1. ‘Take my advice, go to Mongan’s Hotel’: barrenness and abundance in the late Victorian Connemara landscape*
Kevin J. James
Commenting on his stay at Mongan’s Hotel, in Carna, Co. Galway, in an August 1892 entry in the hotel’s visitors’ book, an English guest, Fred Scott, remarked that he had enjoyed ‘several visits’ to the hostelry; he recorded ‘uniform excellence’ and proprietors Martin and Honoria Mongan’s ‘personal kindness and attention’. This was ‘not the least of the charms of a stay with them’.1 Their enterprise, in the western, largely Irish-speaking district of Connemara, Scott wrote, ‘deserves success + this, under present conditions, is certain to be achieved in full measure’. Following Scott’s name were others in his travelling party. The entry, which inaugurates the surviving Mongan’s Hotel visitors’ book, strays little from the tone, style and structure of subsequent inscriptions. These entries hew closely to a template extolling the hotel and praising the cuisine,2 the attentiveness of the hotelkeepers3 and the expansive sporting opportunities in the district’s fields, lakes, rivers and coast. Only the weather figures as a destabilizing element in guests’ fulsome inscriptions; and even then its caprices elicited ambivalent responses, simultaneously heightening the narrative of adventure and emphasizing the warmth enjoyed within the hostelry’s walls. As one traveller commented in 1895: ‘Have been here for a week for shooting, but incessant gales and rain have been very much against it. Found a fair number of snipes in certain places. Everyone very obliging and attentive’.4 As this entry suggests, at Mongan’s Hotel, food and hospitality, in contrast to the inclemency of climate, were as reliable as they were peerless. Craggy terrain, winding rivers and bracing weather defined a landscape with abundant opportunities for hunting, shooting and angling. The desolate terrain and formidable elements interwove with Mongan’s Hotel’s homely welcome to produce a distinctive narrative of an alluring place. Barrenness begat challenge, which in turn accentuated the prize of capture in fields and waters. The adventurous sporting tourist was rewarded in part because of, rather than despite, the visitations of mother nature. And the hotel figured as a beacon of civility and civilization in this narrative of a remote, rugged landscape. Indeed, one party staying over in May and June 1895 remarked in the book that ‘[t]he hotel is the very best we have seen out of Dublin, and for comfort, good cooking + general management could scarcely be improved’ – a sentiment endorsed by a guest on 1 December 1896 who wrote: ‘This I must say without any exception is the nicest + most comfortable Country Hotel I was Ever in’.
This chorus of fulsome endorsement is evident in similar books that lay open for perusal and inscription at hostelries throughout the United Kingdom and beyond.5 A distinctive literary culture surrounded them, marked by whimsical illustration, mannered prose and effusive poetry. Combined, they constituted generic conventions of the ‘hotel album’ and emplaced it within popular imagination as a site of literary excess and a source of bemusement for the reader.6 It was a species of the album genre – a bound codex with blank pages inviting inscription, defined by its initial ‘emptiness’. This ‘empty’ and ‘open book’ was in fact no tabula rasa, but a volume with significant generic and material affordances that shaped the interwoven accounts of space, self and sociability. Textually, the narrative was collectively created through an aggregation of inscriptions – through processes of social authorship as empty pages were progressively filled. The album became a technological device used to build social coherence and to generate, rather than simply record, a particular landscape. Mongan’s Hotel’s book, with its tight focus on leisure and sport and high praise for nature’s yields, implicitly rebutted narratives of want and privation that underpinned other contemporary, printed accounts of Carna in which the condition of the district’s inhabitants was attributed to the barren harvests of the land and sea and the absence of programmes and agents of improvement. Those tropes coloured evocative printed accounts and were measured in detailed statistical surveys of the landscape and its resources. These accounts stressed the barrenness of the district and linked its remoteness and infertile soil to population congestion and deep poverty. In the social economy of improvement, there was an alarming disequilibrium between the capacity of the soil and the coast on one hand and the needs of its population on the other. In contrast, legions of travellers over many years used the lens of active leisure – those who ‘had excellent sport and the Devil’s own blasting round Connemara’ while enjoying ‘the feeding and routine of the hotel’, as one inscriber enthused7 – to invert this trope of scarcity. Over time, as efforts to increase the district’s prosperity failed, this inscription triumphed: the district’s harshness became its chief attraction as terrain described as simultaneously barren of resources and teeming with peasants became a site ripe for the sporting tourist seeking to leave the beaten track.
The voices of the visitors’ book
Travellers leafed through and filled the pages of the hotel’s visitors’ book with inscriptions extolling Mongan’s Hotel’s satiating food and drink, knowledgeable guides and sturdy boats. Their entries were interlaced as comfortably and complementarily as the guests themselves intermingled over a warm fire, good fare and fine ale after a day of invigorating sport in field and stream. If the thematic and rhetorical coherence of the inscriptions in the visitors’ book was marked – and its fulsome, often florid, tone was familiar to the reader of many Victorian hotel albums – features of this particular volume deviate from generic conventions in notable respects. They underscore how inscribers followed codes that were interwoven with acts of reading and also how conditions peculiar to the hotel and the locality influenced the narrative that was shaped through the book. One striking feature is the relative absence of impromptu poetry. Such verses often filled the pages of the late Victorian visitors’ book (here only a few short verses appear, including one hackneyed effort from 16 December 1896 beginning, ‘A tip to the sportsman: who not feeling well | just take the first train for Mongan’s Hotel’). The dialogic structure of some books, which was reflected in scribal ‘conversations’ that saw pages filled non-sequentially as guests responded to earlier entries by penning marginal annotations on the same page, also yields here to a much more sequential series of inscriptions. Perhaps it is due to the nature of the hostelry – its markedly small scale (beginning as a five-bedded inn, with a wing added in the 1890s) and the culture of intimate, familiar superintendence. Or maybe it is the tendency of inscriptions to bear striking structural and thematic relation to surrounding material, as inscribers perused the album and produced entries that corresponded to what they had already read in it, either unconsciously or studiously hewing to thematic and structural parameters set by fellow visitors. Many of these inscribers were united both in purpose and in profile: they were sporting travellers who shared not only a lodging in Carna, but also a socio-economic status, visiting from Dublin and other parts of Ireland. They hailed from Britain, too, and often their stays were lengthy, stretching over a fortnight in late summer and December and January – prime seasons in the sporting calendar.8 Their album entries hint at a gentle competition as they enumerated each day’s success, measured by the size of bag and number of fish captured from coast and stream; their inscriptions also affirm their status as leisure travellers.
