Mayo Gems: Hennigan’s Heritage Centre a must visit

In his 'Mayo Gems' series, Tom Gillespie is focusing on some well-known and less well-known locations in Mayo where, hopefully, readers can visit post coronavirus. This week he visits Killasser.

FOR a really authentic trip down memory lane, post Covid-19, a visit to the outstanding Hennigan's Heritage Centre in Killasser, overlooking Creagaballa Lake some 6.5 kilometres from Swinford, is a must if you want a flavour of days gone by.

The centre tells the story of the lives of local people over the past 200 years.

And proprietor, historian and tour guide Tom Hennigan will have you enthralled with historical facts, poetry, prose and folklore as he paints a vivid picture of how our ancestors lived in harsher times.

Tom is the sixth generation of his family to live on this small 10-acre farm. Back in the early 1990s, Tom, who had seven children with his wife, Katherine, wasn’t sure if he would also be the man who sold the family farm as making a living from his small holding was becoming more and more difficult.

That’s when teacher Peter Casby from Davitt College, Castlebar, suggested that he use his deep interest in the history and archaeology of the local area to convert his farm into a heritage centre.

In 1991 students from Davitt College constructed models that depict the landscape within a five-mile radius of the museum.

The location of the centre, though remote, is worth the effort to hear Tom give a 90-minute commentary on life in the three-roomed thatched cottage where he was born and a tour of the heritage centre which houses hundreds of artefacts from years gone by - including a shovel crafted by my uncle, blacksmith Denny Fahey, from Castlebar.

You can visit the cottage and adjoining museum where all the implements and tools from the blacksmith to the cobbler, from the carpenter to the dressmaker and objects that cover just about every aspect of country life in Ireland in the last few hundred years are on display. And Tom has a story to go with each object.

He also had a schoolhouse with the original text books and the old desks which seated the pupils.

There are articles from the old Swinford workhouse and railway station as well as a poitin still.

Tom said: "I was born and reared here. I am the sixth generation of the Hennigans that lived here. The family has been here for nearly 200 years.

"This is a small holding of 10 acres of land and we realised in 1990 with the demands coming from Europe that we no longer had a future farming here. We tried to save it by opening it to the public. This is the last small holding of land still surviving.

"My grandmother was born in 1876 and she died in 1964 and I knew her for the guts of 11 years and much of the information I have came from her and other old people I have recorded in the region.

"I start by telling the story of the house itself. I lived here until 1970 when the cooking was still done on the open fire."