County Mayo
Maigh Eo
- IrishMaigh Eo
- ProvinceConnacht
- County townCastlebar
- Local governmentMayo County Council
- Area5,588 km²
- Population137,970 (2022)
- Highest pointMweelrea, 814.5 m
Under thirty acres
In 1900, 82.5 per cent of holdings in Mayo were under thirty acres.
A farm of twenty five acres in Mayo fed one household. Not two. So one child got it, and the rest went.
Nine years earlier the Congested Districts Board had valued Mayo's congested districts at eighteen shillings and threepence a head. More people lived inside them than in any other county.
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Céide Fields
Under the blanket bog of north Mayo lies a system of stone walled fields, houses and megalithic tombs. The Office of Public Works calls it the most extensive Stone Age monument in the world.
The fields cover hundreds of hectares and are almost six thousand years old, the oldest known anywhere.
The bog grew over them and kept them. The visitor centre stands near a cliff 110 metres high.
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Michael Davitt
Born at Straide on the twenty fifth of March 1846. In 1850 the family was evicted for rent and the cottage burned.
They moved to Haslingden in Lancashire. At eleven he lost his right arm in a mill.
At nineteen he joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood. In 1870 he was sentenced to fifteen years for treason felony. He served seven, most of them breaking stones at Dartmoor.
In 1879 he founded the Land League. He later said he came out of Dartmoor with the plan already made. The dictionary calls that retrospective wish fulfilment.
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Read further
Mayo lost people at every census between 1841 and 1971, and in March 1906 it was the only county in Ireland where not one labourers cottage had been provided under the Labourers Acts.