Figure 1.2. Mongan’s Hotel, Carna, Co. Galway, n.d. Courtesy of The Historical Picture Archive.
If the mark of the much-derided versifier is light in this album, sporting tourists are ubiquitous within the book’s pages, inhabiting them as energetic narrators of days in the field and stream.9 To them, mother nature played a critical part in defining success: a ‘challenging’ landscape became not an obstacle, but a precondition, to sporting accomplishment. Resistance to the elements while gamely overcoming stubborn wind and lashing rain was rewarded by rod and rifle and calculated proudly in their visitor-book counts of curlew, snipe, woodcock, duck and teal. Shooters might find wild fowl, golden plover and hares. Anglers reported reeling in stocks of brown and white trout, as well as sea fish.10 As they took pen in hand, they propounded a narrative of sporting success and hospitality. And as they filled the empty pages with interweaving narratives of landscape and sociability, they engaged in the simultaneous social fashioning of self and space.
Tropes of bounty and barrenness
As much as topography inspired visitors’-book accounts of the satisfactions of sporting challenge and arduous conditions that were gamely overcome, other people employed alternative outlets and devices to narrate a different relationship to another landscape. They lamented nature’s barrenness on Ireland’s western shores and pledged themselves to the cause of the district’s improvement as they calculated a disequilibrium between the population and the resources available to sustain them. Mongan’s Hotel was located in the heart of a village in a populous district. Situated in a seaboard parish relying heavily on kelp-harvesting for income,11 many observers found considerable poverty there, in part due to the village’s heavy dependence on, and the vagaries of, the kelp market in the 1880s. Carna consequently became a focus of intense philanthropic activity and a synecdoche for western Irish poverty: a putatively precarious balance of resources to population earned it the formal designation of ‘congested’ when the Congested Districts Board (CDB) came into being in 1891.12 This designation encoded disequilibrium between the fertility of land and sea and the capacity for subsistence and proposed an inverse relationship between the two, the district being at once too empty (bereft of productive resources) and too full (teeming with peasants). The CDB ‘baseline report’ for the district described a population nine-tenths of whom hugged the coastline, whose smallholdings supported mixed oats and potato cultivation.13 The region also became a site where an expansive philanthropic enterprise was enacted from the late 1880s. These programmatic efforts at improvement must be understood in relation to the competing ways in which landscape and nature were framed. One narrative emphasized how an observable, calculable scarcity of natural endowments conspired against subsistence and stability. Another narrative, propounded in the visitors’ book, found in the bleak terrain a form of authentication for the sporting tourist’s adventures. Both were mobilized to support different forms of intervention and engagement with the landscape that deeply implicated Mongan’s Hotel – as a site from which the sporting tourist set forth, was nourished and found repose and as a place that leading social investigators and rural industrial improvers made their base on their forays into the district.
Even if the contents of his inaugural entry in the hotel visitors’ book were effusive, Fred Scott’s 1892 entry reveals how a construction of emptiness was propounded through the idiom of improvement. On the first page, scribbled in his hand in the top right-hand corner of the lined sheet, Scott identified his affiliations with the ‘Carna Industrial Fund’ and the ‘Connemara Industries Co., Ltd.’ – bodies on which he served as honorary secretary. By the time Scott penned this entry, the fund and company were inscribing over-population and resource scarcity on the landscape in a wide textual field as they generated reports, delivered testimony before commissions and publicized initiatives to render a bleak terrain productive through their intervention. They contended that commercial acumen and philanthropic energies in far-away Manchester, in alliance with local actors and the state-supported CDB, could develop the district’s infrastructure and throw open its scenic charms to tourists, ‘filling’ the void which fuelled poverty there.
