Browne — Ethnography of the Mullet, Imshkea, ^'' Portachy. 647 



has been carefully avoided, it being evident that in the present state 

 of British ethnology there is not sufficient material available from 

 which to draw exact conclusions as to what race or admixture of 

 races forms the bulk of the population of this part of Erris. History 

 when combined with a study of the folk-names gives some slight help 

 in this respect. So far as records go, the population seems to have 

 been until comparately recent times an almost unmixed one, as it does 

 not appear as if the aboriginal inhabitants, though several times sub- 

 dued and enslaved, had ever been driven out or exterminated. Of the 

 immigrations into the district those having greatest effect upon the 

 population would seem to have been that of the fifteenth and four- 

 teenth centuries, the rule of the Barrets, Burkes, and other "Walsh 

 or Anglo-Norman families, whose surnames now bulk largely among 

 the people, and the influx into Erris of the O'Donnells and others 

 from Ulster in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 



Of these two the former would seem to have entered more largely 

 into the composition of the people than the latter, but it should not 

 be concluded that all those who bore the surnames of Barret, Burke, 

 &c., were of Welsh or Anglo-Norman blood, as the followers of many of 

 the chiefs of these names were in the habit of assuming their leaders' 

 names, though themselves aborigines of Connaught. The descendants 

 of the Ulster people, though to some extent settled in this district, are 

 for the greater part a colony by themselves in the mountainous region 

 of Ballycroy in the south of Erris. 



Tne English Protestant colony introduced by Sir Arthur Shane, 

 having almost from the first set up as small landlords or middlemen, 

 subletting their holdings, did not mix to any extent with the original 

 inhabitants who became their tenants, have left but few descendants, 

 most of the families having left this part of the country. It is said 

 that about Portacloy the people are mainly of Ulster origin, but that 

 there has been a slight admixture of French blood from the intermar- 

 riage amongst them of some soldiers of Humbert's forces who, escaping 

 after their defeat at Ballinamuck, found refuge in that wild moun- 

 tainous district. 



The inhabitants of Inishkea possess, as has been before stated, quite 

 different characters, physically and otherwise, from those of their 

 mainland neighbours ; they have no traditions as to their origin, but 

 may be looked upon as probably the most unmixed representatives of 

 the original inhabitants of the district. 



