-------- Original Message -------- Subject: [Y-IRL] The night of the big storm.............. Date: Sun, 10 Mar 2002 01:09:58 -0000 From: "Jane Lyons" <[email protected]> To: <[email protected]> Given that we have been talking about water and I know that on many lists I have seen queries about this storm over the years, I think maybe now is a good time to introduce it to the group - and the county pieces >From the Dublin Evening Post, January 8th 1839. "The Annals of Ireland do not furnish anything in the remotest degree parralel to this hurricane - nor has there ever been a visitation in this country, attended with more tremendous, extensive, and calamitous consequences" "The night of Sunday, the sixth of January 1839 was a night of madness. Ireland was hit by what was possibly the most cataclysmic storm to strike the country in the last 600 years. It killed, maimed and ruined, threatening to sweep every obsctacle before it fomr the surface of the earth. Ireland has been the chief victim of a hurricane, every part of Ireland - every field, every town, every village in Ireland, have felt it's dire effects from Galway to Dublin - from the Giant's Causeway to the island of Valencia. It has been, we repeat it, the most awful, the most extraordinary calamity of the kind with which a people were ever afflicted. The damage which it has done is almost beyond calculation. Several hundreds of thoussands of trees have been levelled to the ground. More than half a century must elapse, before Ireland, in this regard, presents the appearance she did last Summmer. The loss of farming stock, of all kinds has been terrible. Many of the most thrifty and industrious husbend men, whose haggards and homesteasds were filled with unthreshed corn on Sunday night, found themselves without a sheaf of grain in the morning. The poor, of course, as being the most numerous, have been the greatest suffereers. Tens of thousands of their wrteched cabins have been swept away or unroofed, and many as we have seen, have become a prey to the flames. on the whole, however, there has not been as great a loss of life as might have been anticipated. But the destitution to which they are reduced, must quicken the operation of the Poor Laws. In Cork, we perceive, that the citizens have already adopted active measures, with immediately forming a Union in that city. A similar meeting has been held in Limerick, and we doubt not the example willl be followed in other places. We dare not call this hurricane a phenomenon, however rare or unprecedented it's occurrence in so temperate a climate. But, it will nevertheless, become a study to our meteorologists. Trees, ten, or twelve miles from the sea were covered witrh salt brine, and in the very centre of the island, forty or fifty miles inland, such vegetable matter as it occurred to individuals to test, had universally a saline taste. The surges of the sea, therefore, must have been whipped up, and whirled hundreds of miles inland. Such, in a word was teh fury of the storm, that, had it lasted six hours longer, it is not houses that would have been prostrated, but streets and towns levelled with the dust." If I remember correctly, this particular storm is mentioned at least once in Cathy Joynt Labaths Connaught Journal Abstracts..........the piece I remember was on the herring fishery and the impact of the storm on it............ Ireland Newspaper Abstracts http://www.newspaperabstracts.com/Ireland/ Jane ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> FREE COLLEGE MONEY CLICK HERE to search 600,000 scholarships! http://us.click.yahoo.com/iZp8OC/4m7CAA/ySSFAA/dvArlB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [email protected] Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/