The Clew Bay drowning, 1894
Each summer, hundreds of young people from Achill and Corraun crossed to Scotland for the potato harvest - tattie hoking, months of stooped labour for hard money. On 14 June 1894 around 400 set out for Westport Quay to board the Glasgow steamer SS Elm. One of the hookers ferrying them out, the Victory, carried roughly 126 people. As it neared the quay the crowd surged to one side to look at the steamer, a gust caught the boat, and it went over, trapping people under the heavy wet sails. Thirty-two drowned, most of them teenagers, from Achill, Achill Sound and the surrounding townlands. The dead were brought home on the very first train to run the new Achill railway line - a detail locals tied to the old prophecy of Brian Rua Ua Cearbháin, who was said to have foretold that fire carriages on iron wheels would carry the dead to Achill. They were buried in a communal grave at Kildavnet on the south of the island, under a single headstone bearing all the names. The prophecy was read again in 1937, when the last train on the same line brought home ten Achill boys killed in the Kirkintilloch bothy fire near Glasgow.