Mayo Gems: Doolough – scene of Famine tragedy

With the lifting of the Covid-19 travel restrictions, Tom Gillespie's Mayo Gems series focuses on some well known and other less well-known 'hidden gem' locations in Mayo, where, hopefully, readers can visit and enjoy. This week we visit Doolough.

WHEN you are mobile again, and can travel uninhibited, one trip I would advise is to Doolough (Black Lake) Pass, beyond Louisburgh, between Mweelrea Mountain and the Sheeffry Hills, the scene of a horrible tragedy during the Famine.

There, two memorials mark the spot as a reminder of one of the blackest events in Irish history, the Doolough Tragedy, which occurred 171 years ago on Friday night, March 30, 1849.

One memorial is a plain stone cross engraved with the words ‘Doolough Tragedy 1849’. The other bears the inscription: ‘To commemorate the hungry poor who walked here in 1849 and who walk the Third World today’.

In 1849, people who lived in the town of Louisburgh - around 600 in total which included women and children - were starving as a result of the Great Famine

At the time it was rumoured that if they walked to Delphi Lodge, where the landlord and the council guardians were, then they would be given food. But it was bleak and freezing when those people set out on that terrible night on their journey to meet their landlord.

Wearing light bedtime clothing and with only blankets and shawls for protection in the atrocious weather conditions which prevailed at the time, the starving people were forced to walk more than 20 miles from Louisburgh to Delphi Lodge to attend an inspection and get Famine relief.

Many walked in their bare feet. When they eventually got to Delphi Lodge, they were told that the guardians could not be disturbed while they were having their lunch.

When they eventually did see them, the people were sent away empty-handed and most of them died on the journey back.

Later, people found corpses - including those of women and children - by the side of the road between Delphi Lodge and Louisburgh, overlooking the shores of Doolough Lake, with grass in their mouths which they had been eating for want of food.

It was estimated that more than 400 people died at Doolough on what was for them an extremely fatiguing journey back through that terrible night and into the next day.

Local folklore maintains that the number of people who died, given their state of debilitation and because of the ordeals they were forced to endure, was far higher than was ever known.

Over the years there have been memorial walks along the route. One I attended several years ago was led by Nobel Peace Prize recipient Bishop Desmond Tutu, which attracted a huge crowd.

The drive from Louisburgh is a pleasant one, despite the reminder of the tragedy of 171 years ago.