Famine Roads and Poetry

The British response to the Great Famine of Ireland, when over a million people died from hunger, was to make the Irish work hard for any help provided. One of the work projects was to build "famine roads" - roads that often climbed steep hills and dead ended. Here is a map showing some of these roads in Mayo and Galway - via this history site.

I first heard about these roads because they are mentioned in a lovely poem by Eavan Boland called That The Sceince of Cartography is Limited. You can read the poem here. 

The area shown above was one of the hardest hit areas in the famine.