Seventy Years in The Wild West by Irish Author Sean Cadden

Seventy Years in The Wild West is a story of almost 80 square miles of Southwest Mayo, from the evictions of 1851 to its repopulation in 1923.

The post-Famine decade 1851–1861 was a cruel period for many small hill farmers who had survived the Great Hunger. The Marquis of Sligo and the Earl of Lucan evicted 44 townlands in southwest Mayo. Captain William Houstoun leased 37 of those townlands to assemble Dhulough Farm, the largest farm in Ireland. John Louden leased the remaining seven townlands to create Killary Farm.


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The captain built Dhulough Lodge in the beautiful but very remote Dhulough valley, where he and his wife Matilda, the novelist, lived for 20 years. William Houstoun made a success of the farm. However, he was succeeded by his unwise son George, who was bankrolled by his shrewd cousin Alfred Houstoun Boswall, until George left the country to escape his debtors.

The captain imported Scotch Blackface sheep and introduced a hill farming system based on this sheep breed. That farming system survived for 120 years and has been difficult to replace.

In the early 1900s, agrarian agitation forced the sale of the farm to the Congested Districts Board. The division of the farm created more than 90 new farms and this book also includes a wealth of genealogical information on these new farmers and their neighbours.

About the author

Sean Cadden is a native of Glenisland, Castlebar. He worked as an agricultural adviser for Teagasc in West Mayo for almost 40 years. He has a keen interest in local and agricultural history. He has published many articles on farming and local history. In 2019, he co-edited the book, Remember Us, a military history of the Newport area, 1914–1924. More recently, he was a joint editor of The Men of the West, a history of the West Mayo IRA Brigade during the War of Independence. The folk memory of the evictions and the actions of the graziers were still vivid in the minds of many people he met during his early years as an agricultural adviser.