Scott’s endeavours were embedded within a dense urban voluntary and philanthropic network in Manchester and located within a coherent late Victorian civic Reform ideology – one that promoted intervention in, and reorganization of, the environment and advocated proactive measures consistent with (and indeed complementary to) capitalist development to promote social and economic improvement. An accountant and son of a leading Manchester Liberal, Scott advocated schemes to improve urban air quality.14 He was also deeply engaged in other literary, cultural and statistical groups.15 He served as secretary to the Manchester and Salford Sanitary Association, the National Church Reform Union and the Manchester and Salford Noxious Vapours Abatement Association.16 Promoting rural Irish industrial development was consistent with the mindset of mid to late Victorian Manchester reform politics, which extended its reading of the noxious urban landscape and associated distress to a critical and rational analysis of the improvement of rural Ireland. It rendered this rural landscape calculable – subject to computation and, through it, to improvement.17 Indeed, rural Ireland’s improvement through energetic, organized intervention was a corollary to the urban investigation and reform efforts in which Fred Scott was intimately involved.18
Scott’s interest in alleviating Irish poverty may have tapped a personal and civic disposition to mobilize for the cause of social reform, but it was spurred by emotive reports that appeared in the pages of the Manchester Guardian in late 1887.19 In contrast with a visitors’-book landscape produced largely by leisure visitors, these press accounts were authored during the course of purposeful investigative ‘tours’, usually undertaken by special correspondents whose evaluations were then circulated widely through the press. Whereas hotel album-inscription was a specific act of personal and social fashioning with a limited audience that rarely extended beyond the hostelry’s walls, press publication had different polemical objectives, particularly in the Manchester Guardian, a champion of middle-class reform politics.20 In dramatic and evocative portrayals of the landscape, its correspondent portrayed Carna’s soil as rugged, rocky and infertile, incapable of supporting even subsistence activity. Writers who collaborated in producing this assessment of rural Ireland, and those who supplied them with testimony on the ground, were simultaneously self-fashioning as keen observers of rural social life and relations, as interpreters of the roots of the locality’s misfortune and as interlocutors between the rural Irish west and Britain. And their initial efforts had particular salience at a moment in time when the island of Ireland’s status within the United Kingdom was contested – in between the two bitter home-rule debates that resulted in defeat for Liberal home-rule bills in 1886 and 1893 and the Tory articulation of an alternative vision that would diminish support for home rule through a programme of systematic investment in, and improvement of, Ireland’s infrastructure and industries. Tourism was touted as an agent of prosperity and reconciliation that would transcend party divisions and draw the ‘sister isles’ closer together.
In 1888 and 1889 deputations from Manchester visited Carna to explore opportunities to develop cottage industries and the fishing economy there.21 At Easter 1888, on the invitation of the energetic Carna priest T. J. ‘Father Tom’ Flannery, Fred Scott joined the prominent Liberal and Manchester councillor J. W. Southern and his wife, the cloth agent and leading civic figure T. C. Abbott and a correspondent for the Freeman’s Journal, on a visit to the district.22 At Carna, where the delegation stayed for several days, it was greeted with a huge bonfire and the burning of tar-barrels.23 Upon returning to Manchester, at a meeting in July 1888 chaired by the mayor and in the presence of Scott and the Irish home-industries champion Alice Hart (who embraced ‘hand and village industries’ as a means of development befitting the district’s meagre resources), Flannery invoked bleakness to describe the prospects of his parishioners – some 750 families – as being ‘perhaps the poorest community in the world’.24 The public meeting, whose proceedings were minutely recorded in the press, took action to remedy their plight. Their solution was extensive commercial development and expanded cottage manufacture which sought to tap ‘native’ skill and preserve the domestic rural milieu as a site of production. A formal body was established to ‘raise a fund for the purpose of providing instruction for the people in improved methods of knitting, weaving, & c., and also in industries previously unknown in the district’.25 The limited-liability company, with capital of £1,000, would provide implements for the advancement of commerce. The president of the new ‘Carna Industrial Fund’ was the distinguished chemist and Liberal MP Sir Henry E. Roscoe. Fred Scott was honorary secretary. Initially, £200 was raised to support a commercial network linking Carna producers to new markets. It would collaborate with the newly formed ‘Connemara Industries Company, Limited’. The limited-liability company was established to conduct trade for those engaged in the fund’s activities26 and place on a sound commercial footing those cottage industries for which the Carna Industrial Fund had sponsored training.27 It initially secured the services of a London smallware merchant to employ female labour to produce knitted children’s underclothing and other work.28 Scott signalled his unflagging interest in this venture through frequent voyages across the Irish Sea. To him, the plight of the rural Irish cottier was a barometer of wider problems connected to uneven industrial development in the UK. Their amelioration rested not only on home rule, but also on support from centres of capital and commerce in the sister isle. He championed these links during the ‘several visits’ he referenced in his 1892 visitor-book entry and during many more that followed the date of that inscription, even as the Carna industrial development movement that he so energetically spearheaded disavowed any position on the question of home rule.29
How do we reconcile the two contemporaneous narratives of space – one in which emptiness and barrenness are sources of adventure and the other in which they are signals of privation – and explain Scott’s exposition of both landscapes, in two textual fields? The interplay between these two tropes is one of the most intriguing features of the visitors’ book. They rest on different assumptions about the relationship between the landscapes and its uses and users – and the degree of intervention, development or conservation that they require. The visitors’ book promotes Martin Mongan as an assiduous host – a figure whose qualities are filtered through the lens of sporting tourists drawn from far afield. But other sources reveal his broader roles within the local economy which drew him into many sectors outside tourism, often acting also as an agent of the state and estate and as an intermediary between local and external actors.30 Mongan was a major tenant of Dominick B. Leonard in the 1880s31 and his self-representation, both in private records and in public forums, sometimes elided or downplayed hotel-keeping: in September 1907, offering evidence before the Royal Commission on Congestion in Ireland, Mongan captured the multi-faceted dimensions of his activity in a pithy and revealing reply. He supplied his occupation at the commencement of his evidence: ‘I am a farmer, and I keep a small hotel and shop’.32
Mongan, a native Irish-speaker, also helped to mould outsiders’ perspectives on the local community and their evaluation of its privation, as well as its bounties. He was implicated in local governance, in the circulation of money and the extension of credit, as postmaster, shopkeeper, Clifden Union poor-law guardian, barony cess collector and estate agent.33 He appealed to the Manchester reformers’ predilection for calculation, not least in his capacity as shopkeeper, even when rural retailers came under heavy scrutiny and strong criticism for their putative monopolistic grasp on cash and credit. Operating most rapaciously within the system of agricultural credit in rural Ireland, they were castigated as usurious ‘gombeen men’. Here, too, another ‘absence’ – of specie – signified the district’s backwardness. In 1892, the ‘Report of the Inspector for the Congested Districts Board’ described the rhythm of credit among local families: it was extended at Christmas and rose through June, when the kelp and lobster sector allowed the bills to be discharged; in August to December people were able to pay cash for purchases, as cattle and sheep were ‘fit for sale’.34 In general the shopkeepers were adjudged to be ‘not too exacting in their demands, so long as they see the people are honestly endeavouring to meet their liabilities. Interest varies from 10 to 20 per cent’.35 Shopkeeping and deep implication in systems of legal regulation and credit authorized Mongan, in newspaper accounts and before royal commissions, to adopt the language of the accountant in calculating the extent to which agrarian crises had reached families and assess whether the resources of the district could support its population.36 If the visitors’ book reveals it to be a centre of conviviality and leisure, clearly Mongan’s eponymous hotel and shop were also a nexus for the administration of the local landed estate and also, through its function as a centre of credit and informal site of barter, for the organization of household economies as they negotiated the vagaries of consecutive, shattering crises.37 These many roles enhanced Mongan’s local power and also his status as an intermediary for those who came to Carna – whether to shoot, to fish or to offer their services in lifting the region out of apparent, deep poverty. His eponymous hotel became a site from which these diverse activities, initiatives and narratives of space developed.
