County Donegal
Dún na nGall
- IrishDún na nGall
- ProvinceUlster
- County townLifford
- Local governmentDonegal County Council
- Area4,861 km²
- Population167,084 (2022)
- Highest pointErrigal, 751 m
Eighteen shillings a head
In 1891 the state drew a line through the West. Where the land was valued at less than thirty shillings a head, a district was congested, and the new Congested Districts Board could act there.
The Board's first count put Donegal's congested districts at eighteen shillings a head. Only Galway came lower.
More people lived inside those districts in Donegal than in any county but Mayo.
Cormac Óg
Port
Port is a townland of 331 acres on the Donegal coast. It is often called a village emptied by the Famine.
It was not empty. Twenty people lived there in 1901, and twenty in 1911. Thirteen of the twenty in 1911 were children.
In 1901 one house was headed by John Gillespie, a widower and still the farmer. Four grown children lived with him. Not one of them was married.
Cormac Óg
Patrick MacGill
Born on Christmas Day 1890 at Maas, near Glenties, the eldest of ten. He left school at ten. At twelve he was hired out at Strabane fair to work on the farms of the Laggan.
At fifteen he was picking potatoes in Scotland, at eighteen laying railway track. Then he was a tramp, and a navvy on a waterworks.
The Derry Journal printed his first poems in 1910. In 1912 he went to work for the royal chaplain at Windsor, and Songs of a Navvy came out with Windsor Castle on the cover as his address. Children of the Dead End followed in 1914.
He died in Miami in 1963.
Cormac Óg
Read further
The townland of Port held twenty people in 1901 and twenty again in 1911, which is not the story the ruins are usually made to tell.