The history of the county of Mayo, Reprint 1908 r.

The history of the county of Mayo, Reprint 1908 r. - Hubert Knox

County Mayo has been inhabited for thousands of years with Neolithic, Megalithic, Bronze Age and Iron Age monuments and remains in evidence including court, portal, passage and wedge tombs, standing stones, ring-forts, stone circles and much more. Little is known of who these people were but legend has it that Ireland was settled by descendents of Noah following the Biblical deluge. The supernatural Tuatha De Danaan were defeated by the Milesians, ancestors of the Gaels who came from Spain and their descendants became the various tribal clans who ruled the region until the Norman conquest of the 12th century. Among the chief Gaelic clans were O'Malley, O'Dowd, O'Lachtnan, Mac Fhirbhisigh, O'Cleary and many more. The arrival of St. Patrick brought the pagan druidic religion to an end and Christian communities sprang up in places such Aughagower, Ballintubber, Errew, Cong, Killala and remote islands. The Normans commanded by Richard De Clare better known as Strongbow came to Ireland following the invitation of the deposed King of Leinster, Dermot McMurrough. Strongbow married his daughter Aoife and claimed his royal title following his death however Henry II, King of England made himself Lord of Ireland and brought the Norman lords and Gaelic chiefs under his control. In the 19th century a series of crop failures and famines culminated in the Great Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s. County Mayo suffered greatly with whole villages and communities vanishing due to starvation, disease and mass emigration to America . Memories of the catastrophe fueled the activities of the Fenians, the Land League and Irish Parliamentary Party who pushed for land reform and Irish Home Rule in the latter half of the 19th century. A famous incident was the ostracisation of the landlord Captain Boycott by his County Mayo tenants. At the turn of the 20th century most of the Anglo-Irish Protestant estates had been broken up and most Irish farmers owned their land. When Knox wrote his book in 1908, Ireland was on the cusp of revolutionary changes that brought about transformation of the democratic drive for Home Rule into a violent uprising against British rule between 1916 and 1922. A Civil War followed from 1922 to 1923 between rival republican forces. In the new Irish Free State and Irish Republic , County Mayo remained economically deprived compared to the rest of the country and experienced decades of continued mass emigration.