The novelist who left and wrote about leaving
George Moore
George Moore was born at Moore Hall in 1852, the eldest son of John Moore MP. He left Mayo at seventeen for London, then Paris, studied painting under Cabanel, ran out of money, began writing instead. A Mummer's Wife (1885), Esther Waters (1894), The Untilled Field (1903) — a body of work that put him in the first rank of English-language fiction. He came back to Ireland for a decade from 1901, working with Yeats and the Abbey Theatre crowd, then left again for London. Hail and Farewell, his three-volume memoir of that period, is still the sharpest account of the Irish Literary Revival written from the inside. He died in London in 1933, a year before his house was finally declared a ruin. His ashes were brought back and buried on Castle Island in Lough Carra — a small island in the lake below where he grew up.
Built in 1795. Burned in 1923.
Moore Hall
John Moore Moore built the hall in 1795 on a wooded peninsula above Lough Carra, using money from the family's wine trade with Spain. It was a substantial Georgian house — two storeys, eleven bays, cut limestone — and the Moore family lived there for four generations. John Moore, George's father, was a Mayo MP and an early supporter of Charles Stewart Parnell; he died in 1879, a year before the Land League agitation peaked around the lake. The house was burned in February 1923 by Anti-Treaty IRA forces, who used it as a barracks during the Civil War and torched it on withdrawal. No one was hurt. The contents, including a library of several thousand volumes, were lost. Coillte now manages the surrounding plantation and the roofless shell of the hall. There is a car park at the end of the forest road. The walk to the ruin takes about fifteen minutes through commercial spruce.
One of the few marl lakes in Ireland — and one of the best trout fisheries
Lough Carra and the marl
Lough Carra is roughly seven kilometres long and three wide, sitting on a limestone plain between Castlebar and Ballinrobe. It is one of a small number of marl lakes in Ireland — the alkaline limestone weathers directly into the water column, making the lake unusually clear and biologically rich. The white marl bottom, visible through the shallow water on calm days, accounts for the distinctive colour. The lake holds a strong population of wild brown trout. The mayfly — Ephemera danica — hatches in the second half of May, triggering the dry-fly season that anglers mark their year by. Boats are available from the western shore. The season runs March to September under Western Regional Fisheries Board rules. Pike also run in the lake's northern bays; the trout anglers regard this with feelings.
The priest who named the tactic
Father O'Malley and the word
Father John O'Malley was parish priest of The Neale — six kilometres south of Belcarra, between Lough Mask and Lough Carra — through the Land League period. When Charles Boycott's estate workers withdrew their labour in September 1880, it was O'Malley who managed the moral and pastoral dimensions of the protest for the local Catholic community. And it was O'Malley who, in a conversation with American journalist James Redpath sometime in late October 1880, hit on the word 'boycott' as a name for the tactic of total social exclusion. Redpath wired it to his Boston paper. Within weeks it was in the London newspapers. The OED admitted it in 1888. Father O'Malley lived out his years at The Neale; he is buried in the parish churchyard there.