little was
fit for cultivation, even with the help of capital and civilised
management. There was not a road in the district, nor a drain.

Lord George came and established himself here. He went to work
systematically to improve the country, reclaiming bog-lands, building
roads, and laying out the property into regular farms. He went about
among the people himself, trying to get their confidence, and to let
them know what he wanted to do for them, and with their help.

For a long time they wouldn't believe him to be a lord at all, "because
he spoke Irish"; and the breaking up of the rundale system, under which
they had lived in higgledy-piggledy laziness, exasperated them greatly.
Of the first man who took a fenced and well-defined farm from Lord
George, and went to work on it, the others observed that he would come
to no good by it, because he would "have to keep a maid just to talk to
his wife." Men could not be got for any wages to work at draining, or at
making the "ditches" or embankments to delineate the new holdings; and
when Lord George found adventurous "tramps" willing to earn a few
shillings by honest work of the kind, conspiracies were formed to undo
by night what was done by day. However, Lord George persevered.

There was not a shop, nor a dispensary, nor a doctor, nor a warehouse,
nor a quay for landing goods in this whole populous and sea-washed
region. He put up storehouses, built a little harbour at Bunbeg,
established a dispensary, got a doctor to settle in the district, and
finally put up the hotel in which we are. He advanced money to tenants
disposed to improve their holdings. Finding the women, as usual, more
thrifty and industrious than the men, and gifted with a natural aptitude
for the loom and the spindle, he introduced the weaving of woollen yarn
into stout frieze stuffs and foot-gear for both sexes. This was in 1840,
and in 1854 Gweedore hand-knit socks and stockings were sold to the
amount of L500, being just about the annual estimated rents of all the
properties bought by Lord George at the time when he bought them in
1838! But with this difference: The owners from whom Lord George bought
the properties got their L500 very irregularly, when they got it at all;
whereas the wives and daughters of the tenants, who made the socks and
stockings, were paid their L500 in cash.

Clearly in Gweedore I have a case not of the children of the soil
despoiled and trampled upon by the stranger, but of