I have a suspicion most of you would be appalled by the sheer number of empty and derelict cottages we have here in the West of Ireland...
Because Irish cottages are built of stone gathered from the surrounding land and little or no mortar was used, it's very difficult to put an age on them...they all follow the same design...three rooms in a row with the back and front doors in line with each other...later additions of small rooms built on the back for a scullery/kitchen are often dated by means of a rough date scored on a stone or on the concrete which had begun to be used for the flooring.
We dated our kitchen by the newspapers which had been pushed between where the walls met the roof...1963 mostly.
One of our bigger barns has the date of 1952 marked on the gable end and we know the Dutch barn was built after the railway closed because the uprights used to support the roof are parts of the iron runners from the train tracks.
The cottage itself could be anything from two to three hundred years old...
But I've drifted again...every single townland will have empty cottages...some left as they were when the owner went to live in a home...others left empty since the family scraped their meagre belongings together and walked to Dublin to wait for a boat sailing to America...many are simply too derelict to ever be restored...some are like tiny museums to be explored and wondered over.
Caught in another age, their small treasures remind us of a time when meals consisted of potatoes and buttermilk...when the dresser was built first from pieces of scrap wood and then the walls were erected around it...when girls birthed baby after baby and worried about them being exchanged for a changeling by the Faeries...their men had illicit stills hidden among the gorse bushes and Wakes took three days before the coffin was carried to the burying ground.
Your wedding frock was the one least patched and mended, perhaps with a scrap of pretty lace bought from a travelling hawker carefully stitched on as a collar...
You used old rags for when you had a period and washed them out hastily in the river...filled with shame in case anyone saw you...
It'd cost a penny to send your child to school for a week when that six year old could earn two pennies by scaring the crows from newly planted fields...
With Irish as your only language, you understood enough when the rent was a week behind and the bailiff came on his fancy horse with his minions in tow and swore at you in English...struggling to sell eggs on the market to raise enough to pay the arrears and having to feed the latest baby with watered down potato because your milk had dried up...
Then the offer was made...the landlord would pay your families fare to America. I can't begin the grasp the enormity of that journey...walking to Dublin with the occasional lift on a farm cart...waiting for the boat to become available...sailing to Liverpool first, to be housed in damp stinking cellars before word came there was a ship about to sail...queuing up at the quay while officials took down your names and dates of birth which you couldn't remember...
We still stop when we see an abandoned cottage...we still push the door open and note the cast iron cauldrons have been long spirited away and sold, to be planted with flowers or to grace a fireplace...we shake the collecting box for St Padre Pio and are not surprised to find it empty...I pick up the crude pottery ashtray which announces it is a 'Present From Knock' and carefully put it back where I found it...
Always there is a faded Madonna on the mantel...the mantel often trimmed with an edging of cheap lace...deep set windowsills smothered in long dead spiders and moths looking out over impossibly soft purple mountains and small green fields.
There is invariably a sense of peace and quietude within the walls of these tiny homes...a sense of waiting perhaps for their people to come once more through the front door...chickens scattering and an old dog to be petted...little children sent up to bed in the roof space after the evening Rosary is said in front of the hearth...the baby rocked to sleep while the man of house closes the doors and lights the candle and dozes for a while...his pipe filled with baccy and a jar of poiteen at his side.
From Cottages To The Big House
