks of subsistence farming. They shaped my early years. I thank them for that.

I am not making any judgements on a great people who inhabited my native townland, Blackmountain, and the surrounding townlands for centuries. Without any pretentiousness on my part, I am simply telling the story of their struggle to survive in a bleak landscape on poor soil in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

I try to place this story in the great onward thrust of the human race towards some destiny which we all hope will be perfect happiness. I deal with the influence of the Catholic Church, the future of agriculture, and the evolutionary process in general which most of us are agreed is carrying us along towards some final destiny which, with our present knowledge, we can only speculate about.

We are all living the mystery, as Dom Mark Patrick Hederman OSB of Glenstall Abbey tells us in his latest book.

I wish to thank all my neighbours who encouraged me to tell their story and are happy to see their names in the story.

A prime purpose of this book is to ensure that the people of Blackmountain will not be forgotten and it is my great wish that all their relatives, wherever they may be, will enjoy reading about their ancestral townland.

The tombstone of Donald and Mary Mc Dermott, Seán’s father and mother

Chapter One

Blackmountain in the past

To live in Ireland, any part of it, not just Leitrim, or specifically Blackmountain, is to be confined by the mérin ditch. This is the boundary fence between farms. Good fences make good neighbours is an often-heard dictum in the countryside.

Any well-to-do farmer, as my mother Mary Hughie Dinny was wont to say, must be up early in the morning so that everything is alright and that no trespassing is taking place. Those slounging in bed – another phrase of hers – would be ate out of it if the fences were not up to scratch and the animals would be removed before they got up. Of course, if you were a good tracker you could see the evidence when you’d rise and go out and look about you, but it would be too late then as the damage would be done and since you didn’t actually see them thieving you couldn’t be dead sure whose stock they were.

The original name of the townland of Blackmountain was Cnoc na raithní (the hill of the fern). Cnoc na ceárta (the hill of the forge) was the Irish name for Moore’s land. The folklore is that it was the result of two landlords falling out with one another that brought about the name Blackmountain when one suggested to the other that all he had got was a black mountain. And so the name stuck. We frequently used Fernhill when writing home.

Since there was no industry in the country, especially in the Manorhamilton-Glenfarne-Kiltyclocher area – except for a button factory in the former and a few jobs on the railroad and County Council and in Killasnet Creamery – everyone was dependent on their twenty-odd acres and their two to six cows for a living. In the twenties and thirties there was much talk about ditching with the loy (spade) and the graip* (fork) and this was usually done in the winter and early spring. It was heavy work. You had to build up the sods high on one side so that a beast wouldn’t be able to climb up. It had to be high enough on the other side so that the beast would balk at throwing himself down. It was a huge task to keep the ditches in good repair and if there was not a good understanding between neighbours there would be continual feuds and recourse to law. Any wealth a man accumulated had to come from the land. There was no other way. Hence the greed for land.

Loy

At the end of the nineteenth century the land acts gave more freedom to the landowners, but it was still hardship. The demand note and the receivable order were two documents feared in every house. There was a valuation on every piece of land no matter how poor the quality.

Since the cow was the standard of judgement, it was always a question of how many cows you had. An eight cows or ten cows place would be considered a big farm. Most people sent milk to the creamery. A creamery cheque of £10 a month would be considered a lot of money, but the snag was the cows milked well for only four or for five months, if even that. People were always short of grass, as they called it. If it was slow in coming in the spring (and some years it was slower than usual), it compounded the problems. It was said that old hay was old gold so any left over from the previous year came in useful for the following year if you had to keep the cows in longer to give the grass a chance to grow. A lot of people were overstocked and the cows were bare, going out from seven months feeding on poor quality hay with a lot of sprat and rushes in it, with but the odd sheaf of corn for the barest of them. There were no fertilisers of course except for the odd bag of sulphate of ammonia for the potatoes. Grass grew with whatever the sun, the moisture and the weather in general managed to coax out of the reluctant earth. As they used to say, the hens only laid when the birds of the air were laying and the grass only grew when nature answered to the most favourable weather conditions. Were it not that nature kept renewing itself, the people would not have been able to feed themselves.

The one consoling factor was that almost everyone was in the same boat, except that some people did have better quality land and more acreage. Little did they know then that the world would change, and the lot of the farmer would even get worse, if that were possible. Of course, not everyone was equally industrious, and many people failed to grow enough potatoes to feed the family and were in dire straits every spring when they had no potatoes for dinner, not to speak of seed potatoes for the following year. Looking back now, one is inclined to blame them for finding themselves in the lurch, which they frequently were. You’d imagine they should have the foresight and industry to see to it that they would have enough potatoes to see them through the whole year. Now, it wasn’t that easy to grow potatoes. Some people hadn’t the land for potatoes, as they used to say. There was very little clay land in the Dubh area, so people were depending on patches of moss which were cut-away bog. This was excellent for potatoes and other vegetables, especially cabbage and carrots.

