Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Book in excellent unread/unused condition. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> Of all the changes experienced by European peoples in the nineteenth cen- tury none was more profound or more widely felt than migration. Whether it was merely a few miles from village to town or a journey across great oceans its effects were usually irreversible distancing minds as well as bodies from the past. In the century before 1914 alone some forty million indi- viduals crossed the Atlantic the greatest movement of peoples since the dawn of civilization and an event comparable in its human effects to any of the great wars or revolutions of the modern era. While Irish emigrants did not make up the largest part of this movement no other country lost a larger part of its population to it or was altered more profoundly by the loss. Nearly a million had already left Ireland before 1845 and in the terrible decade that followed the country sent out a quarter of those remaining more than two million emigrants. Added to those who died of the hunger and its com- panion diseases the slightly more than eight million people of old Ireland were reduced by almost half. Thereafter tens of thousands followed every year until the ritual of mourning the departed in the “American wake” became as familiar a part of life as burying the dead. The narrative that follows describes a minute part of this historic move- ment. It is based mainly on the experience of the townland of Ballykilcline a community of small farmers and laborers living on an obscure estate in the Irish midlands near the provincial market town of Strokestown County Roscommon. Such a community as Ballykilcline was known as a baile in the Irish language and so it was called by its people becoming the com- mon prefix “bally” in English maps and surveys. But by the nineteenth century the general usage in English both for the community and the sur- veyed unit of land in which it lived was the “townland.” Hence this Roscommon community was known as the townland of Ballykilcline. (LL)