Abundance and poverty: tourist and philanthropic narratives of Carna in the 1890s
The 1890s – the same decade in which the voices of hotel visitors raised a chorus of praise to Carna’s sporting treasure – buttressed the dire appraisal that Carna’s inhospitable terrain could not sustain its people. These years coincided with pessimistic assessments from Fred Scott regarding the prospects for the Connemara Industries Company and the Carna Industrial Fund. The fund had lost the offices of its valuable instructor on the ground, May Southern, and its partner, Father Flannery; the prospective subsistence crisis of 1890 had severely curtailed the company’s activities and it was failing to turn a profit.38 Indeed, Scott’s accounting acumen was put to good use, albeit for a purpose that would no doubt have disappointed him, when he served as liquidator of the company only a few years later.39 A potato-harvest failure in 1890 prompted Fred Scott’s collaborator, Manchester councillor J. W. Southern, to lament that salutary improvements had been undone. His observations were disseminated in Irish and British newspapers in 1890 and 1891 and strengthened a narrative of a benighted peasantry inhabiting a barren landscape against whom providence conspired. Evaluating local channels of relief in 1890, Southern claimed that Mongan was one of only two district shopkeepers who would ‘buy against an unusual demand’, thereby providing a channel for food distribution. But Southern doubted that such an enterprise could be achieved, even with sympathetic shopkeepers’ acquiescence, on the scale required by this calamity.40 Poverty returned again in 1897 in the form of a severe swine fever and potato failure41 and signalled to many observers that despite Manchester’s efforts, and those of the state through the CDB, Carna’s resources and its population were strikingly and stubbornly imbalanced – obdurately resistant to programmes of improvement, the seeds of which had failed to germinate in its rocky terrain.42
Like others, Reverend T. A. Finlay excavated Carna’s social ills, located their origins in congestion and speculated that new systems of commercial organization would offer some avenue to improvement. Finlay focused on agrarian organization and made no mention of tourism or, indeed, of the infrastructure that supported it at this time: indeed, the ‘grocer’s shop’ that he described was attached, he pithily wrote, to ‘a small squat building dignified by the name “hotel”’.43 His scepticism echoed other evaluations expressing doubt that such a desolate and isolated district supplied the requisite scenery for tourism to flourish. They offered a much more critical appraisal of the hotel than the one supplied by inscribers in the visitors’ book: ‘Your Special Correspondent in Ireland’ advised a reader that ‘[t]here is a small inn at Carna making up five beds. But I cannot honestly recommend Carna as a tourist resort. It is a mere jumble of rocks, bog, water, and seaweed. But there is noble scenery at Recess, where also is one of the best of the minor Irish hotels’.44
Despite these critical evaluations of barren terrain, the idea of tourism as a vehicle for development began to take hold in the district and it supplied a rhetorical framework within which the landscape was recast from unproductive and harsh to stark and alluring. In so doing, it reproduced many visitors’-book tropes of an essentially challenging but nonetheless inviting and indeed attractive landscape. This focus was nourished by a wider effort at the national level to promote the tourism sector as an engine of economic development and political fraternity.45 No ancillary of improvement, it became a key rhetorical part of the argument for investment in the rural west in which the region’s natural endowments, remoteness and cultural distinctiveness were to be valued and indeed preserved; and suggests the influence of this broader discourse on the evaluations of travellers who found both gratification amidst, and beauty in, Carna’s barrenness.
