Skibbereen is one of the most significant towns in Ireland in terms of its Famine heritage; it  truly was the ‘ground zero’ of Ireland’s Great Hunger. And Windmill Hill/The Rock was one of the worst-affected areas in Skibbereen.



Because it was a ‘Union Town’ with a Workhouse, thousands of desperate starving people poured into Skibbereen from the surrounding areas seeking help during the crisis. As the Workhouse was often full to capacity, many of these refugees ended up squatting in hovels in the poorer areas of the town, including Windmill Hill.

So this was the place where the poor of the Skibbereen Union came when they had nowhere else to go. And many of them never left, having their final resting place in unmarked graves in nearby Chapel Lane graveyard.

Most of these Famine victims are nameless and voiceless but we do have a few newspaper reports which give a sense of their suffering:

‘I was told this day by the police that a man had been for days unburied in a house on the Windmill … In a nook in this miserable cabin lay upon a wad of straw, a green and ghastly corpse that had been for five days dead … At the feet of this decomposing body lay a girl groaning with pain; and by its side was a boy frantic in fever. The wife of the deceased sat upon the filthy floor stupefied from want and affliction. I asked her in the name of Heaven, why she did not get her husband buried, her answer was she “had no coffin.” I enquired why she did not go out to look for one; decency would not allow her, for she was naked; the few rags that she had after the fever had rotted off her, and she hoped that a coffin would be her next dress.’ Dr Dan Donovan, The Cork Southern Reporter, Saturday, 2 January 1847.

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‘In huts that I have visited, at the New Bridge and Windmill, at Bridgetown … I have seen children reduced to skeletons, in some instances; in others bloated beyond expression by hideous dropsy [famine oedema], and creeping round the damp wet floors of their miserable cabins … unable to stand erect, or even articulate. In other hovels there were crawling, jabbering idiots, when disease and hunger had deprived both of strength and reason.’ The King’s County Chronicle, 13 January 1847.

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Windmill Lane

Like their neighbours on the Windmill Rock, the occupants of Windmill Lane suffered terribly during the Famine and we have a few contemporary reports from Windmill Lane too:

“In the town of Skibbereen, a person named Crowly [sic] died on Christmas Day in Windmill-lane; and because his friends could not procure the price of a coffin, they kept him in the house for five days, until the corpse was in a state of putrifacation, and had to be removed. Irish Examiner, 6 January 1847.

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“Another case is that of the Widow Lynch, who also lived in Windmill Lane. This poor woman came into town about four months ago, from a neighbouring village with four children depending on her. Sometime after her arrival one of the children was attacked by fever, and died; another of them was shortly after visited by the same disease … and hardly had the corpse of this infant been removed for interment, before the third of them was smitten in a like manner … the mother was attacked by the same malady, and lay stretched upon the straw with her dying child. Impelled by the cries of her starving infant … she crawled from her sick bed when her disease was at its climax, and staggered down to the town … – she dropped on that day in the street; she was carried home, and she died on Friday last in her hovel.’ The Southern Reporter, 2 January 1847.

Ar dheis Dé go raibh a n-anamacha 

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