fanad

On my annual pilgrimage to Fanaid having some time to read in the soft wet Donegal rain. Here looking out over Mulroy I can see over to the woods where the long un-lamented William Sydney Clements (look him up!) 3rd Earl of Leitrim (1806-1878) met his demise, maybe it was not his fault, contemporary evidence would in these times be taken as signs of mental ilness, low self esteem, paranoia and megalomania, this gentleman set up groups of baliffs, under baliffs and bum baliffs to watch the locals and each other. Every April he would issue eviction notices to all, yes all his tenants, this saved him time as after 6 months he could scatter anyone with a notice. A local schoolmaster Hugh Dorian documented an invaluable piece of social history of Fanaid (The outer edge of Ulster) in the mid to late 19th century, Clements would be a divisive but unignorable figure of this time.
What has this got to do with Colclough's? Well it's to do with half of me, and there was a schoolmaster, folklorist and social historian Patrick Kennedy, among other books produced Evening's in the Duffrey 1875, which as I noted earlier painted a kinder picture of landed gentry, but I'm willing to bet the16th century Cavanagh clan might not have been so complementary.