Tropes in the hotel album now became central rhetorical elements in the promotion of the district as a centre of hospitality and enthralling wilderness. Martin Mongan’s hotel figured in a flattering appraisal of the Fund and Company’s activities in Carna written in 1889 to the editor of the Manchester Guardian that echoed many of the comments found in the album that lay open for inspection and inscription within the hotel’s walls.46 English visitors Edwin B. and S. Brownlow Benson touted Carna’s tourist potential, praised the hotel and suggested that tourism might be an engine of improvement:
Suffice it to say, we heartily recommend English tourists to pay Carna a visit. Mongan’s Hotel at Carna gives most comfortable accommodation, and if there is interest in the people’s welfare the parish priest, who knows all in the parish, will show and tell all there is to be known. But more, we saw enough to come to this conclusion, that, whether it be the woollen or the fishing industry, capital and market are needed, and there is scope for both; that, whether Englishmen realise it yet or not, there is a true deep bond of love and gratitude wherever such friendly help is granted in Ireland; that Father Tom and his people in particular are flourishing as compared to what they were, and will yet, please God, flourish the more owing to the outstretched hand of Manchester’s wealth and love to them in their time of need.47
Rural hostelries such as Mongan’s Hotel anchored a new vision of western tourist development that anticipated commercial tourism taking deep root in its rocky soil. To the rural Irish hotel’s champions, a hostelry that was conducted on modern lines stood as a beacon of improvement. The only hitch was that in many places the traditional Irish inn was largely not up to snuff – or so many British (and indeed many Irish) travellers complained. The English barrister, travel writer and prominent caravanner J. Harris Stone remarked that Connemara hotels in general lacked amenities. Given the region’s many natural beauties and bounties for the angler, improved inns would help to rectify negative assessments of Ireland. The British traveller’s gaze was richly informed, through popular culture, by images of the racialized ‘dark continent’ which offered a foil to the sister isle. At this high point of imperialism, far-flung colonial realms were both more ‘discovered’ and more securely implanted in the British imagination. Or at least that was Stone’s contention when he lamented that ‘Africa is getting more popularized than many parts of Ireland’.48 At Carna, Stone found only a ‘quiet, comfortable hotel, with old-fashioned enclosed garden, but no view’.49
The natural endowments of the district had, for many observers, been the principal constraint on Carna’s development. But as early as 1885 Father Tom Flannery mooted that tourism might help to resolve the apparently intractable problem posed by an overabundant population which had not emigrated on a desirable scale. He testified before the Select Committee on Industries that in contrast to those who lived along the tourist track, locals lived ‘by the land, by kelp making and by fishing’.50 An extension of the rail line would benefit not only the fishing sector, but would also diversify the rural economy by promoting tourism. It would provide a boon for that signal of improvement in rural Ireland – the well-managed hotel. There were already several tourist hotels in Connemara, alongside very good trout and salmon to attract the sporting traveller.51
As tourism began to figure in plans for Irish rural improvement, nature might not be framed as a limitation on development, or an impediment to progress and prosperity. Rather it might offer a catalyst for a particular kind of recreational development. Carna provided a rugged coast and terrain that would supply triumph to the sporting tourist. Hostile nature, which so conspired against local agrarian livelihoods on a sustainable commercial basis, might befit sport, with its very different framing of the elements. Through this lens a barren landscape was recast as rugged and alluring, its emptiness salutary and relationally defined in terms of coexisting abundance in the field and stream. In August 1888, a correspondent to the Manchester Guardian, ‘G. E. B.’, extolled not only the improvements that had been effected under the aegis of Southern and Scott, but also the tourist sporting attractions of the district: ‘If the traveller likes shooting, he has curlews, sandlarks, sea swallows, gulls, and other birds too numerous to mention, not to mention a chance at the seals. If he likes freshwater fishing, he has it here in abundance; and if he likes the sea, for a small sum he can have as much as he cares for’.52
Tourism might harness the district’s resources – and exploit the rural realm’s natural endowments to a new end: in extolling its potential, both Fr. Tom Flannery and ‘G. E. B’ foreshadowed fulsome comments found in the pages of the hotel visitors’ book for many years. The shooter’s small outlay would be rewarded with grouse, partridge, hares and snipe. Success was calculated in relation to the economy of commercial recreation, rather than commercial craft, fishing and farming, and its benefits were correspondingly distributed disproportionately among those in the service of travellers. A writer who had visited the district initially in connection with the business of the Connemara Industries Company, Limited, and in a later visit leading a party of tourists, extolled Carna in the pages of the Manchester Guardian in 1892, only two years after the district’s potato failure, as a place where the sporting traveller would benefit from comparative isolation, free amid the rocky and remote terrain from the incursion of commercial tourism on a large and destructive scale and liberated from the comparatively high charges levied elsewhere. The tourist would find at Mongan’s Hotel ‘all the comforts of more pretentious English hostelries at half the cost, and experience, moreover, an amount of kindness and attention of the nature of private hospitality rather than business, which is only to be found in places not spoiled by a constant influx of tourists’.53
This positive appraisal of remoteness evoked the gushing visitors’-book tributes of the 1890s. By 1897 a light rail line ran from Galway to Clifden and considerable hotel expansion was underway in the district – at Clifden, Recess and Cashel. At Carna, twelve miles from a railway station, Martin Mongan had expanded his hostelry with a new wing, as sportsmen enjoyed free shooting and fishing over several thousand acres.54 In 1905 a writer in The Western People invoked precisely the same features of the Carna landscape, boasting ‘a most beautiful and up-to-date hotel built on the very borders of the Atlantic’, that were said once to have irredeemably impeded its improvement when inviting tourists to holiday there: ‘The scenery around Carna is something magnificent, so varied and beautiful. Mountain, sea, and rock combine to please the eye. One might say to himself “How strange are the works of Nature? And what were the ideas of an all-wise Providence in forming such a barren and fruitless soil as Connemara?”’.55
Beyond its singular natural features, the district offered opportunities for ‘those who are anxious to gain a knowledge of the Irish language, and to learn the ways and customs of the Irish peasant’.56 In this respect, from the early twentieth century in particular it was promoted as a site of deep cultural immersion and of ethnographic and anthropological curiosity. As the agrarian economy succumbed to successive periods of distress and Carna rural industrial initiatives championed by Fred Scott floundered, the narrative of Connemara as productive leisure terrain – curious, timeless, still remarkably unfamiliar and culturally distinctive – blended with constructions of a peculiar, challenging, isolated and rugged natural world, lending allure to the district as a place of rugged adventure. It became central to a political project that valourized the district as part of a remote western ‘fringe’ where the heart of undiluted Gaelic culture lay.
