Learning a little history on our Mayo travels

Every bit of the Irish landscape has seen a lot of history: as Seamus Heaney put it in one of his poems, ‘every layer seems camped on before'. 

With summer the time to get out and about, I also like to take the opportunity to consider a little history on my travels. So this is the second of three articles about parts of our county that tell us plenty about all those layers of centuries past.

Last week I suggested a visit to the 12th-century round tower of Killala, and this week we jump forward to the 15th century, starting with a site that tells us much about those old Norman families in the story of Mayo. The Normans had arrived in 1169, and some of them came west. The most famous of those families were the de Burgos, a name which in time became Burke, or Bourke, as we all know.

Our next place to visit derives from the Lower MacWilliam Burkes, a spin-off of the original de Burgo family. The family had by that stage become ‘more Irish than the Irish themselves’, meaning that they had become quite Gaelic in their custom. One aspect of that was they no longer passed on the inheritance in the Norman way, to the first son. As a result, the de Burgos/Burkes had by this stage – to use our terminology – divided the farm, and so the Lower Burkes controlled much of Mayo, while the upper ones were located down in what is today Galway. The ‘lower’ branch of the family dominated Mayo all throughout this period.

To get a sense of their world and of their ambitions, it is worth a visit to Burrishoole Priory, near Newport, and not least because the ruins of it are extensive. It is also easily accessible and not too far from the Greenway. The priory was founded by the Dominicans in the later medieval period – around 1469 – under the patronage of Richard Burke of Turlough. He was the chief of the clan, but powerful and all as he was, he made a bit of mistake when he built that priory. For he did so without permission from the Pope, which is the equivalent nowadays of building without planning permission. All was well that ended well though, because the situation was regularised later – no doubt by paying the appropriate fee to Rome. Richard it seems built it as a place to retire, and he ended his life there as a member of the Dominican Order.

Great lords of this time built such places to give glory to God, to atone for their sins (and they had plenty) but also to show their power. All of those elements were in play. Lords of the time quite literally believed that you would have to account for your stewardship of your lands and people after you died, so building a friary or abbey was a good way to enter something into the credit side of the ledger. These people were very different to us, but anyone who knows anyone who has left anything to the church can understand the mind of Richard Burke of Turlough.

Such buildings also had meaning in this life. If a friary or an abbey was under your protection, you had some serious assets and everyone would know it. And a friary or abbey could be more than a place of prayer: often it became a place of learning and of trade. Such institutions were common across the middles ages in Europe. In places like Mayo, where towns had not yet begun to properly develop, such places really mattered. They often became a source of competition between local lords – a sort of keeping up with the medieval Joneses. If you want to get a sense of what some of the neighbours were up to around the same time, you can visit the Clare Island Abbey, where the O’Malley clan were having magnificent frescoes painted. What both places will tell you is that this part of the world was not some backwater.

Burrishoole Priory is also a place that will tell you about the switch over from the Anglo-Norman to English control. The priory was occupied by the forces of Elizabeth I under the command of Sir Nicholas Malby, and they inserted a series of gun loops in the wall which can still be seen today. If you want to learn more about the often confused sets of struggles that led to the English domination of Mayo, you can follow the brilliant work of the Battle of Ardnaree group in Ballina. They have tales to tell and sites they have discovered, which add so much to our understanding of the period, and in a fun and accessible way.

Now, to get a sense of the period of English control, we have to skip through a lot of detail – tales of the Burkes and the Binghams would make for a good episode of Game of Thrones – and focus on a specific location that will be familiar to many, and head for Westport House. What Westport House can tell you and describes is the period of English domination in Mayo, and of the land system which was used to put that dominance into effect.

A number of families, some of them Gaelic, some Anglo-Norman and some new English, who had made astute or dishonourable (depending on your point of view) choices in the wars of the 17th and 18th centuries, came to control large tracts of lands around the region, which were organised into estates. As we all know, they became a common feature of life all over the county and region. The estate that centred around what became Westport House is a good example and perhaps the most famous.

These large family-owned estates had large centrally controlled farms at their heart, which were then supplemented by tenants who were settled on, and paying rent on, those parts of the estates that were often less valuable. The landlord families essentially soaked their tenants, extracting surplus from their back-breaking labour, which they then spent to make themselves look grand. The grandness was confirmed by titles from the King for services rendered to the Crown.

Many of these families invested the money they generated from these large estates into the British Empire’s other colonies, where they made even more money from trading slaves and from sugar. Very often, they then used the various forms of profit they gained to build houses like Westport House. They were the 18th-century equivalents of the castles of the Middle Ages. Unlike castles, they didn’t need to be fortified because their occupants used the law and the power of the state to stay in control – supplemented by a local garrison or militia who could be called out if the natives got restless. But the house above all was the way to signal that control. Some of them, like Belleek, were built much later, but the underlying economic dynamic was the same.

The struggles between those families over who controlled what, as well as who took the political power in the county, played out until the latter part of the 19th century. They married between one another and more or less controlled the show. In the final article on this topic next week, we will be making our way to two important sites, both of which tell us much about what the rest of the people thought of these houses and those who lived in them.