The Donegal Cottage

We live in one-half of a 300-year old farmhouse, but across the yard is an even older cottage. Our landlady uses it as a shed.  

Its proportions are lovely. 

Recently, we watched a program about an emigrant from the UK who is restoring her family's Donegal cottage. She remembers summer visits as a child, and wants to preserve that tradition for her family. 

In the documentary, we learned that these cottages all have a similar design and history of step-by-step expansion. They begin as an original one-room cottage. Later, a room to the left would be added as a byre or threshing room. Later, another room would be added to the right as a bedroom, while the bed nearest the fire in the main room would be used by the older folks. The threshing room might be converted to another bedroom, with the byre being moved down to the left. 

You can see the linear construction in this cottage near Falcarrah. 

That's Tory island in the distance.

Before they were sheds, this house and surrounding cottages were a guest house called "Bidawee." My landlady says that many of the older women in the neighborhood worked at this place in the 40s and 50s. When they had a spare moment from the kitchen and laundry, the landlady sent them to work in the vegetable gardens. 

Guest houses aren't as popular as they once were because now people from the North can afford to build their own holiday home. They stand empty for all but a few weeks every summer. 

Some of the ruins nearby us are recent. My neighbor remembers when a friend of hers lived in this farm house in the valley across from us. 

In the 1950s, Donegal people in the far west decided to preserve cottages so future generations to see how their ancestors lived. I've visited similar folk villages, but Glencolumncille Folk Village is my favorite.

In the photos above, you can see the wooden rafters. Those rafters are bog wood, thousands of years old. Wood is so scarce here that people would walk the bogs with long thin poles, probing for something solid. Once retrieved from the bog, the ancient trees might hold up the roof of one house after another, transported from village to village when people moved. Notoriously, landlords would burn the precious bog timber rafters in an eviction so that cottage could never be inhabited.

Today, you can holiday in a restored Donegal cottage, like these Donegal Thatch Cottages on Cruit island near the airport. I'm sure they are nicer than a holiday home, but you can be sure none of them have bog timber rafters.