The Deserted Village at Slievemore and the Old Keel Cemetery

For some reason I had it in my mind that this place was called the "abandoned village," but "deserted village" sounds so much more mysterious and lyrical.  In recent history, the stone cottages at Slievemore were used as summer homes so families could take their cattle up the mountain to graze.  (The proper term is ""Booleying".)  A few old-timers on the island can even remember when they were used for such.  However archeological evidence suggests that some of the structures up on the mountain have been there from at least the Medieval times. 

It was a very soothing to walk around the dismembered stone homes.  There is beauty as well as intelligence in piled up rocks.  There really is!

Window

Our family likes to pick up rocks.  Through the years we've amassed quite a collection of geodes, petrified wood, small fossils such as trilobites, Native American arrowheads and stone tools.  It seems like we bring rocks home from any family outing.  So it was quite a delight to us to find an entire village make of rocks!  The photo ops were endless! 



Ben, Aaron and Jim in decapitated stone residence.
Ben is ready to pose for a magazine cover

The boys' patience soon ran thin with my requests for pictures...

 

So I resorted to photographing sheep.  At least they didn't run away.

 

Well, some of them did run away...



 So, I finally put down my cell phone camera and just enjoyed the serenity of the place.

 

 

And my husband's habit of bringing souvenir rocks home... Well, I don't want to tattle over the Internet or get the customs folks suspicious.  Let's just say that my mother-in-law's home now displays an interesting keepsake from the Island.

 

 

 

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The Old Keel cemetery was full of familiar surnames we recognized from Jim's family tree - Corrigan, Kilbane, Mylott, Burke, and of course - CALVEY, his maternal grandmother's surname. 

 

 

 

There is a certain reverence one feels when walking through cemeteries.  There is a connection between the dead and living. 

 

Many of the tombstones in the Old Keel cemetery are disintegrated so badly that you can't decipher the names.   I think the tombstones of Jim's ancestors probably are among some of those.  The names and dates are all cataloged on the Internet though.  It is these old, unreadable stones that fascinated me most of all.  Not quite forgotten memorials.  As in the Deserted Village at Slievemore, stones remind us of the past.

 

 

 

We gained a gem of information about his great-great-great grandmother's surname.  John Richard Calvey (b.1844) was the guy that immigrated to Cleveland from Achill Isle in the 1860's.  Oral family tradition was that his mother's name was Maude McMannon.  However, Jim and I could find no evidence that any McMannons ever lived in the area: no McMannons in the cemetery, and none in the vital records.  But... we did find was the surname McManamon in abundance!  I took the liberty of changing Maude's surname to McManamon on Jim's digital family tree at www.familysearch.net.  I hope that grandma Maude is smiling there on the other side, satisfied that we finally got her name right! 

 

When doing Family History work, sometimes you just have to be there, walk the roads your ancestors walked in order for things to finally make sense.