There was one priest in the district, and one National School, the schoolmaster, with a family of nine persons, receiving the munificent stipend of eight pounds a year.  These nine thousand people, depending absolutely upon tillage and pasture, owned among them all one cart and one plough, eight saddles, two pillions, eleven bridles, and thirty-two rakes!  They had no means of harrowing their lands but with meadow rakes, and the farms were so small that from four to ten farms could be harrowed in a day with one rake.

Their beds were of straw, mountain grass, or green and dried rushes.  Among the nine thousand people there were but two feather-beds, and but eight beds stuffed with chaff.  There were but two stables and six cow-houses in the whole district.  None of the women owned more than one shift, nor was there a single bonnet among them all, nor a looking-glass costing more than threepence.

The climate and the scenery took the fancy of Lord George.  He made up his mind to see what could be done with this forgotten corner of the world, and to that end bought up as he could the small and scattered properties, till he had invested the greater part of his small fortune, and acquired about twenty thousand acres of land.  Of this, little was fit for cultivation, even with the help of capital and civilised management.  There was not a road in the district, nor a drain.

Lord George came and established himself here.  He went to work systematically to improve the country, reclaiming bog-lands, building roads, and laying out the property into regular farms.  He went about among the people himself, trying to get their confidence, and to let them know what he wanted to do for them, and with their help.

For a long time they wouldn’t believe him to be a lord at all, “because he spoke Irish”; and the breaking up of the rundale system, under which they had lived in higgledy-piggledy laziness, exasperated them greatly.  Of the first man who took a fenced and well-defined farm from Lord George, and went to work on it, the others observed that he would come to no good by it, because he would “have to keep a maid just to talk to his wife.”  Men could not be got for any wages to work at draining, or at making the “ditches” or embankments to delineate the new holdings; and when Lord George found adventurous “tramps” willing to earn a few shillings by honest work of the kind, conspiracies were formed to undo by night what was done by day.  However, Lord George persevered.

There was not a shop, nor a dispensary, nor a doctor, nor a warehouse, nor a quay for landing goods in this whole populous and sea-washed region.  He put up storehouses, built a little harbour at Bunbeg, established a dispensary, got a doctor to settle in the district, and finally put up the hotel in which we are.  He advanced money to tenants disposed to improve their holdings.  Finding the women, as usual, more thrifty and industrious than the men,