How a verb was made in ten weeks
Captain Boycott
Charles Cunningham Boycott was a former British army captain who had taken on the job of land agent for Lord Erne at Lough Mask House, six kilometres outside Ballinrobe. In autumn 1880, after a bad harvest, the tenants asked for a 25% rent cut. They were offered 10. Charles Stewart Parnell, on the 19th of September, told a Land League meeting in Ennis to treat any man who took an evicted tenant's farm as 'a leper of old.' Father John O'Malley of The Neale, with the Boston journalist James Redpath sat across from him in a parlour, came up with the verb on the 23rd. Inside weeks the labourers had walked off, the shopkeepers wouldn't serve him, the postman wouldn't carry his letters, and fifty Orangemen had to be brought down from Ulster under army escort to dig his potatoes. He left Ireland on the 1st of December. The word was in the OED by 1888.
Connacht's only track
The racecourse
Horse racing on the plain at Ballinrobe goes back to 1774, with a steeplechase recorded in 1834. The current course was laid out in 1921, and it has been the only racecourse in Connacht ever since — Galway is, technically, in the same province but a different world. Ten fixtures a year, mostly Friday and Monday evenings in summer, with gates from three and the first race at five. McHale Raceday in August carries the McHale Mayo National and the Mayo Hurdle, the two biggest pots run on the course. The Lodge at Ashford Castle Ladies Day in late June is the dressed-up one. The flat light over the lake at the back of the stand is the part nobody photographs and everyone remembers.
A week in May the anglers wait for
Lough Mask and the mayfly
Lough Mask is the second-largest of the limestone lakes after Corrib, ten miles long and three across at its widest. It is brown-trout water of the better sort. The mayfly hatch comes off in the second half of May, generally — the precise week is what you ring the boatmen about — and for ten days or so the trout that have been ignoring everything come up to take a fly that has just spent a year as a larva at the bottom of the lake. People plan their year around it. The boats go out from Cushlough, Cahir and Caher Bay. The wind is the whole story. If you do not know what you are doing, hire a man who does.
Three layers of the same town
Friary, Workhouse, Two Medals
The Augustinian friary ruin by the river was founded before 1337 by Elizabeth de Clare, a granddaughter of Edward I — the first of nine Augustinian houses west of the Shannon. The Union Workhouse, off the Castlebar road, opened in 1839 and held 2,000 souls at the worst of An Gorta Mór; substantial blocks of it still stand. And on the Cornmarket there is a memorial to John King, born in Currabee just outside the town in 1865, one of only nineteen sailors in US Navy history to be awarded the Medal of Honor twice. The town wears all three quietly. You will walk past any of them without noticing if nobody points.