The Salt Road to Clifden
Connemara, 1847. A road crew of starving men builds a road to nowhere, and one of them decides where it will end.
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In the famine winter of 1847, the relief works put Tomás Joyce and forty men to work building a road across the bog outside Clifden. The road has no destination. It exists so that the men can be paid in meal. Tomás, a stonemason’s son, decides that if they must build a road, it will at least go somewhere: to the sea, to the salt, to a way out. A historical novel of hunger, work and small defiance.
The road started at the crossroads above Ballinaboy and went nowhere at all. The engineer from the Board of Works had drawn it on a map in Dublin, a straight line across the bog, and it ended in the middle of the bog because that was where the money ran out. Forty men worked on it that winter for a pound of Indian meal a day. Tomás Joyce was twenty-two, a stonemason’s son, and the only man on the crew who knew how to lay a proper drain under a road. The ganger said it didn’t matter. Nobody would
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Declan Fahy
I taught history in a secondary school in Galway for twenty-nine years and fished lobster off Inishbofin in the summers, which taught me more about the west of Ireland than any archive. My grandfather was born in a cottage outside Clifden with no road to it. My novels are about the people who built the roads, lost the land, emigrated or stayed, and I try to write them the way they would have told it themselves: plainly, with a bit of a laugh. I live in Salthill, near enough the sea to hear it at night, with my wife Úna and a lurcher called Pádraig.
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