Famine Cottage Ruin
— — the door the wind walks through.
Not only on a wall.
“A single roofless cottage on the way out to Slea Head. Stone walls, gable still standing, the doorway open to the Atlantic. Hundreds like it stand along Ireland's west coast, most quietly returning to the field. The Dingle Peninsula carries them well: the road runs close to the shore and the cottages sit just above it, in townlands that emptied in the 1840s and never came back. Locals on the R559 drive past them without ceremony. The wind does most of the visiting.
Famine Cottage Ruin, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
The cottage sits along Slea Head Drive (the R559), the loop road that runs west from Dingle town around the seaward end of the Corca Dhuibhne peninsula in County Kerry. The Dingle Peninsula reaches further west than any other part of mainland Ireland; its tip, Dunmore Head, looks across to the Blasket Islands a few miles offshore. The 47-kilometre road threads past dozens of ruined cottages above the carriageway, on the low slope below the ridge. The land here is officially Gaeltacht; Irish is still the everyday language of the townlands. The cottages were emptied in the years following the Great Famine of 1845-1852, when the population of the west of Ireland fell sharply and emigration carried off another generation.
The cottages are drystone: local sandstone and quartzite lifted from the field, no mortar, the walls roughly a metre thick at the base. Most were a single room with a hearth at one gable end and a thatched roof tied down with súgán rope against the Atlantic wind. When the rafters went, the gables stayed: wind passes through a roofless cottage rather than pushing against it. The hearth and the chimney breast are usually the last things to fall. You can read the floor plan of a vanished townland in the stone outlines a hundred and fifty years on.
Hundreds of deserted villages line Ireland's west coast, where the famine emptied the smallholdings first. The largest, at Slievemore on Achill Island in County Mayo, holds the foundations of 80 to 100 cottages on the southern slope of the mountain. The cottages along Slea Head are scattered rather than gathered, one or two to a field, but they read the same way: walls without a roof, a hearthstone still in place, the field around them grazed by sheep that do not care what was here. The sites are mostly unsignposted. You drive past them and they do not ask anything of you.