Strokestown Park and Museum

Don drove me to get the 7:35 am train in Dublin's Heuston station in a mad hurry.  

Mary met me at the train station in Roscommon on Friday as planned. Such nice trains! It took about an hour and a half and only cost 13 Euro and that was for the flexible ticket.  I didn't realize I had an assigned seat so I got comfortable, connected my tablet to charge it and then had to move. But there were plenty of seats and the countryside landscape of sheep and green was so pretty, I couldn't read.

After breakfast at Gleesons in Roscommon

 and buying tomatoes at the CSA in the town plaza, we went on a tour in Strokestown of the garden, house and National Famine Museum. 

The house was about the rich people who lived there, their servants, their skiing trips, the drawing room (did you know drawing rooms were not for artistic endeavors such as drawing but for WITHDRAWING for privacy). I must confess that I was doing a Toastmaster function of counting our young guide's use of "actually" (about one every sentence) and didn't get much out of the tour; I asked Mary afterwards about the connection between the Famine and the aristocrats.

 Family skiing

Drawing room with mostly old books (of course, I looked) except for a paperback by Louise Erdrich

Poor servants who had to lug huge pots full of food

The Mahons had many tenants and during the potato blight were blamed by the tenants for their sickness and death and sending them off in boats (called coffins) to North America.

"It was cheaper for their landlord to pay for their emigration to Canada (via Liverpool) than it was to keep them in the Roscommon poorhouse. Only about a third of them survived traumatic journeys to build new lives in the UK and North America."

The owner of the house and land, Denis Mahon, was shot and killed in 1847 and three men were executed for the crime but the man thought to be the main instigator escaped.

"His death is considered the first murder of a Landlord during the Great Famine and to this day there is debate over the real reason for his murder and the identity of those responsible. Mahon's murder caused panic among the aristocracy and turned English public opinion against the Irish in the midst of the Black ‘47."

It was sobering! I heard an American say, well, that was a barrel of laughs. Mary felt so overwhelmed she didn't know if she could drive (but when I offered to drive she said no, it wasn't legal).