.Toti:Rt-iAL oi' 'tHE COuNTY DONEGAL llISTORICAL $OCIE'r i James Johnson, one of them, "it is a principle much encouraged. by every judicious owner." Another, James Harvey, "had carried out consolidation to no great extent but encouraged one tenant to purchase . a neighbour's holding (4). The reclaiming of waste I.and was :part of this·scheme·of-improvement. By waste ·land the landlords meant all untilled land. It consisted of the commonages as well as of large ti.iacts of mountain grazing held, on lease, by individual tenants. The third, fourth arid fifth pri.nciples specified for th~ Cloghan estate and already quoted deal with waste land and its division. When it came to mapping out the new farms the old difficulty arising from the·inequalities of the soil asserted itself. To make a waste farm attractive it had to contain some portion that could pe made fertile, without excessive labou~, and a mere four acres of arable land did not satisfy a tenant who previously enjoyed grruz!i.ng rights on the commonage in addition to his four acres. In consequence the ideal square farm pre· scribed by John Pitt Kennedy did not materialise. Tlhe new farms were mostly narrow oblongs running parallel from the bank of a river or the edge of a stream to the top of a neighbouring slope, or based on a stretch of mountain lea-land. The landlords changed the face of the country-side. One glance at an Ordnance survey map of the eighteen-' thirties and another at the corresponding map as revised in the ·first decade ·of this century wm prove this. rn the intervening seventy years villages have disappeared, trackless hill slopes have become lined with straight mearing fences and isolated farm-steads have sprung u.p all over the lower contour lines. he gave, as a reason for this antipathy, their love of talking and story-telling. The Devonshire Commisison Report colltains i:;imilar evidence from nearly every county in Ireland. The antipathy to the change was due to more reasons than the sociability of the people: Conservatism. was strong in the tenants, as it is strong among farmers everswhere:· The natural instinct to cling to ancestral lands was still stronger. iAnd the superiority of consolidated farms over-rundale farms was not oib:vious to the tenants. Inde2d, excellent farmers to-day in some parts of the world fail to see that there is really sucn: a superiority, hut a discuss'.on of that point would take us too far. Besides, the building of new hou,ses and the making of new fences were not to be lightly undertaken. Add to all this that there was a fundamental differenee of opinion between liandlords and tenants about rights. The landlmds' claim to absolut2 ownersMp was not admitted by the tenants, and with good reason <5). All things considered, the wonder is, not so much that the tenants disliked th~ change, 1but that so few of them took effective steps to !Prevent it. The ending of rural village life must have had a p·rofound influence on the minds and · habits of the peopl~. For better? For worse? -------·-- --------- ·---- (5) S>ee "History'" of the L1nd Tenures an'i Lnnd c:a<:.·s:e•s. of Ire-land" wit'a. an ac o·mt of the v.::trious s2creb Agrar~a".l.. Con. fed:oracies," bv Dr. George Sige: son, Landon, 1871. The people everywhere disliked the change. Jimmy O'Neill of the Cloghan estate says: "I often heard my father ·and other old men telling how the people were crying, as if. they were . going to America, when they were only . moving from the cluster (Village) to a lonely house not half a mile away." !Lord Hill gave evidence that he eff'ected the consolidation with the greatest difficulty "the people themselves having the greatest antipathy to any change," and Not>e-Th~ rural -village h called a "clisiter," or "cluster;" in Sou'h :Cerry, and in parts · of Donegal and Tyrone. In Tee1in it was ·Called! "clih~n": by some o1d • pe::p'..e in G~·<:?nfinn · "cladarn": .and in Do:n1aghmore it was refcU.Ted to a,.~. "c:·a'gean Ttghte.'' Usually it was. called simply "lbaile" in Ul!':ter. · foilcwed by an epithet such as "Iochtar," "lar," "Uachtar." (4) Report Devonshire iComm:ission.
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