Journey To Dungloe: Part Three

The Four Hundred Year Old Wee House

In Creeslough, a slightly bigger town than Church Hill, we stopped at a small grocery store where the owner was working the till. We said we were looking for any Toners about, and he called over a customer to help him answer our request. No Toners around here anymore, the customer said; the last ones died some time ago, and the rest immigrated. But go out to Nat Russell’s farm; he’ll know where they lived. The directions to the farm were to turn left at the big stone house, the last one in the town, and follow the road to a fork where there’s a huge boulder. Take the left fork and keep on until you see the Russell van; they do building work, and their name is on the van.

We found Mr. Russell at home, a lively man in his mid-70s, wearing knee high rubber boots and working clothes. Follow me, he said, I’ll show you where the last of the Toners lived, Hannah and her brother Billy. Sweet-natured people, he called them. He walked quickly up the road – no more than a strip of pavement barely wide enough for one car -- and we followed in the car. He showed us an empty lot between a large cow barn and a big tool shed. Their wee stone house stood here, he said; it was 400 years old, that house and barely big enough for a tiny kitchen and a small room for two beds. They lived here until they died.

Hannah and Billy were the last of the Toners in Creeslough district. They died at advanced ages in the 1960s, after selling the small farm in the 1950s on the mountainside where my great grandmother was born. They spent 40 years in Philadelphia, but returned home when they retired. They had inherited the farm, and perhaps they were Mary Toner’s niece and nephew. I want to see the farm, I said, and asked Nat Russell for directions. But there’s no way to get up there now, he said, except by a hard long climb. The roads are gone.

Ireland had eight million people before the 1845 famine, and only three million by the time my great grandparents left Ireland in the 1880s. Died of hunger or sorrow, or immigrated, and most never returned. The countryside is still depopulated, especially in Donegal; Ireland’s population is only four million now, with one-third in Dublin. We drove as far as we could towards Gortnalecky, the farm tenanted by Mary’s parents; along the thin strip of road that Nat Russell told us used to be a cow path when he was a boy. The fields stretched empty and green with low grasses, all the way to the purple Muckish Mountain standing straight up from the fields as if cut out and placed there, sharp against the sky. It was the most beautiful place I’d seen in Ireland. There was nearly absolute quiet, strange in a place that obviously used to be farmland. We stopped the car at the turnoff for Gortnalecky, and gazed towards the far distance, where the farm would have been. There was no road now. I imagined this place humming with life and work and people, 170 years ago. People fled this place for their lives. I wonder if they longed for it again, from their tenements in Philadelphia.

It was nearly eight in the evening when we drove the five miles back to Creeslough. Nat Russell said that it would have been too far to walk to church or school, from Mary’s farm; they would have gone to church for special holy days only, and Mary would not have gone to school. We stopped at the Corn Cutters Rest for dinner, a restaurant that had been in operation for a hundred years; the haddock and mackerel chowder was the best either of us had ever had. Our dinners came with mountains of potatoes: seven large scoops of potatoes for each of us. One hundred and seventy years after the potato blight wiped out Ireland’s potato crop and up to a third of the people died all the restaurants we visited piled on the potatoes at every meal. We’ll never be hungry again! The whole country seemed to say.

The next morning we stopped at the Creeslough cemetery; Ken found Hannah Toner’s grave, with lettering already so faded that he had to trace out the words with his finger. The stone was tilted and moss-covered, although it was just fifty years old. There were no family left to care for the grave; by the time she died, at age 89, most of her friends would have been dead too. The graves were laid out in a way I saw in other Irish graveyards: each stone was set at the head of a large rectangle made of iron railings, so that it looked like a bedstead without a mattress. That night, I dreamed that I was Hannah, lying six feet deep and sensing my great great niece sitting by the grave.

We were only a few miles to the Atlantic; did Mary and James ever walk there to see it, far below the cliffs? Before we got to the coast, we saw a cow standing in a wood; it was at least double normal size; it dwarfed the others in the herd. I thought it was a giant cow statue, until it moved.

To be continued next week...