‘I lived my life knowing houses like this’ - Hughie

On a peaceful September evening “at the very bottom of Tullyveela”, the encompassing River Blackwater can be heard rippling outside an almost 200 year old cottage lovingly renovated by local man Hughie McManus.

Since the mid-1800s, the house has belonged to the Corlough man’s family, and now Hughie, from the neighbouring townland of Cortoon, has spent the past number of years restoring the property and surrounding site of around 20 acres to former glory.

The quaint farmhouse is a portal into a time long since past, situated along what was once a walking path off the former main Longford to Enniskillen road. Further down that road lies the inspiration behind ‘The Pride of Petravore’/’Eileen Óg’ by Percy French is found in the townland of Pedara Vohers - from the Irish ‘Peadar an bhóthair’ or ‘Peter of the road’, named after Peter McGovern, who ran an 18th century inn there.

Back then, it was more important that houses were built near water than on the road. According to Griffith’s Valuation, the current road, which connects the house to the opposing old Tullyveela school, didn’t exist when the house was first built.

Hughie’s grandmother, Agnes Dolan grew up in the cottage. Her parents, Mick James Dolan and Ann Dolan (née Byrne) had lived there since 1855.

The Census records from 1901 show there were a total of 10 living in the house at the time, including Agnes, her four sisters and three brothers.

For Hughie, the house is full of memories. He never knew his granny as she died the year he was born, but he is able to imagine what her life may have been like growing up there.

“She would have played around the street,” Hughie says, adding that his father, also called Hugh, would have gone there for lunch while at school in Tullyveela.

Born in 1896, Agnes later married Hugh McManus of Cortoon. Several of her siblings moved to America, including a brother who went and joined the US army but never returned home.

Her two other brothers, who were “doing well for themselves” remained on, but unfortunately their lives were cut short as both died from TB in their twenties. One had likely intended to stay and extend the house as there is still an “arctic lorry load” of stones lying in the field at the back of the house, which had been brought from further up the hill.

Another sister was getting married to a McTague man who lived in the next field and they were given the place. The house remained in the McTague family from the 1930s until it went back up for sale in the mid-1980s, and was last lived in circa 1955.

Hughie’s father then bought the house and the land, which stretches across the road to the back of the old school. From then it was used mainly for keeping farm animals.

“The house was completely run down,” Hughie says, and there was cattle “coming and going” to it. The upper room had been converted into a cattle shed, and a door was knocked out of the front of the house to make an entrance.

Along with an upper room, there was also a kitchen, a lower room and two bedrooms upstairs.

“It must have been a lovely site when it was functioning fully,” Hughie believes.

The “first thing” he wanted to do was to “bring it back to its original shape” by closing up the door and putting the window back in.

Renovating the cottage was something he had always wanted to do but never had the time for. He felt a strong familial connection to it, which he was keen to preserve.

Hughie recalls, thinking: “If or when it falls, that’s the story of that house, of them people gone.”

He previously had to dry out the cottage as a drain at the back had become blocked, and water was going underneath, flowing up through the floor and out the door. One wall had gone green with algae from the dampness and Hughie dug a new drain at the back to get rid of the water, tidied it up and cleared away the muck.

Lockdown project

“That was all I had planned for,” Hughie admits, but he “hit luck” being made redundant during the pandemic, and found himself with the time to finally devote himself to working on the cottage.

“It’s not something that most people would claim to be lucky but it was for this house.”

Most of the renovation work was carried out by Hughie and his family, including his wife Fiona, daughter Farrah and son Aodhgán, as well as his sister Agnes and her husband Les. The only works that were subbed out were done by Colm and Gavin Baker on the windows, and Sean McAveety who finished the roofing.

In total, he reckons he spent at most €5,000. Hughie plastered over gaps between stones and made the fixed windows himself.

“Anything that’s in the house, I like it to have a story,” Hughie says fondly.

The window latch came from the McGovern sisters in Corrachombra, who also gave Hughie a seat for the kitchen, one half of which is in the lower room. It is one of the original seats from Corlough chapel, itself built in the 1850s.

The church didn’t have an altar until the 1870s and there were no seats until 1893.

The ‘firm’, a long bench with no back, was in Hughie’s homeplace via a dancehall in Corraleehan called Drumbrick. When it closed in the 1960s, his father and first cousin bought the structure for a hay shed.

The table came out of his mother’s own home place in Moherhe dresser was bought in Ballyheady. A dresser had always sat under the stairs and the new one was a perfect fit.

The tin basin belonged to Paddy Duffy from Culliagh, the gramophone came from Alan Martin, the lamp belonged to Peter Curran and the radio was from the Baxter family.

Some of the doors came from Joe McManus, who was his neighbour growing up, as well as a few of the chairs and the shaving mirror- a particular favourite of Hughie’s as the nail was still in the wall beside the window.

The bar for the fallen table was also still in place, so he was able to install one.

“I lived my life knowing houses like this,” Hughie says.

“If I didn’t do this, our kids would never have known that this was the way people lived.”

SPECIAL TRUNK

The trunk in the corner of the kitchen is the only thing original to the house. It belonged to Hughie’s grandmother’s sister, who went to America and returned after developing MS.

Despite arriving at the house in 1911, the trunk still has her name and the shipping label on the back. She lived the rest of her life in the lower room, a good life despite being immobile. She was good with her hands too and spent a lot of time doing embroidery, knitting and sewing.

The family got a “good bit of enjoyment” out of making a picture frame that hangs in the kitchen, crafted from broken bits of plate, cups and mugs found strewn around the street.

“There would have been delph that would have been used at the house by our ancestors,” Hughie says.

“It felt like a link back into the house,” which he now describes as a “collection of family and local history”.

While renovating the cottage, Hughie realised a lot of what it was made of had been found locally.

The roof was originally thatched, likely done by his grandfather, a thatcher. Underneath the thatch, there were “hundreds and hundreds” of timber branches laying the foundations.

“Everything that the house is built from was collected in the fields within a mile of here,” Hughie says.

“You start to build a house and you don’t leave the townland for anything. Imagine being told to do that now.”

The lime was the only thing that wouldn’t have come from the land around, but there would have been lime kilns “all over the place”.

A lot of progress has been made on the house but Hughie would still like to carry out some further works, particularly on the upper room. He no longer has the same time now that he is back at work.

“The thing that I found most rewarding out of doing it, apart from saving it from falling, was imagining the life that people had not that long ago,” says Hughie.

“Everything that we take for granted basically could be done but it had to be done at a much slower pace. There was physical work involved in everything.”

SPRING WATER

Those living in this house were “very lucky” as the spring is only around the corner of the hill. It is on Hughie’s land, and a “huge” amount of people still use it for “really good” water.

The house remains in a similar condition to what it would have looked like when it was last lived in. Electrification didn’t come to the area until the early 1960s, and there is no evidence of it anywhere at the cottage.

“When you’re standing outside on the street, you can’t see an electric or a telephone wire anywhere,” Hughie says.

“It’s completely off-grid.”

Hughie lights the fire inside the kitchen on Sundays, and people are welcome to visit.