Touring Connemara: Learning to Read a Landscape of Ruins, 1850–1860

Abstract

In 1851 the preliminary results of Ireland's decennial census revealed that the population had fallen by nearly two million since 1841 and that the regional focus of this ecological jolt was the rural West.1 In many parts of Clare, Gal way, and Mayo, the population had decreased by 50 percent, and contributors to the local press warned that the return of normal harvests had done little to stem 'the exodus from this part of Ireland [which] is going on at a rapid rate.'2 Thus, the dread Census, as it was referred to in Dublin, brought the material ity and concreteness of numbers to bear on the imaginative mapping of the Famine that had emerged by the late 1840s.3 In the reports of journalists and relief workers, the Shannon River had become a symbolic boundary between two markedly distinguishable regions in Ireland: one to the east where the impact of the Famine was intense?but manageable?and one to the west, where the evidence of devastation was so overwhelming that even the most ardent proponents of progress were overcome with feelings of powerlessness and doom.4 As he toured his native Connaught in 1849, for example, Sir William