Conclusion
Before and after he left the inaugural inscription in the hotel visitors’ book, Fred Scott was a regular traveller to the district in connection with cottage-industry development and made regular Easter trips across the Irish Sea to inspect the fund and company’s operations.57 Sometimes he was accompanied by family,58 on other occasions by his colleagues in the fund and like-minded reformers. The striking mutual instrumentality of the relationship between Scott and Martin Mongan was in stark evidence in 1898 when, during dinner at the hotel, Scott encountered a Bristol guest staying for the ‘excellent shooting’. Upon hearing of plans for an agricultural bank for the district, he wrote a cheque for £10 towards the scheme and consented to be guarantor of £100 to advance it.59 Spring 1900 saw another encounter between Scott and Mongan. At Whitsuntide, Scott headed a party of visitors to Carna from the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society – a very different purpose to the superintendence over rural industries that had spurred earlier travels. From 1 June to 7 June Scott conducted the party to sites of antiquarian interest before proceeding to Galway, where their tour took in other places of interest in the city and in Connemara, including Lough Corrib, the Aran Islands and Carna.60 Their stay at Mongan’s Hotel was duly recorded in its visitors’ book, in which Scott inscribed, in conventional language, his party’s high regard for the comforts of the hotel and gratitude for the appreciation of the hospitality that they received.61
Both Fred Scott and Martin Mongan outlived the late Victorian era in which press reports and the album supplied diverse narratives of Connemara’s attractions, ills and potential. Martin Mongan died in 1921. The Connacht Tribune hailed him as a leading figure in the locality – a poor-law guardian for forty-three years,62 an eloquent Irish speaker and a man whose ‘purse, his time, and his marvellous energy and ability were always unsparingly used in developing his beloved Connemara’.63 Fred Scott died in 1924.64 Mongan’s eponymous hotel endured, as did its book, which continued to record the comings and goings of sporting guests and other travellers for several decades after Fred Scott left his first mark there.
In examining how the empty pages of the visitors’ book provided surfaces for acts of self, social and spatial co-construction, it is important to consider how generic conventions of inscription and reading, as well as peculiarly local contexts, combined to produce a narrative that was at once a product of its wider age and of its particular locality. The book captures appraisals of the relationship between people, leisure and space that were configured in starkly different ways when Carna became an epicentre for experimentation, state intervention65 and philanthropic action. Professor James Long, author of evocative accounts of local poverty and a key figure in efforts to extend relief to Connemara, once noted: ‘There have been many English pilgrims to Carna, and I am not sure that it is not better known to some of the men of Lancashire than to the people of Connemara’.66 These pilgrims came with a range of motivations, not always neatly divided between philanthropic and recreational (as Scott’s deep engagement in the locality suggest), but increasingly, as they embraced the leisure tour and also the district as a site of the persistence of Irish folk ways, the rhetoric of the visitors’ book was translated into a more public discourse that supplied new ways to calculate the resources of the soil and appraise rural hospitality: ruggedness bequeathed beauty and sporting satisfaction in equal measure and became a precondition for the triumph of the rod and rifle. The neat interweaving of these assessments of barrenness and adventure found expression in a multitude of inscriptions, bound as tightly in rhetorical unison as the pages of the book in which they figure.
* I wish to acknowledge the generosity of the Moore Institute for Research in the Humanities and Social Studies for supporting a visiting fellowship in aid of this research, and to thank Dara Folan for his hospitality and insights.
1 Special Collections, National University of Ireland – Galway, Mongan’s Hotel Book, Carna, ‘Original in the possession of Mr. M. Mylote, Carna’ [hereafter ‘Mongan’s Hotel Book’], p. 1. The copy of the book is occasionally illegible, especially dates, in which case it is noted in the reference.
2 Mongan’s Hotel Book, 20 Dec. 1893.
3 Mongan’s Hotel Book, 14 Aug. 1896 and 15 Aug. 1896.
4 Mongan’s Hotel Book, Dec. 1895. Inscription dates, rather than page numbers, are cited in these notes.
5 There is a growing literature analysing visitors’ books as travel texts in the United Kingdom and continental Europe in the 19th century. See A. Durie, ‘Tracking tourism: visitors’ books and their value’, Scottish Archives, xvii (2011), 73–84; R. Singer, ‘Leisure, refuge and solidarity: messages in visitors’ books as microforms of travel writing’, Studies in Travel Writing, xx (2016), 392–408; K. James, ‘“A British social institution”: the visitors’ book and hotel culture in Victorian Britain and Ireland’, Journeys, xiii (2012), 42–69; K. Michalkiewicz and P. Vincent, ‘Victorians in the Alps: a case study of Zermatt’s hotel guest books and registers’, in Britain and the Narration of Travel in the Nineteenth Century: Texts, Images, Objects, ed. K. Hill (Farnham, 2016), pp. 75–90.
6 James, ‘“A British social institution”’.
7 Mongan’s Hotel Book, December, 2 Feb. 1897.
8 Mongan’s Hotel Book, 30 Jan. 1896.
9 Mongan’s Hotel Book, 1 Jan. 1894; 31 Aug. 1894; 19 Oct. – 3 Nov. 1896.
10 While such sport predominated among hotel visitors, and was the subject matter of the majority of inscriptions in the 1890s, other guests staying in June 1897 recorded cycling and pleasure boating (see Mongan’s Hotel Book, undated, June 1897) and enjoyed the wild scenery of western Connemara. For an excellent comparative study of sporting tourism, see A. J. Durie, ‘Sporting tourism flowers – the development from c. 1780 of grouse and golf as visitor attractions in Scotland and Ireland’, Jour. Tourism History, v (2013), 131–45.
