In late March I visited County Mayo to visit the home town of my great great grandmother, Sarah McLoughlin. She was the paternal grandmother of my maternal grandfather Hugh Brawley. Spending time in Ireland really this time really made me feel closer to my ancestors. I am not sure why. Perhaps it is because the landscape has changed very little over the years so it is easy to imagine Sarah and her family living there. I loved Derry and Donegal but the places that my ancestors knew are now unrecognisable. If Sarah could visit Westport now there would still be much that she would recognise.

Croagh Patrick is a mountain with a height of 764 metres or 2507 feet. Nicknamed ‘the Reek’ it overlooks Clew Bay and is an important site of pilgrimage as it is said, that Saint Patrick spent 40 days fasting at the summit. There has been a church on the summit since the 5th century.

In these photos, which were taken at Bertra Beach, you can see Croagh Patrick in the background. Zoom in to the mountain and you’ll see the church at the top.

The village at the foot of the mountain is Murrisk which is just a couple of miles away from where we were staying at Westport Quay, and it is here that I believe Sarah and her family lived in the tiny townland of Ballataleen. The sight of Croagh Patrick was, for sure, part of Sarah’s everyday life.

To find out more about the area we visited the Clew Bay Heritage Centre. Here we met Bronagh and Eamon who between them know everything there is to know about Westport. Eamon gave us an overview of the town’s history and it is fascinating stuff. Bronagh is the family history expert and she explained how during the time of the penal laws priests were in hiding and would visit a town perhaps every six months to baptise the children and perform marriages. Everything was done in secret so proper records could not be kept and this habit continued so details of addresses, occupations etc which are so useful are just not available. I am lucky to have at least a marriage record for Sarah’s parents and a baptismal record for her younger brother. I have to use the little information that is available to me to work out where Sarah lived. Bronagh also helped with my pronunciation of Bellataleen which, of course, I was saying completely wrong!

Bronagh told me that whether Sarah lived in the centre of Westport town or on the outskirts in Murrisk her local church would be St Mary’s. The location of the church is the same but the building has changed. It is in the centre of Westport which is a thriving town. The centre will have altered quite considerably since the 1850s when the family left but it is not difficult to imagine how the South Mall where the church is located would have looked when my family attended services there.

Another landmark that Sarah would recognise is the Octagon monument. It was erected between 1843 and 1845 by the local vicar’s son, George Glending, a wealthy banker who contributed to the development of the town. It was a statue of Glendining who originally stood atop the plinth but during the Civil War Free State troops used the statue for target practice and shot off his head! The statue was eventually removed from the base and it is now St Patrick who stands looking over the town.

The grand mansion that is Westport House was built in the 18th century. It has a really interesting history with links to,the famous Pirate Queen, Grace O’Malley. Sarah would surely have seen the house but as a Catholic from a poor family she would most certainly never have been inside. So I didn’t visit the inside either but enjoyed a walk around the beautiful grounds.

The story of the McLoughlin family is very much a story of the famine in Ireland. They were most certainly victims of The Great Hunger which changed Ireland and my family forever. I have read about that period in history, of course, but I really felt it, if that makes sense, while spending time in Westport.

In 1841, when Sarah was a toddler, the population of Mayo was 388,847, by 1851 it had fallen to 274,830; the number of homes in the county had fallen from 70,542 to 49,073 in the same period. If you are interested in this period in Mayo’s history then click this document to read more.

Thinking of the famine makes me sad of course but also so angry. This did not have to happen. My family would have suffered great hardship and were eventually forced to leave everything behind. It is surely impossible that there were no losses in the McLoughlin and Reilly families. There are no further records of my great, great, great grandmother Elizabeth Reilly after 1851 nor of the child who was baptised that year. The remaining family members left Ireland some time between 1851 and 1856.

In Murrisk we visited the National Famine Memorial which commemorates the millions who perished during the Great Hunger. The sculpture represents the “coffin ships” that sailed from Ireland carrying emigrants fleeing the famine. It is really moving. It sits at the foot of Croagh Patrick with views over the Atlantic and the beauty of the setting just made me feel sad. They had to leave all this behind.

Westport is such a lovely town. There is a real buzz about the place and, unlike the town where I currently live, all the premises are occupied with shops, cafes, restaurants and pubs, the vast majority of which are independently owned. We spoke to a few locals who are very proud of the fact that they are keeping out the big chains and maintaining their town as somewhere worth a visit. We visited outwith the real tourist season so got to enjoy it when it was a bit quieter. It did mean that some things weren’t available to us like the Bay cruises and some opening hours were shorter but that wasn’t an issue for us.

We did miss out on The Quiet Man museum in the village of Cong which opens for the season in April. The John Wayne movie which also starred Maureen O’Sullivan was filmed in Cong in 1951 and is the town’s main claim to fame. It’s a really pretty place where we enjoyed a woodland walk and by chance discovered the Guinness Tower after a passer by asked us for directions. We couldn’t help but a couple of other walkers knew the way so all 5 of us ended up exploring the tower. It’s quite easy to make friends in Ireland!

Every day we were there we were blown away by the natural beauty of the landscape. The hills and the coastline. How Sarah must have missed her homeland! It was a very emotional experience.