Some of the Dubh people used to go down to John Larry’s (Mc Dermott) on the lower road near Thompson’s to set their potatoes. They would have been given so many ridges such a length, as they used to describe it. They might have to bring down the cow dung if they had any to spare, which wasn’t always the case because there were so many demands for it like top dressing the meadows to increase hay yield. They would have to give so many days’ work in lieu of pay. No money changed hands simply because there was no money. Families were big and there was no way of making money because there were no jobs around. The cycle could begin with putting in the potatoes, as they called it.

Most people had no horse, so they had to rely on the little black or grey donkey and pardóga (panniers) to put out the manure. The pardóga were usually made of wood/sallies and a bottom that was hinged with two pieces of leather and two loops of wire which could be released to drop the dung. It would be very messy to put the dung out in the ordinary creel because you would have to lift it off and dump it and you would need a second person to hold the other creel or it would topple over. So, the pardóga were the first hydraulic tippers down on the farm.

This job of putting out the dung with the donkeys and pardóga was frequently left to the boys in the family when they came home from school. It was heavy and dirty work, no matter how careful you were, so their hands and clothes would be filthy and often they were barefoot and had oighear (inflamed skin) on their legs so they suffered doing the job of getting the potatoes in. The better-off people might have a dray for the donkey. This could be pulled along the ground, but it took a strong donkey to pull it, especially if the ground was bumpy. Between hopping and trotting, another phrase of my mother, they somehow got the work done.

It was said that a good man would cover a hundredweight of seed in a day. It was also said that a good man would mow a half-acre of meadow in a day with a scythe. The mowing with the scythe and the coping (turning the sod) with the loy was brutal hard work. You got blisters on your hands and hacks on your fingers with the wet and cold spring air.

Rural Ireland was exemplified in the townland of Blackmountain, ancestral home of the Seán Mac Diarmada clan. The Dubh area generally was just typical of any rural area in Ireland in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Almost everyone was eking a living from the soil. Even as late as 1950 there were 350,000 farmers in the country. This fact helps us to understand the attachment to the land. It was the land that sustained our ancestors during all those thousands of years when they were foragers wandering all over the planet searching for something to eat. And it was still doing that in the early twentieth century. But things were changing; imperceptibly for most people, but nevertheless changing.

Like many others I don’t like change. I wanted our rural life to remain static. I thought our neighbours, the Clancys, the Moores, the Donalds, the Eddies and all the others in proximity, would be with us always. Nobody was to die. After all, they had been there for the last twenty years. Hadn’t they been there since I was capable of knowing of their presence?

Why should things change? This was the youthful simplicity of my thinking. I can’t ever forget them. I witnessed all of them at their daily chores and I sometimes lent a hand. There was something about them – a resilience that gladdened my heart. I carted out the dung for John Donald in April 1953 and my father coped the last potato crop that he ever set. They were never dug and the flattened ridges can still be seen in the garden at the back of the house to this day.

In moments of reverie I can see the contours of all their farms in my mind’s eye as clearly as if I was there and all the names of the fields. I often ask myself is this a penance I have to bear for all the sins of my youthful years in that dark townland, Blackmountain, with its back to the sun. Equally, I can visualise all the nearcuts through their lands – down by Eddie’s, Hugh Kilkenny’s, and across by Bob Nixon’s, and over by Tobar and yet again down from the line by Dolan’s. Talk about landscape – it’s all there in my mind’s eye.

Contemplating the future, one has to face the inevitable. The memory of this mountainy people will fade into the annals of history. Their humble abodes will be smothered in blankets of afforestation. No amount of nostalgia will bring them back. Unlike the Blasket islanders off the Kerry coast, whose literary output assured that they wouldn’t be forgotten, the people of Blackmountain and surrounding area have no such assurance.

Dubh mountain

* These and other Irish terms are explained in the Glossary at the end of the book.

Chapter Two

My family

I was born in my granny’s house on the banks of the Corr na bhfeannóg river which rises in Healy’s askey at the foot of Thor mountain and winds its way down till it eventually flows into Lough Mc Nean in Glenfarne village. The date was the 27th March 1934. I was christened Patrick Joseph – Patrick, because it was the month of March and the feast day of one of our patron saints, Saint Patrick, was celebrated all over the world on the 17th March; Joseph after the carpenter, Saint Joseph, partner of the Virgin Mary.

My father was known as Wee John, although he was six foot, and his father as Big John, although he was much short of the ideal height, simply because he was his father. His son then had to be Wee John and the name stuck to him although he was destined to grow taller than his father.

My father, Wee John (Mc Dermott), married his neighbour Mary Hughie Dinny (Mc Morrow), the eldest of 13 in the family of Hughie Dinny Phaidí and Rose