roofs would have originally been thatched. The walls were made of a greyish stone, like the church in Ballymor. Some walls were more or less intact, and others had long since toppled, leaving mossy piles of rubble.
As I approached I could see the layout of the cottages – they were all tiny, single-roomed, with a fireplace at one end and a door in the middle of the side facing the track, looking across the moors to the sea. Most had two small windows, one on each side of the door. I guessed the windows would not have been glazed but perhaps originally had wooden shutters. The first cottage I reached was one of the more intact ones, although its roof was gone, so I ducked in through the low doorway to have a look inside.
The heather had found its way in, along with a few ash saplings, some gorse and plenty of bracken, and there was a burned-out circle on the ground – evidence that someone had lit a campfire. The cottage was tiny. I tried to imagine a whole family living here – where would their beds have been? Their table and chairs? I wondered what possessions people would have had, before the famine. Maybe Declan would know more. I smiled with pleasure at the idea of sitting in a corner of O’Sullivan’s quizzing him on it. Now that I knew Michael McCarthy’s home had been abandoned during the famine years when he was just a teenager, I realised I’d need to properly research that part of Ireland’s history. I made a mental note to get hold of some books about the famine so I could fully understand what had happened. It had obviously impacted Michael’s life – how could you not be affected by something like that happening around you? And maybe that’s what had become of his mother, Kitty. Perhaps she had been a victim of the famine. But if that was true, why then had he continued to paint her, and why the rumours that he had searched for her all his adult life?
I went out of the first cottage and into the next. This had one collapsed wall and a skull of a sheep in the remains of the fireplace, with a foxglove growing up through it.
The village was an eerie place, even on a glorious summer’s day. To think that once it would have been full of people going about their business – children playing, women cooking, men repairing thatch or tending to vegetable plots – and then the potato crops failed, people starved or moved away, leaving the entire village to crumble. Some walls looked pretty unstable, listing at precarious angles as though the next gust of wind would blow them over.
I pulled out my water bottle and took a long swig from it. It had been a hot, tough walk up here. Without meaning to, I found myself thinking of Dan, the way I’d hurt him, the secrets I was still keeping from him. I knew I wasn’t being fair to him. I walked further up through the village, going in and out of every ruined cottage, in an effort to put it all out of my head, for a little longer anyway. A stream ran down the hillside behind the cottages, and crossed the track between two cottages about halfway along the row. There were slippery stepping stones to enable walkers to cross the stream. I guessed this had been the villagers’ water supply.
There was someone else up here – someone sitting on a tumbledown wall that had once been part of the cottage at the far end of the village. A man, who was staring out across the moors towards the sea. As I approached I realised it was Declan. He hadn’t spotted me – he seemed lost in his thoughts the way I’d been lost in mine a few minutes ago. I coughed a bit and deliberately kicked a few stones to make a bit of noise. It worked.
‘Well, hello there, Maria! You found it, so.’ He stood to greet me, smiling, the sun making his hair look more blond than it had appeared in the pub.
‘Yes, thanks, great directions. We could have walked up together if I’d known you were coming.’ As soon as I said the words I wished I could claw them back. That sounded like a come-on. I racked my brains – had I mentioned Dan last night at all? Declan was lovely, and I certainly felt attracted to him to an extent, but I wasn’t available. I didn’t need any more confusion in my life. Dan was my man, despite everything.
‘Ah, it was a spur of the moment decision this morning. I often come up here, to sit and meditate, and just soak up the glory of God’s creation. On a day like today it was irresistible.’
‘It’s amazing.’ I stood beside him and took in the view. The heather was in full flower, giving the moorlands a deep purple hue. Here and there stunted ash trees grew, their leaves a vibrant green in contrast to the dark heather. There was gorse too – its time for flowering was mostly over but here and there were splashes of bright yellow bloom. The sea on the distant horizon glinted gold and silver as the sun, now high overhead, reflected off it. The air was scented with summer. It was hard to believe that this place had seen tragedy.
‘So, I wonder which cottage your ancestor lived in?’ Declan said, shielding his eyes with a hand across his forehead, as he turned to face me.
I shook my head. ‘No idea, and I don’t see how I could find out. Were all the cottages abandoned at the time of the famine?’
‘I believe so, yes. Not everyone would have died, though. Some probably went abroad, to England or America. Perhaps others went to try to find work in the cities – Limerick or Cork, or even Dublin. Public works schemes had been set up – building roads and suchlike – so people could earn money to buy food to offset the loss of the potato crop. But there weren’t enough places on them, or they were badly managed, or they weren’t running in the areas where the poorest people lived. The people here, like so many across Ireland, depended on their potato crops. They failed several years in a row in the late 1840s, with the blight making the few potatoes that could be salvaged almost inedible. And without the potato crops the people had nothing.’
‘What I don’t understand is, why did they only grow potatoes? Surely if they’d grown other crops and not been so reliant on potatoes, the blight wouldn’t have affected them so badly?’ I felt a bit like a schoolkid on an educational visit, but I’d need to understand this properly for my book.
‘The farm workers only rented a tiny patch of poor land from the big landowners – it’s all they were allowed to have, to grow their own food. You can still see evidence of cultivated land where the Kildoolin inhabitants grew their potatoes – halfway down the track on the right you can just make out lines and ridges in the heather. Potatoes are a high-yield crop; they’ll grow in the poorest soils and are very nutritious. There aren’t many vegetables you can live on if you’re not eating much else, but potatoes you can. On the big farms, plenty of other crops were grown – wheat, barley, maize – and cattle were reared. The great tragedy is that Ireland was producing enough food to feed itself, right through the famine years. But the majority of it was exported, mostly to England, and sold to make money for the English landowners.’
I felt guilty, as if I should apologise on behalf of all English people. ‘Did the landowners not realise what was going on, or how bad it was?’
He gave a small shrug. ‘Some did, some didn’t. Many were absentee landlords who hardly ever set foot on their Irish estates. Others were well aware of what was happening. To be fair, some tried to help by donating food. But some people were too proud to accept charity, preferring to work for their money. And there was the option of workhouses, but those of course were the last resort.’
I shook my head. ‘You’d think if your children were starving you’d do anything to save them.’ As I said it I wondered if that would be true for me – would I do anything to save my child? Was I capable of self-sacrifice? To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t sure. It was presumably something that came with maternal instincts, and I did not believe I had those. I wondered if my own mother had ever considered this question. I could not imagine her sacrificing herself to save me. She’d never really given up anything for me.
Declan was looking at me oddly. ‘Are you all right there, Maria? You look as though you’re fretting about something. If you want to talk . . .’
‘No,
