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The Salt Road to Clifden

Name: The Salt Road to Clifden
Price: 8.99 USD
Availability: InStock
Rating: 4.5 (2 reviews)
Author: Declan Fahy

by Declan Fahy · published via Smithbook

Connemara, 1847. A road crew of starving men builds a road to nowhere, and one of them decides where it will end.

★★★★★ 4.5 · 2 reviews 7 readers English

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★★★★★

"My great-grandparents left Connemara in 1849. This helped me understand why."

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What it covers

historical fictionIrelandConnemara1840s

About this book

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.

Look inside · First chapter

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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Product details

Title: The Salt Road to Clifden
Author: Declan Fahy
Format: Digital · browser reader
Language: English
Category: Fiction & Literature
Delivery: In seconds · to your e-mail
Access: Lifetime · any device
Publisher: Independent · via Smithbook

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Reviews

4.5

★★★★★

2 reviews

5★1

4★1

3★0

2★0

1★0

★★★★★ · bev•••@readers.staging.smithbook.test9/21/2026

Hard and beautiful

My great-grandparents left Connemara in 1849. This helped me understand why.

★★★★☆ · kwa•••@readers.staging.smithbook.test9/8/2026

Plainly told

No melodrama. The ending is quietly perfect.

About the author

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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