Chapter Text
Introduction
Ireland’s Dingle Peninsula (Corca Dhuibhne in the Irish language), situated in County Kerry, is a remote, rugged spit of land that juts out into the wild North Atlantic in the southwestern part of Ireland, just above the Ring of Kerry. At the eastern base of the peninsula lies the town of Tralee and about 40 miles away at the other end lie the Blasket Islands, a small archipelago located off Slea Head at the southwest tip of land. These islands are considered by many to be the westernmost point of Europe. The Blaskets were inhabited until the 1950s when the last few families reluctantly moved away, unable to sustain their homes in such a remote location.
The topography of the land was carved by the action of glaciers. Several spines of steep, rounded, stony mountain ridges run roughly down the center of the peninsula and are flanked by broad, smooth valleys that swoop upwards again into craggy cliffs where they meet the sea. The occasional white sandy beach breaks the cliff walls and allows walking access to the shoreline.
Although nowhere in Ireland endures extremes of weather, Dingle is more susceptible to a rougher climate than anywhere else on the island as, apart from a somewhat sheltered harbor, it is almost completely open to the full force of the Atlantic. Still, because the island is hugged year round by the warming influence of the Gulf Stream, Ireland is temperate and warmer than other countries that share its latitude and its coastline remains ice free throughout the winter. In Dingle, the summers are short, cool, and windy; the winters are long, cold, wet, extremely windy, and it is mostly cloudy year round.
Largely comprised of grassland and crisscrossed by over 3,000 miles of hedgerows, the Dingle peninsula is home to terrestrial mammals such as otters and badgers. Fox, Irish mountain hare and Irish stoat are known to use the upland habitats. Bees, bats, owls, butterflies, ladybirds and other insects can also be found in great abundance. Gorse, heather, hawthorn, willow, holly, tiny flowering red fuschia, ash, blackthorn, oak and wild privet are some of the most common woody species to be found along the hedgerows, with tiny sea pinks growing bravely in the rough rocks along the sea cliffs, buffeted by the constant winds. Thousands of seabirds such as storm petrels, shearwaters, terns, gulls, auks, and puffins nest along the oceanside. The high cliffs fringing the peninsula also hold good numbers of chough and peregrine falcon.
The hardy generations of people living on the Dingle have farmed and fished there for approximately 6,000 years, eking out a thin living by enriching the poor valley soil with tons of sand, peat, and seaweed over the centuries until it became arable and fit for cattle and sheep grazing as well as crop farming. Sections of ancient peat bogs are cut into square “logs” and dried to provide turf for fuel. The lovely, earthy smell of a turf fire is unmistakeable and unforgettable.
Approximately 2,000 ancient monuments including Celtic crosses, beehive huts, stone circles, Neolithic rock tombs, and early Christian churches still dot this astonishingly green landscape, proving the ingenuity and hardiness of the people who have called Dingle their home over the millennium. Thousands of miles of stone walls creating fields and meadows were built in the valleys and halfway up the sides of the mountains as the population grew and cleared more and more land in the latter part of the 18th century and into the early part of the 19th century.
The richness of the land across Ireland led to a great rise in the farming industry, centered in the English tradition of landed gentry or Squires who leased their land to peasant farmers. The majority of the crops produced — oats, barley, and soft wheat — were mostly exported to England, giving the island the nickname “England’s bread basket.”
There was an associated population explosion in Ireland as the farming and fishing industries progressed, resulting in a surge to about eight million people across the land by 1840, most of them poor country folk who lived by subsistence farming, relying on a monoculture of potatoes (supplemented where possible in more prosperous communities with eggs, milk, butter, cream, fish, seaweed, cabbage and root vegetables). Many poorer families existed solely on potatoes, consuming on average about nine pounds per person per day (about 45 potatoes per person).
Everything changed when the potato crops began to fail due to the arrival of a fungal blight in 1845 which originated in South America and spread via trade ships not only to Ireland but also to the rest of the British Isles and parts of Western Europe, rotting the potatoes in the ground and wiping out the main source of food. Because of the devastating effects of monoculture, Ireland was hit particularly hard (and the poor western parts of the country were hit the hardest) by the successive failure of potato crops over the next seven years, resulting in the Great Famine, also called the Great Hunger.
With almost no assistance to alleviate the crisis from an ignorant and frankly hostile English government, about one million Irish died of disease or starvation during the hunger and another three million immigrated to America, Australia, or elsewhere over the next decade in search of a better life, cutting the population of the island in half. Ireland’s population has never fully recovered, although since the 1960s it has started to rise again and currently stands at around seven million persons.
The years between 1860 and 1900 saw the people of Ireland trying to recover from the great disaster and to create their own self-governing nation. During this difficult period, anger at the British who had left them to die in their time of greatest need grew stronger and the seeds of rebellion against the English government germinated. Calls for Home Rule began to grow. The Sinn Féin party (meaning We Ourselves) was formed in 1905, various factions grew bolder and more violent under the increasingly brutal treatment of the Irish by the Black and Tans (British troops sent in across the land to curb the unrest), and in the middle of WWI there was an attempt to overthrow the rule of the English government.
The 1916 Easter Rising, centered in Dublin with a few skirmishes elsewhere in the country, was launched by the Irish republicans with the aim of establishing an independent Irish state. It lasted six days; the Irish were defeated and their leaders summarily executed. The anger of the people of Ireland was set aflame at this abominable insult, leading two years later to the bloody war for Irish Independence which lasted from 1918 until the Irish Free State was created in December, 1922.
Dingletown, (An Daingean, in Gaelic), the only town on the Dingle (although there are a number of small enclaves dotted here and there), has a stunning natural harbor on the southern side of the peninsula and is the center of the relatively small fishing industry. Today it has a population of about 2,000 and a roaring tourist business with the largest concentration of pubs per capita in the country, but in 1903 when this story is set, it was home to about 1,000 souls.
Much of the peninsula is a Gaeltacht or an area where the Irish language (Gaeilge, Gaelainn or Gaelic) is widely spoken. In 1900 probably 90% of the regional population spoke Gaelic but for reasons of brevity, clarity, and my incompetence in writing, it would be unwieldy for me to place it foremost in this story, an adjustment I sorely regret having to make.
This beautifully raw, wild part of Ireland with its self sufficient, independent, strong-minded people is where we set our tale. In my Dingle of 1903 there were no telephones, no telegraph, no newspapers, no electricity, little mail, few books for the common people, and the town was only accessible by rail via an unreliable, narrow gauge line laid down a decade prior from Tralee. The fishing industry —supported half-heartedly by certain English concerns — was limping along, hampered by the lack of salt for preserving the fish until the railroad arrived and trade (as well as the tourist industry) began to pick up.
There was one priest, one Catholic Church which also housed a school, a couple of pubs, a tiny An Post, a few shops for food, farming needs (blacksmith, leather worker, knacker), and miscellaneous household items, as well as a workhouse for those who had not the stamina or wherewithal to provide for themselves although for many, death was preferable to the workhouse.
Molly Hooper lives in her family’s cottage a few miles west of town.