To speak of the `history of County Mayo` before the latter part of the 16th century is in a sense anachronistic, for the county, as such, did not exist before Queen Elizabeth`s Lord Deputy in Ireland, Sir Henry Sidney, and his subordinates undertook the shiring of Connacht about the year 1570.

County Mayo got its name from the diocese of that name which evolved from a 7th century monastery established by Saint Colmán and some English monks on `the plain of yews`, about 2 miles south of Balla. Mayo became a diocese in the 12th century, but it was amalgamated with Tuam about 500 years later. When the county was established around 1570, it was called `Mayo` after the famous monastery and diocese. The Irish name for Mayo is Maigh Eo, which means `plain of yew-trees`. Evidence of this settlement are still visible in Mayo Abbey as it is now known and there is extensive work going on there at present with the intention of reroofing the old church (pre-famine) and turning it into an interpretive center for the area.

Prehistory

In the fourth millennium BC, during the Neolithic period, another group of settlers arrived in Ireland, the first farmers, who introduced agriculture and animal husbandry to the country as well as the skills of pottery-making and weaving. They started a custom of burying their dead collectively (usually cremated) in large stone-built chambered tombs known as megalithic tombs, the earliest surviving architectural structures in the country. There are over 1,500 such tombs identified in Ireland with approximately 160 in County Mayo. This fact indicates the importance of the Mayo region during the Neolithic period and into the Bronze Age (c. 2000- 400 BC) when this phase of tomb-building came to an end.

Early Christian Period

The early history of the county is obscure and frequently confusing with various tribes seeking control. Christianity came to Ireland at the start of the fifth century, if not earlier, and brought about many changes, including the introduction of writing and reading. St. Patrick, Ireland`s national apostle, is chiefly credited with the conversion of the pagan Gaels. Recent research indicates that St. Patrick spent considerable time in County Mayo, where according to tradition and some written sources he spent forty days and nights on the summit of Croagh Patrick fasting and praying for the people of Ireland.

From the middle of the sixth century onwards, hundreds of small monastic settlements were established around the country, many of which became very important. It is an indication of Mayo`s importance in the middle ages that, when, in 1152, the synod of Kells introduced a system of diocesan organization to the Irish church, one of the dioceses established west of the Shannon was that of Mayo.

The Vikings

The Vikings or Norsemen first attacked Ireland in 795 and Mayo around the start of the ninth century. On arrival, they started to plunder and loot places of wealth especially monasteries. It was partly in response to those attacks that round towers were later erected in monastic enclosures (most were erected in the 12th century). There are about 65 of these fine structures surviving in Ireland, with five located in County Mayo: Aughagower, Balla, Killala, Turlough and Meelock. The Viking invasion led to the establishment of settlements in a number of locations like Dublin, Cork, Wexford and Waterford which later developed into towns and cities.

The Normans

The Anglo-Norman colonization of Ireland from1169 onwards was one of the most significant events in the development of Ireland. Mayo came under Norman control in 1235. The Norman Conquest meant the eclipse of many Gaelic lords and chieftains, chiefly the O`Connors of Connacht, but the invaders soon adopted Gaelic customs and began to marry with the native Irish and became as the phrase has it: `more Irish than the Irish themselves`. This process of Gaelicization is best exemplified in the adoption by various Norman families and branches of families of new surnames based on Gaelic-style patronymics. Examples of Mayo surnames today with Norman origins include Barrett, Burke and Bourke, Costello, Culkin, Davitt, Fitzmaurice, Gibbons, Jennings, Joyce, McEvilly, Nally, Padden, Staunton and Walsh. The Normans started numerous towns and developed some existing settlements into towns, as well as organizing fairs and markets. They developed roads, bridges, sea-ports and promoted the growth of trade both domestic and foreign as well as improving the agricultural methods then in vogue.

