The Last Word On Nothing

I’m having trouble with a story.  First I went down one rabbit hole (the effects, on both sides of the Atlantic, of the Irish Potato Famine) until it branched into two (now-dead towns, one in Maryland, one in Ireland), and then I went down both.  You can picture me heading down one, scrambling back up, heading down the other one, a happy little rabbit.  My behavior so far is appropriate for a science writer.

Then the editor says, “Those two towns, the one in Maryland and the one in Ireland, they’re the wrong towns.”  Given the story she assigned, she’s right.  “But I’m already down here,” I say.  She gives me a pitying look.

I didn’t have the heart to tell her the whole truth:  one of those rabbit holes sprung a branch, and then that branch branched, and I’m now so deep I’ll never see the sky again.  This is definitely not appropriate for a science writer. My trouble started when an archeologist told me about a man who had lived on both sides of the Atlantic in both towns.  He was listed as “a middling farmer” in the Irish town of Ballykilcline, in the late 1840’s when the potato blight hit.  When he couldn’t pay rent, he was evicted and with his family, put on a ship leaving Liverpool for New York City.  A few years later, he shows up in Texas, Maryland as the owner of a manor house. Maybe he came over with more money than I thought?  Rabbit hole!  I found every mention of him in every piece of literature; I found his family tree.  Back in Ballykilcline, he’d even helped lead a rebellion, a farmers’ rent strike.

Ah.  Why were farmers on a rent strike?  Didn’t they own their farms?  No, they didn’t — the middling farmer of Ballykilcline was a hungry rent-payer — and the people they paid rent to didn’t own them either, and the people those people paid rent to didn’t own them either, and it was non-owners all the way down.  The English Crown owned the farms in Ireland and roughly a zillion layers of middlemen collected rents.  Whole towns-worth of farms owned by another country altogether?  If no one local had a stake in the farms and towns, then what held, say, Ballykilcline, together? why was it a coherent town at all?  Rabbit hole!

I found a book by a notable historian.  Writing a feature, I never read books as background – they take too long for too small a return in current and useful information – so this rabbit hole is now at an unprecedented depth.  Most Ballykilcline-type farmers lived in what the best travel writer of all time, Alexis de Tocqueville, said were “wretched” houses made of “sun-dried mud,” walls only the height of a person, some of them “semi-underground” with thatched roofs that melded with the grass surrounding, “giving the whole thing the look of a molehill on which a passer-by has trod.”  The houses  looked temporary, says the book, as though they could be left behind easily.

The houses were in small groups, called clachans; a clachan was surrounded by farmland arranged into fields, called rundales.  The whole affair together was called a townland; Ballykilcline was a townland.  The townlands weren’t like English villages or American small towns, says the book: no main street, no stores, no pubs, no churches (the priest used a house), no schools (the schoolteacher used a house too).  Townlands were just clachans and rundales.  Every year, the people of a townland got together and threw lots for individual fields in the rundale.  A given farmer’s fields weren’t necessarily contiguous – one here, one there – and in any case, they’d be the farmer’s responsibility only for the year.

Towns with no centers? Houses that could be abandoned easily? Fields that you’d farm for a year?  All owned by an entity nobody saw?  And Ballykilcline remained Ballykilcline because?

The book’s answer:  over this incoherent infrastructure was a sort of human net.  The townland was essentially the shared histories of the people who’d always lived in one place.  People lived near each other, married each other, had kin in the next townland, told the same stories, had the same memories, were all trying to feed themselves with their farms.  They identified with their own townlands and knew the names of the townlands nearby, knew the other townlands’ families and histories and who argued with whom.

Ballykilcline was held together by a web of history and memory.  “It was an extremely fragile form of social organization,” says the book.  And yes, between the famine and the mass evictions for nonpayment of rent, Ballykilcline pretty well cleared out for good.  Google Maps shows no place there at all.

But a townland made mostly of minds and connections? a middling farmer going from famine to manor house?  Down here in this rabbit hole, I’m in such lovely company.

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Photo courtesy of MacDermot.com:  Ballykilcline is out there somewhere.