Formidable bands went about, in some portions of the country, visiting the houses of farmers, and even of the gentry, warning them not to raise the price of provisions, and also asking for employment.  Notices continued to be distributed, and posted up in public places, calling assemblies of the people in various towns of the South, in order to discuss their existing state and future prospects.  A notice posted on the chapel of Carrigtwohill, calling one of those meetings, warned such as absented themselves that they would be marked men, as there was famine in the parish, and they should have food or blood.  The priests of the place advised and warned their flocks against those illegal proceedings, and the evils to themselves which must necessarily spring from them.  This had the desired effect, and the objects contemplated by the promulgators of the notice were entirely foiled.  At Macroom, crowds of working men paraded the streets, calling for work or food.  Food they urgently required, no doubt, for two of those in the gathering fell in the street from hunger.  One, a muscular-looking young man, was unable to move from the spot where he sank exhausted, until some nourishment was brought to him, which revived him.[166] At Killarney, a crowd, preceded by a bellman and a flag of distress, paraded the streets, but the leaders were arrested and lodged in Bridewell.  In the neighbourhood of Skibbereen, the people employed in breaking stones for macadamizing the roads struck work, and marched into the town in a body, asserting that the wages they were receiving was insufficient to support them.  The overseer alleged that enough of work had not been done by the men, and that task work should be introduced.  Their answer was, that the stones given them to break, being large field stones, were as hard as anvils, and they could not break more of them in a given time than they had done; and that death by starvation was preferable to the sufferings they had already endured.

Those men worked some miles from Skibbereen, at a place called Caheragh, and before their arrival, the wildest rumours were afloat as to their coming and intentions.  It was Wednesday, the 30th of September.  At twelve o’clock on that day, the principal inhabitants met to consult with Mr. Galwey, the magistrate, as to what course they should adopt in the emergency.  Whilst thus engaged, Dr. Donovan, who had been on professional duty, rode in from the country, and announced that a body of men, consisting, as far as he could judge, of from eight hundred to a thousand, appeared on the outskirts of the town.  They were marching in regular order, ten deep.  Twenty-two years after the event, Dr. Donovan thus narrates the cause of this extraordinary movement, and the impression made upon his mind by the terrible phalanx, on its appearance before the trembling town of Skibbereen:  “Some difficulty,” he says, “occasionally arose in making out the pay lists,” and as the people were entirely dependent for their day’s