MONAGHAN SOCIETY
The residences of the great landed proprietors are not remarkable for architectural splendour; they are rather good family houses, and are noticed in their respective parishes. The farm-houses are better than those of the same class in Leinster; those of the class that combines manufacture with farming are comfortable in appearance, but the habitations of the cottiers and journeymen weavers are miserably poor. Such tenants hold their hovel, with a small plot of ground for a garden, either by a "dry cot take" or a "wet cot take," the former implying an agreement by which the tenant pays a rent for his tenement and works at taskwork or for daily pay at the loom for his landlord; the latter signifying that he has also the grass for a cow in winter, for which he pays an additional amount of rent, but finds his own hay and grass in summer: these tenures are merely from year to year.
The clothing of the peasantry is frieze, or a coarse light blue cloth manufactured at home and dyed with indigo: the women wear cottons more generally than stuffs: all are tolerably well supplied with linen and with shoes and stockings. Their food is potatoes, meal, milk, and butter; though in the poorer parts, where the population depends wholly on the produce of the soil, the cottiers are seldom able to procure anything better than salt to their potatoes; while in the neighbourhood of the county town the luxury of animal food is occasionally enjoyed. Irish and English are indiscriminately spoken in the intercourse of the peasantry with one another.
An attempt was made some years ago to diminish the pressure of mendicancy, which is very prevalent, by compelling the paupers to wear badges, but it had no permanent effect. An extraordinary custom of annually electing a mayor, with power to decide all disputes, long prevailed in the village of Blackstaff, near Carrickmacross, which was composed of about 200 wretched hovels in the centre of 500 acres of bog, heath, and rock, so barren as never to have been cultivated, and on which the inhabitants supported themselves by holding each a very small portion of land at a considerable distance from the village. But the inconvenient distance of their habitations from their farms, and the dangers apprehended from this irregular union of a number of families during the disturbed period of 1798, caused the community to be broken up, and its members established on their separate plots of land; yet for years after they met annually at Blackstaff to commemorate the by-gone pleasures of their former state of social intercourse.
A chalybeate spring rises in Cairnmore, at a place called Drumtubberbuy, or "the ridge with the yellow spring," from which flows a stream of pellucid water covered with a strong scum of ochre; it is not noted for any medicinal qualities. At Tullaghan is a spring, the water of which, though tasteless and perfectly pellucid, forms an incrustation on all the substances it passes over near its source. This county gave the title of Baron to Sir Edward Blayney, who was ennobled by James I., in 1621, for his services against the Irish.
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