The Achill Mission - 'the Colony,' as it was known locally - was part of a wider evangelical movement to convert Catholics in the west of Ireland to Protestantism. It was controversial from the beginning. Nangle's neighbours included Catholic priests who regarded him as a soul-stealer; his backers were Protestant subscribers in Britain and Ireland who saw the work as urgent. The settlement aimed to be self-sufficient but relied heavily on outside donations. Food was scarce in normal years - the nearest market town was Newport, 25 miles away by appalling roads - and meat was almost unobtainable on the island. Then the Famine arrived, and everything changed.

By December 1846, the Achill Mission was reporting that it had given employment to over 4,400 labourers during that month - more than half of them Roman Catholic. Nangle later clarified that these were aggregate figures, not daily averages; on most days the actual employment was somewhere between 50 and 200. But the underlying reality was undeniable: starving Catholic families came to the Protestant Mission for work, for food, for the two daily meals the Mission was providing to over 600 children, of whom 100 were orphans. Dr. Adams, the local doctor, reported in 1847 that nearly every household on Achill was suffering from fever and dysentery. People who had previously said they wanted to 'starve the devils out of the island' were now working on the Mission farm to earn a few coins for whatever food they could afford. Some converted. Many simply ate, and survived, and went home. The accusation of 'souperism' - the term for Catholic converts who changed religion in exchange for soup - haunted Nangle and the Mission for the rest of the century, and haunts the memory of Dugort still. There are no easy ways to tell this story honestly. There were starving children. There was food. There were strings attached. People made the choices that hungry people make.

The Mission's careful record-keeping has left behind one of the most detailed pictures we have of life in a Famine-era Irish community. Between 1841 and 1851, the number of inhabited houses in Dugort actually increased by 16, while uninhabited houses dropped by 3 - suggesting migration into the settlement during the Famine years rather than the wholesale collapse seen elsewhere on the island. Between 1838 and 1861 the Mission recorded 182 baptisms against 77 burials. The highest annual burial counts came in 1847 and 1848 - the worst Famine years. The marriage register shows 18 weddings in 1849 and 32 in 1850 - couples rushing to marry once the immediate emergency had passed - before numbers dropped sharply. By 1853, only 4 couples were married in the whole settlement. The Mission slowly declined through the second half of the nineteenth century as the population aged and the new converts drifted back to Catholicism or emigrated. By 1900 it was effectively over.

Today Dugort is a quiet village known mostly for its scenery. It has two Blue Flag beaches - Silver Strand at the foot of Slievemore, and the Golden Strand further east - both of them sweeping pale arcs of sand against the dark mass of the mountain. Slievemore itself rises directly behind the village to 671 metres, its long quartzite ridge dominating the northern half of Achill Island. On the slopes above the village stand the ruins of the Deserted Village of Slievemore - a separate, older settlement of stone cottages abandoned in the late nineteenth century - which the Achill Archaeological Field School has been excavating for over thirty years. Some of the Mission's original stone houses still stand in Dugort, repurposed as private homes or holiday cottages. The settlement that Edward Nangle built on a swamp where a hare could not walk has had a longer afterlife than its founder probably expected, but not the one he hoped for.