Sometime in the 1950s, on the high sand dunes at Doolough on the north County Mayo coast, the prevailing Atlantic wind exposed something that the people of the townland had long known was there but had hoped not to see. Bones. Small bones, mostly. They were children - infants and small children - who had been buried in the sandbanks during the Famine years of the 1840s and the decades after. There had been no proper cemetery for them at the time, and so they had been placed here, in soft ground above the high tide line, where the wind eventually found them again. The remains were gathered in large boxes and reinterred at Glencastle Cemetery. The dune is now known locally as a cillín - one of the unconsecrated children's burial grounds that scatter the west of Ireland, marking places of unspeakable sorrow that the rest of the country prefers not to remember.
Long before the Famine, Doolough had its own complicated history with power. Sir Edmund Barrett - Baron of Irrus - lived in a castle here in 1585, knighted by Queen Elizabeth I for his loyalty to the English Crown. His sons Edmund and Richard were sent to be raised in the household of the Earl of Essex in England. In 1605 King James I granted Sir Edmund more land in Erris and the right to hold a weekly fair at Doolough - a market that drew traders from across the peninsula. But the Barrett family's accommodation with the Crown did not last. In the early seventeenth century they rose in armed revolt; they were caught, shot and hanged, and their property was confiscated. By 1619 the castle had passed to a man named Michael Cormuck, and after the Cromwellian period of the mid-1600s the lands passed again to the new English settlers of Erris - the Shaens, the Carters, and most notoriously the Binghams. Part of the original castle stood at Doolough until 1937, when its remaining stones were carted off to build local houses and roads.
When the potato blight arrived in 1845, the Bingham family were among the largest landowners at Doolough. Local memory of them is not kind. Evictions were widespread; the tenants, already weakened by hunger, were often turned out of their cottages and watched their homes pulled down by the landlord's agents. The first proper road from Doolough to Belmullet - seven miles to the northwest - was constructed during this period as a famine-relief work, the council paying starving men a few pennies a day to break stones. The local Coastguard Station got its own access road around the same time. By the time the worst of the Famine had passed, the population of Doolough was a fraction of what it had been, and the people who remained had a long memory.
When Michael Davitt founded the Irish National Land League in 1879 to challenge the entire system of absentee landlordism, the people of the Doolough area were among its most committed supporters. The memory of the Famine evictions was still fresh in the 1880s; the Bingham name still carried weight as a curse. The Land League's campaign of social ostracism - the same tactic that gave the world the word 'boycott' from Captain Boycott a few dozen miles south - was applied with particular vigour in Erris. In 1899, the landlords were finally approached by the Congested Districts Board with offers to buy out their estates. Arthur Shaen Bingham held out for the highest price he could get; eventually a deal was struck. The Land Commission divided the property among the tenants who had worked it for generations. After three centuries, the land at Doolough belonged again to the people of Doolough.
The coast at Doolough has always held what it was given. The merchant ships Thompson and Mitchell were both wrecked here in the nineteenth century; the coastguard boat Lee was also lost. In the 1940s the Thelma drifted ashore at Doolough Point with a cargo of coal; pieces of that coal can still be found among the rocks at low tide, more than 80 years later. Each summer the week-long Geesala Festival brings horse racing and dog racing onto the strand at Doolough, sulkies and harness drivers running on hard-packed sand at low tide, with bonfires and music in the evenings. The festival is loud, joyful, and entirely modern. But walk above the strand in the off-season, alone, and the dunes are quiet. The cillín is unmarked. You would not know what is underneath you unless someone had told you.
54.14N, 9.91W. Doolough is a coastal townland on the Erris mainland, about 7 miles southeast of Belmullet. From the air it appears as low, sandy ground with dune systems along the shore, broken by the Doolough Lough inland. The Geesala area lies immediately north. Best viewed at 1,500-3,000 ft. Ireland West Airport Knock (EIKN) is approximately 80 km east-southeast. Atlantic weather is volatile; expect strong southwesterly winds and frequent low cloud.