11 Trinity College Dublin, department of early printed books, Congested Districts Board for Ireland: Baseline Reports, ‘Congested Districts Board for Ireland, County of Galway – Union of Clifden. Report of Major Rutledge-Fair, inspector, district of Carna’, 1892 (hereafter ‘CDB Report, Carna’); in this report it was noted that 360 families, constituting one-third of the district’s population, were employed in the kelp industry (p. 1).
12 C. Breathneach, The Congested Districts Board of Ireland, 1891–1923: Poverty and Development in the West of Ireland (Dublin, 2005).
13 ‘CDB Report, Carna’, p. 1.
14 Manchester Courier, 8 Feb. 1907.
15 Manchester Courier, 25 Jan. 1908.
16 M. E. Rose, ‘Culture, philanthropy and the Manchester middle classes’, in City, Class and Culture: Studies of Social Policy and Cultural Production in Victorian Manchester, ed. A. J. Kidd and K. W. Roberts (Manchester, 1985), pp. 103–17, at p. 103. For a review of Fred Scott’s energetic campaigns against pollution and the ambivalent reception accorded the abatement of ‘noxious vapours’ at a time when the smokestack was viewed as an icon of industrial progress, see S. Mosley, The Chimney of the World: a History of Smoke Pollution in Victorian and Edwardian Manchester (Cambridge, 2001). Some key findings of this study are summarized in S. Mosley, ‘Public perceptions of smoke pollution in Victorian Manchester’, in Smoke and Mirrors: the Politics and Culture of Air Pollution, ed. E. M. DuPuis (New York and London, 2004), pp. 51–76. See also H. L. Platt, ‘“The invisible evil”: noxious vapor and public health in Manchester during the age of industry’, in DuPuis, Smoke and Mirrors, pp. 27–50. Platt expands his analysis in comparative perspective in Shock Cities: the Environmental Transformation and Reform of Manchester and Chicago (Chicago, Ill. and London, 2005). A broad British perspective is offered in P. Thorsheim, Inventing Pollution: Coal, Smoke, and Culture in Britain since 1800 (Athens, Oh., 2006). Scott also played prominent roles in the Hospital Sunday and Saturday Fund and the Red Cross Society (Manchester Courier, 14 Nov., 18 Dec. 1908).
17 See Breathneach, Congested Districts Board.
18 See A. Davies, Leisure, Gender and Poverty: Working-Class Culture in Salford and Manchester, 1900–39 (Buckingham and Philadelphia, Pa., 1992), pp. 14–20.
19 Tuam Herald, 23 March 1889; e.g., Manchester Guardian, 23 Nov. 1887.
20 For a succinct discussion of the Manchester Guardian within the context of the English provincial press, see A. Walker, ‘The development of the provincial press in England c.1780–1914: an overview’, Journalism Studies, viii (2006), 373–86.
21 Freeman’s Journal, 18 Apr. 1889.
22 Tuam Herald, 23 March 1889; Manchester Guardian, 4 Apr. 1888.
23 Tuam Herald, 23 March 1889.
24 Tuam Herald, 28 July 1888.
25 Freeman’s Journal, 25 July 1889.
26 Manchester Courier, 3 Aug. 1889.
27 Manchester Guardian, 17 Jan. 1889.
28 Tuam Herald, 23 March 1889.
29 The chairman was the eminent chemist and radical Liberal Sir Henry Roscoe, whose parliamentary victory in 1885 helped to secure the Liberals’ toehold in Manchester at a time when Irish nationalists were being mobilized against the party. Then, following William Ewart Gladstone’s embrace of home rule, Roscoe fended off anti-home rule challengers in two subsequent re-elections before losing in 1895 to the Liberal Unionist the Marquess of Lorne. Roscoe was mindful of the deep divisions occasioned by Gladstone’s support for home rule and the failure of the 1886 Home Rule Bill. For a discussion of the dynamics of Liberal politics at local and national levels during the realignment of Liberals occasioned by home rule, see J. R. Moore, The Transformation of Urban Liberalism: Party Politics and Urban Governance in Late Nineteenth-Century England (Aldershot, 2006). At the 1889 first annual meeting of the Carna development bodies, Roscoe insisted that the Carna Industrial Fund offered the potential to advance the interests of the ‘sister isle’ by uniting people divided over home rule (Freeman’s Journal, 2 Aug. 1889).
30 In 1897, Mongan was castigated for arriving at Boffin Island with a ‘posse of police’ in his capacity as county cess collector (Tuam Herald, 12 June 1897). Mongan also appeared on the wrong side of the law – such as in 1896, when he was fined £100 for not having entered spirits into his stock book (a fine that was reduced by three-quarters with a recommendation for a further £10 reduction to £15) (Connaught Telegraph, 23 May 1896).
31 Irish Land Commission. Return According to Provinces and Counties of Judicial Rents Fixed by Sub-Commissions and Civil Bill Courts, as Notified to the Irish Land Commission During the Month of June, 1884, Specifying Dates and Amounts Respectively of the Last Increases of Rent Where Ascertained; Also Rents Fixed Upon the Reports of Valuers Appointed by the Irish Land Commission on the Joint Applications of Landlords and Tenants (Parl. Papers 1884 [C. 4161], lxvi, pp. 82–3).
