Dingle Sheepdogs

Famine Cottage

Visit the historic Famine Cottages. Dating back to the 1800's, the ancestral home of the Kavanagh family remains as it would have appeared during famine times in Ireland.



During the 19th century the western seaboard of Ireland was the poorest and the most densely populated part of Ireland and would therefore be the most vulnerable to any crop failures. The people in these areas were hugely dependent on the potato crop and when the potato blight first visited these shores in the 1840’s West Kerry was to experience severe hardship.

Due to the remoteness of Dingle and the townlands west of the town it received little publicity. The reports that are available of what the people had to endure are horrific, indicating a district, which was to be completely neglected during a period of extreme suffering.

Understand about the landlords in the area and their often cruel agents. One agent lived in the same townland as the Famine cottage with the fields still carrying the names the agent used at this time (e.g. “The Paddocks” where the agent’s horses were kept) Learn of the suffering of the Kavanagh family and the heartache endured with one family suffering six infant deaths. The babies had to be buried in a nearby medieval graveyard (unbaptized children could not be buried on Catholic Church grounds).

Visualise how the townland of Fán might have looked through our perplex scale model of Fán in the 1840s and how these people survived when their main source of food disappeared