Famine 1846-47
Soup house in Beamish’s farm at Ardogeena One very charitable person Mrs. O’Donovan beggared herself in the process. A great number of ‘cabhlachts’ and ruined houses in the townlands of Drishane and Cashelane are believed to have contained large families pre-famine. It was said in every thirty acres of land no less then eight families inhabited it. They all died of hunger; some were said to die by the fences, in a field just on the boundary of Drishane and Cashelane owned by the Hegarty family (1938) about one and a quarter of a mile from Dunbeacon school it is said that about 40 persons died there and were eaten by dogs. Most of the people were buried en masse and the burial grounds are still to be seen at Cashelane. There is a field called ‘the Cill Field’ which is believed to contain about two thousand people. Cart loads of corpses were carried there.
Mr. E Driscoll (1938) was told by his mother that in black 47 people walked to Ballydehob where the local depot for Indian meal was. One day as Mrs. Driscoll was returning from town she was met by a horse pulling a cart of dead bodies which were picked up from the wayside. She compared the bodies to ‘fir scolls’ (scolbs, long thin pegs of wood used to pin down thatch) at sight; they were later cast into a pit in Stuaic graveyard without distinction