32 Royal Commission on Congestion in Ireland. Appendix to the Tenth Report. Minutes of Evidence (Taken in Counties Galway and Roscommon, 18th September, to 4th October, 1907), and Documents Relating Thereto (Parl. Papers, 1908 [Cd. 4007], xlii, evidence of Martin Mongan, q. 53937).
33 Manchester Guardian, 25 Apr. 1889.
34 ‘CDB Report, Carna’, p. 5.
35 ‘CDB Report, Carna’, p. 5.
36 E.g., in 1889 he insisted from direct experience that the number of people receiving relief in the village was declining and the debts owing to him were diminishing, leading him confidently to double credit for ‘any of his poor customers’ to £10 (Manchester Guardian, 25 Apr. 1889). In 1897 Mongan was surveyed by a correspondent to the Freeman’s Journal to ascertain the extent of privation connected to a bad harvest. He recorded over £3,000 in debts on his books – the worst, he attested, since 1879 – from 195 debts. Correspondence to the Freeman’s Journal between Dec. 1896 and Jan. 1897 was subsequently published as Agricultural Depression in Ireland: the Harvest of 1896 with the Reduction in Prices and in Rents since 1881, etc. (Dublin, 1897); this material appears on p. 42. See also Royal Commission on Congestion in Ireland, evidence of Martin Mongan, qq. 54010, 54012, 54013.
37 Mongan also spearheaded a scheme that linked local peasant kelp-harvesters to external markets through Guernsey, serving as its agent. Mongan had for several years despatched men in his boats to areas around nearby islands where he was a tenant to collect what he claimed was the best kelp-weed in Connemara, which he then sold on (Royal Commission on Congestion in Ireland, evidence of Martin Mongan, qq. 53940–54006).
38 ‘Memorandum of proposals to the Congested Districts Board on behalf of the Connemara Industries Company (Limited) and the Carna Industrial Fund, by Fred Scott, Hon. Sec. to both’, in ‘CDB Report, Carna’, p. 5; ‘Carna Industrial Fund. Report for the two years ending June 30th, 1892’, in ‘CDB Report, Carna’, p. 2.
39 See The National Archives of the UK, BT 34/555/27498, records relating to the liquidation of Connemara Industries Company, Limited.
40 Tuam Herald, 13 Sept. 1890.
41 Agricultural Depression in Ireland, p. 33.
42 These initiatives included sponsorship of instruction from Scottish fisherman and the erection of a fishing station near Carna. Even with the shift from the philanthropic-commercial ventures that originated in Manchester to more systematic efforts by the CDB at forestation in Knockboy, some two miles outside the village, and its investment in the fishing sector, such efforts frustrated champions of improvement (Agricultural Depression in Ireland, pp. 38–41).
43 T. A. Finlay, ‘The economics of Carna’, New Ireland Review, ix (1898), 65–77, at p. 66.
44 Manchester Guardian, 21 Nov. 1888.
45 I. Furlong, Irish Tourism 1880–1980 (Dublin, 2008).
46 These appraisals of the Fund and Company were reprinted in a pamphlet entitled Irish Poverty and English Sympathy: a Story of Industrial Help in Connemara (Manchester, 1889) – a publication comprising a history of the Fund’s inception. The collection drew from the Manchester Guardian and featured a profile of the tireless efforts of Father Tom, a prospectus for the new limited company and glowing tributes from Gladstonian Liberal MPs Sir Ughtred Kay-Shuttleworth and Joshua Rowntree. The material referenced in this chapter is drawn from that compilation.
47 Irish Poverty and English Sympathy, p. 26.
48 J. Harris Stone, Connemara and the Neighbouring Spots of Beauty and Interest … (London, 1906), p. 35.
49 Stone, Connemara and the Neighbouring Spots, p. 50.
50 Report from the Select Committee on Industries (Ireland); Together with the Proceedings of the Committee, Minutes of Evidence, and Appendix (Parl. Papers, 1884–5 (288), lx, evidence of Father Tom Flannery, q. 12664). The organization of the kelp sector, whose season lasted from May until Sept., had proven especially unsatisfactory, with agents for Scottish firms claiming monopolies over certain sections of coast and thereby setting prices (q. 12970–84).
51 Report from the Select Committee on Industries (Ireland), evidence of Father Tom Flannery, qq. 12904–18.
52 Manchester Guardian, 28 Aug. 1888.
53 Manchester Guardian, 23 Aug. 1892.
54 Mongan’s Hotel Book, 28 Apr. 1897.
55 Western People, 29 Apr. 1905.
56 Western People, 29 Apr. 1905.
57 Tuam Herald, 29 Apr. 1893.
58 Tuam Herald, 13 May 1893.
59 Manchester Guardian, 7 Jan. 1898.
60 Proceedings of LCAS, 18 136; Jour. Royal Soc. of Antiquaries of Ireland, 1900 (Dublin, 1901), 30.
61 Mongan’s Hotel Book, June 1900.
62 He triumphed even in 1920 as Sinn Féin candidates captured all but a handful of the seats in the district.
63 Connaught Tribune, 13 Aug. 1921. Mongan’s wife Honoria Mongan died in 1925. The Mongan family continued to be prominent political figures in the district, with Martin Mongan’s son a T.D. and a stalwart of Cumann na nGaedheal and Fine Gael, as well as a leading figure in the Irish Tourist Association.
64 Manchester Guardian, 7 May 1924.
65 This direction was exemplified by the purchase of the Leonard Estate there by the CDB in 1896 (Connaught Telegraph, 1 Aug. 1896).
66 Manchester Guardian, 22 July 1898.