The New Abbeys and Friaries

A noteworthy feature of the period with which we have been dealing was the buildings of abbeys or friaries for the new mendicant orders - Augustinians, Carmelites, Dominicans and Franciscans - principally by the Hiberno-Norman families. A number of early monastic sites - such as Cong, Inishmaine, Ballintubber, Errew, and Mayo - had been chosen as locations for abbeys of the Augustinian Canons Regular, built under the patronage of Gaelic families (particularly the O`Connors) in the 12th and 13th centuries. One or two have been rebuilt and restored, but in most cases, only the ruins survive, pleasing, if poignant, late Gothic relics of what must have been among the most striking buildings in the countryside of pre-Tudor Ireland.

The Great Famine
Early in the nineteenth century, there were a number of famines in Ireland, culminating in the Great Famine of 1845 - `49, when about a million people died and a further million went into exile. The population increased from an estimated figure of four and a half million in 1800 to over eight million by 1841. The pressure of this vast increase exacerbated the fragile subsistence economy of the period, as land became subdivided into smaller and smaller plots. Destitution was already a fact of life for many and evictions became regular occurrences in the Irish countryside. Most of the impoverished population depended on the potato as their staple food product. Disaster struck in August 1845, when a killer fungus (later diagnosed as Phytophthora infestans ) started to destroy the potato crop. The green stalks of potato ridges became blighted and within a short time the rotting crop was producing a terrible stench. About a third of the national potato crop was destroyed that year, and an almost complete failure the following year led to a catastrophe for the remainder of the decade. By `black forty-seven`, people were dying in their thousands from starvation-related diseases. The workhouses, built in the early 1840s to relieve appalling poverty, were unable to cope with the numbers seeking admission. Various parsimonious relief measures were inadequate to deal with the scale of the crisis. The number of evictions increased. This process of `clearance` (as it was called) was aided by the `quarter-acre clause` (the infamous Gregory clause, called after its proposer, Sir William Gregory MP of Coole Park, Co. Galway) in the Poor Law Extension Act 1847 which excluded from relief anyone who had more than a quarter acre of land. Any such unfortunate person who was starving had to abandon his holding and go to the workhouse if he and his family wanted a chance to survive. Conditions became worse in 1848 and 1849, with various reports at the time recording dead bodies everywhere.

The catastrophe was particularly bad in County Mayo, where nearly ninety per cent of the population was dependent on the potato. By 1848, Mayo was a county of total misery and despair, with any attempts at alleviating measures in complete disarray. People were dying and emigrating in their thousands. We will never know how many died in the county during those terrible years. The `official` statistics for the county show that the population dropped from 388,887 in 1841 to 274,499 in 1851, but it is accepted that the actual figure in 1841 was far higher than the official census return. It can safely be said that over 100,000 died in Mayo from the famine epidemic and emigration began on a big scale (there was some emigration before the Great Famine). Most emigrants from the county went to the USA, Canada, England and Scotland, to become part of the big Irish diaspora scattered throughout the world.

There are numerous reminders of the Great Famine to be seen on the Mayo landscape: workhouse sites, famine graves, sites of soup-kitchens, deserted homes and villages and even traces of undug `lazy-beds` in fields on the sides of hills. Many roads and lanes were built as famine relief measures. There were nine workhouses in the county: Ballina, Ballinrobe, Belmullet, Castlebar, Claremorris, Killala, Newport, Swinford and Westport. Rather ironically perhaps, the great reduction in Mayo`s population, and especially the virtual annihilation of the formerly numerous class of landless cottiers who had been hardest hit by the Great Famine, enabled those who remained to considerably improve their standard of living in the following decades. The new National Schools - despite the opposition of those, such as Archbishop MacHale, who regarded them, with some justification, as agents of anglicisation - succeeded in reducing the rate of illiteracy by almost half in the forty years between 1841 and 1881. The result was a population with rising expectations, and with growing confidence in their own strength and in their ability to bring about a change in conditions, and so, when bad harvests in 1877 and `78 and a disastrous one in 1879 brought the threat of another serious famine, paticularly in the west, the people were far better prepared to protect themselves than they had been thirty years before.

A small poverty-stricken place called Knock, County Mayo, made headlines when it was announced that an apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary, St. Joseph and St. John had taken place there on 21 August 1879, witnessed by fifteen local people.