Hill along the edges of Blacksod Bay. It follows the route of what was once the Midland Great Western Railway line, extended to Achill at the close of the nineteenth century. Nowadays, the disused railway line forms The Great Western Greenway, a 43km stretch of cycling and walking pathways, while the adjacent roadway carries motorists who follow the ingeniously branded Wild Atlantic Way along the entire stretch of Ireland’s Atlantic coast.
Measuring fifteen miles from east to west, eleven from north to south and the population distributed through several villages, it appeared to Edward that much of the Achill land had not been broken for cultivation since the deluge. He took in the crude houses with the roofs resting like domes on massive walls, giving the appearance of beehives. The worst aspect of the island to his view was the moral condition of the islanders: it was a place of ‘ignorance and barbarism, of intellectual and moral degradation’.11 This was not entirely surprising to him since, he observed, it was then a widely held view that Achill was a byword for barbarism and paganism.
The pair headed north along rugged, zigzagging pathways for, had they taken a direct route, their horses would have sunk to their knees in the marshy swamp. It took an entire day to reach the coastguard station perched on Bullsmouth channel in the north-east corner of the island, an innocuous stretch of water between Achill and the small beast-shaped Inishbiggle, where the tidal swell could make a boat passage treacherous. Clergyman, scripture reader and horses welcomed the coastguard’s hospitality.
The next day, they pressed on in the direction of the purple-black mountain of Slievemore at Dugort on Achill’s north coast. Edward Nangle looked upon the slopes covered with peat and overgrown with heath and hard-stunted grass, the sheltered eastern flank sliced by chasms bringing water in its torrents into the sodden swamp below – a place so inhospitable that, according to the locals, a hare could hardly walk over it.
This was the mountain area on which Edward Nangle set his sights. He needed land and decided to return to Newport and seek a meeting with the head of the Burrishoole estate that comprised most of Achill Island. Sir Richard O’Donnell was favourably disposed to the evangelicals, having closely followed events at Lord Farnham’s Cavan estate, and quickly agreed a thirty-one-year lease on a tract of land at Slievemore.
Over thirty years later, Edward reflected on the difficulties he encountered in securing occupancy on even this poor-quality land from Sir Richard O’Donnell on a lease of thirty-one years: ‘This was not easily to be had, as the land was all leased to tenants, who were very tenacious of their rights. With much difficulty, they were induced to surrender 130 acres of wild mountain, without any building or a rood of cultivated ground upon it’.12 He was certain that the Roman Catholic priest, had he known what was intended for the land, would have prevented him from getting it. Goodwill money of £90 was paid to the occupying tenants.13 The tales of the island people would afterwards speak of the pain of those they believed were dispossessed of their Slievemore fields at that time.14
A few weeks after his first visit to Achill, Edward sat down in Dublin to write to Christopher Anderson whose book had fired his soul five years earlier. Not only did he have a vision for his west-of-Ireland project, but he also had the organisational skills and the financial flair to drive forward his concept. He fleshed out a plan which he presented to some supporters: five directors would oversee expenditure on erecting the Achill Mission buildings, two Irish-speaking missionaries would be recruited and an agriculturist would oversee the land reclamation. If the Achill scheme was successful, he told Christopher Anderson, ‘your Historical Sketches will have been the instrument, or the first link in the chain of secondary causes which were used to promote it.’15
But some of Edward’s associates were unconvinced, warning him that it was a risky and foolhardy venture, a wild speculation originating in a romantic imagination, a project that would be abandoned as soon as it ran into opposition. Moreover, was it wise to sacrifice the interests of his family and career for such an undertaking? ‘What wild goose chase is this that you are going upon to that Island of Achill?’ asked one evangelical-minister colleague.16
Edward was unwavering. He would move to Achill with his wife and children and bring about the moral regeneration of the minds and hearts of the Achill peasantry. His undertaking would face the classic missionary dilemma: to bring the Bible and a ministry of service in education, literacy, medical services and economic development to a wretched people, without trampling on the rituals and way of life which bonded a people together. Despite the obstacles, Edward Nangle was convinced that his island colony could become a model Christian development and a template to demonstrate to the world how to lift a people out of poverty, ignorance and idolatry through an evangelising crusade.
CHAPTER THREE
Bonfires in the West
It was Friday night, on the first day of August 1834, when a heavily laden sailing boat – a traditional hooker – with four passengers on board cast anchor in Dugort Bay in north Achill, where the ghostly figures of a welcome party waited on the strand next to shooting bonfire flames.1 Edward Nangle, his sister-in-law Grace Warner, the Newport rector William Stoney and a female servant stepped ashore and helping hands unloaded the Nangle family’s possessions. This was to be their new home and Eliza would shortly travel from Newport with their three small daughters: Frances, Henie and baby Tilly. Edward and his family had earlier travelled from Ballina, County Mayo, where they had lived in recent years on Home Mission Society work.
In the enveloping Dugort darkness, they could just about make out the vague outline of the work already carried out on the ‘infant settlement’, work that became clear in the morning light. It was a most pleasing vista for Edward: a couple of two-storey slated houses on the western end of the site next to reclaimed and cultivated fields; two more houses emerging from foundations further east; and in between, hillocks of peat marking out an area where yet more buildings would rise. His vision was already taking practical shape in a spectacular mountainside development, the like of which had never before been seen in Achill.
Edward was not the first resident at the Achill Mission colony, for a steward, a schoolmaster and a scripture reader already occupied one of the houses, and the Nangle family would share the second with Joseph Duncan, the assistant missionary. The ground-floor room served as a parlour, drawing room and study during the day, and Joseph Duncan’s bedchamber at night, a situation amusingly described by Edward: ‘Mr Duncan could not retire to rest until we vacated the apartment for the night, nor could we come down in the morning until he had arisen and completed his toilet.’2
The passengers appreciated the warmth of bonfire flames and welcoming hands after their two-day journey from Newport, through Clew Bay, then northward along the eastern edges of Achill and through the treacherous straight at Bullsmouth. Edward was now the full-time permanent head of the Achill Mission, with a growing physical infrastructure and an emerging organisation to drive forward his evangelical mission. He retired to bed in his new home on the flanks of Slievemore with the sounds of the ocean ringing in his ears.
Grace Warner, Eliza Nangle’s sister, is an intermittent and shadowy presence in this story. She landed at Dugort with her brother-in-law before Eliza and her daughters had yet set foot on Achill soil. A young unmarried woman, it appears that she may have divided her time between the home of her widowed mother, Patience, at Marvelstown House, Kilbeg, County Meath, and that of her sister, Eliza, with her growing family. She was in Achill from the start of the Achill Mission, and she would be there at the end of her own life, long after Edward, Eliza and their children had departed the island. In the summer of 1834, Grace made a mountainside house ready for her sister and children.
Edward plunged into his work. Slates arrived by hooker from Westport for the new colony buildings. Prayers and worship took place each morning and evening in both the Irish and English languages. Labourers worked on reclaiming the soil and planting crops, and each Sunday the congregation worshipped in the parlour of the Nangle home. Edward took to the mountain slopes to shoot rabbit for dinner and, all the
