Clare Island Survey— Agriculture and its History. 5 41 



Annesgrove, Co. Cork : Potatoes, wheat or bere, oats, oats, oats, " leave it for 

 three or four years." 1 



Arbella, Co. Kerry : Potatoes, potatoes, wheat or barley, oats, oats, oats, 

 oats, " lay it out, and not a blade of grass comes for three or four years." 2 



There are occasional references to hollow draining, turnips and clover. 

 At Annsgrove "neither pease, beans, nor rape in the country, but turneps and 

 clover are creeping in among gentlemen." 3 Kundale and changedale were 

 common. At Annsgrove " The poor people in general occupy from 10 to 15 

 acres ; but the most common way is hiring in partnership in rundale ; and 

 they have changedale also." 4 In some parts rape was grown, and there is a 

 reference to the seed being pressed for oil : " It is pressed for oil at the mills 

 of Six Mile Bridge and Scariff, near Killaloe ; but the greatest part is bought 

 up by the merchants of Limerick for exportation for Holland. . . . The rape 

 cakes are all exported to England for manure." 5 



Perhaps the most fateful of all the crops ever brought into Ireland is the 

 potato. Sir Walter Ealeigh is generally credited with having introduced it 

 about the end of the sixteenth century, and the circumstantial story of his 

 gardener who sent in the fruit instead uf the tubers to be cooked is well 

 known. But Ealeigh has rivals. The Spanish Armada, for a wonder, was 

 not one ; but tradition supplied him with others, " one of the most probable 

 of which " was " a trading vessel on her return from a transatlantic voyage . . . 

 wrecked on the Galway coast," while more reliable authorities mention " a sea 

 captain, John Hawkins, who had brought it 6 with him from Santa Fe" in 

 1545. 7 



There is no great need, however, to decide exactly when the potato came 

 to Ireland or by whom it was brought; but, if Ealeigh was its original 

 introducer, then its cultivation must have spread through the country with 

 marvellous rapidity ; for by the middle of the seventeenth century it had 

 taken a very important place in the national food-supply. 



Indeed, it might be said that the introduction of the potato was one o 

 the many turning points in Irish history. It came in early in the Plantation 

 times and its value was discovered by those who had been transplanted 

 before the transplantings were well over. Without this discovery the people 

 would have been coerced into the employment of the planters. But, with 

 the run of some rough grazing and an acre of hillside or bog on the outskirts 

 of the planter's farm, that is with the cow in summer and the potato in 

 winter, they could so far maintain themselves and their families that, until 



1 Young, i, p. 297. 2 Ibid., i, p. 367. 3 Ibid., i, p. 297. 4 Ibid.,i, p. 299. 5 Ibid., i, p. 2S6. 

 6 This may have been the sweet potato. 7 Wilson's Farm Crops, ii, p. IS. 



R.I.A. PKOC, VOL. XXXI. F 5 



