NO SILVER LINING
THE SILVER MINE AT BARRYSTOWN, BETWEEN WELLINGTONBRIDGE AND BANNOW NEVER DELIVERED PROMISED RICHES. DAVID TUCKER LOOKS AT THE HISTORY OF A WEXFORD ENTERPRISE WHICH IS NOW ALL BUT FORGOTTEN.
THERE is little to show of the silver mining operations between Wellingtonbridge and Bannow which once held out the hope of financing Henry VIII’s Tudor court and English plans for further expansion financed by the country it had occupied. Travelling out of Wellingtonbridge, a much later brick-built chimney at Barrystown dominates the road to the bay, a leftover of a 19th Century attempt to revive the mines, a curiosity in a land scattered with ruins.
Its chambers flooded with water, shafts sealed up, there is nothing else to remind people of the presumed or past riches beneath their feet, save the odd piece of lead ore still to be found in gardens throughout the Wellingtonbridge area, and perhaps the odd piece of silver too.
Locals tell of a simple memorial at Ballyoughton Church of men who died during the 16th Century mining, but there is no sign to be found there, no graves with crumbling headstones commemorating or confirming local folklore about how they met their fates.
In times past, silver ore, mined by Germans, was carried from the mine across the northern edge of Bannow Bay to the adjacent town of Clonmines, where it was smelted and cast into ingots to finance English expansion into Ireland.
While they may have more ancient origins. the first official reports of mining in the area only emerge in the 16th century, when the Barrystown vein was given the title of the Royal Silver Mines.
While Henry VIII had the area surveyed in 1546, it wasn’t until 1551 that work began on the orders of the new king Edward VI.
The king’s agent and German miners brought in to mine the deposit fell out, however, over allegations of drunkeness and incompetence, and the mine was abandoned in 1553 after a dismal showing of silver.
An attempt to revive it during Elizabeth I’s reign also failed and it wasn’t until the 19th Century that the mine again yielded up its treasures, with 1,381 tons of ore being extracted.
Local historian Tom McDonald said the most succinct account from contemporary sources of the Barrystown mines in the mid19th Century is to be found in the pages of The Wexford Independent, from March 31, 1877:
‘About the year 1840 the mines of Barrystown were again re-opened. A gentleman from Cornwall experienced in such matters, had them in charge but the Famine came and with it the general decay of business, which caused the works to be discontinued.’
A year later, reports in the Wexford Independent and the Wexford Conservative on October 21, 1841 and October 23, 1841, do not clearly identify the company or individuals responsible for the re-opening of the mines.
The Independent account says: ‘A lease of the mine for 31 years, we understand, has been procured from the owner of the property, the Rev. [Richard] King, at a royalty rent of one-sixteenth part of the ore raised and a liberal grant of surface for the necessary operations has been obtained, with an allowance of the first 12 tons of duty ore to assist in the cost of getting it opened.’
The Wexford Independent on October 8, 1845 carried an item, first published in the Irish Railway Gazette, which while largely and tediously technical, did give details of the extent of employment there:
‘ There are at present, employed 16 men on tribute; forty on tut-work; breaking ore on tut-work, ten; surface labourers, six; pitmen, smiths, carpenters, eight; dressers including girls, twelve; buckers, six; boys filling and landing, four – in all from 102 to 120.’
The Wexford Guardian on January 28, 1846 was guarded in its estimate of the prospects
for the Barrystown mines:
‘ The renewed operations of these ancient mines are becoming of a more promising character.’ They weren’t.
Mr McDonald said his impression is that mid19th Century Ireland was in the throes of utilitarianism.
‘ The re-opening of old and long disregarded mines, there were similar operations initiated at Caim at that time, the tearing down of forests, like that of Killoughram Forest near Caim, and the transformation of this forest into agricultural land and the experimentation with steam driven machinery arose from a conviction that the combination of capital and new machinery plus the exploitation of cheap labour was a formula for generating cornucopias of new forms of wealth.’
‘ The men, women and children who laboured on these projects braved mind-numbing cold and wet weather, were usually paid by a task work method and were ever in risk of dangerous accidents. Some of the men taken by John Rowe, of Ballycross, from Wexford Workhouse to work on draining Ballyteigue Lough, unable to cope with the intimidating conditions, went back to the Workhouse!,’ he said.
Mr McDonald said the converse interpretation is that in an era of dire scarcity of employment of any kind, many of the younger and stronger men took to mining with comparative gusto.
‘It was unprecedented opportunity for these poor people. The individuals who initiated and invested in these projects were hyperbolic and naïve in their expectations and financial failure was quite regular. That is the ultimate outcome of this phase of the story of the Barrystown mines.’
A report from the Wexford Independent, from September 15, 1849, highlights the perils facing those who sought their fortunes in the mines:
Fatal Accident—Barristown Mines
To the Human and Charitable - The family of the late James Leary who was accidentally killed at the above mines on Friday 7th instant, being in the deepest of distress and consisting of his widow and five young and helpless children are compelled to appeal to a humane and generous public for a favourable consideration of their deplorable circumstances. The deceased bore an excellent character and was the sole support of his wife and family.
‘ We have been requested to receive at our office contributions towards the relief of the afflicted and desolate widow and orphans. We shall feel pleasure in doing so and in making suitable acknowledgments.’
There was no suggestion of any compensation or support being paid by the mining company.
Mr McDonald said the early decades of 19th Century, Ireland could be classified as a pre-truth era—at least in relation to Tom Boyse, the opulent proprietor of Bannow and other estates in Graignamanagh, Waterford and the West of Ireland.
He said Boyse, of a Protestant family, and with a brother a Rector of the Established Church, and another brother a high ranking officer in Wellington’s army, led the campaign for Catholic Emancipation in County Wexford.
He attracted mega-crowds to hear his impassioned, fiery, erudite and feisty speeches at public meetings to petition Parliament to abolish the tithes — the charge levied on all cultivators of arable land, on the musty and risible basis that the ‘Established Church or Protestant Rector’ ministered to all the inhabitants of his parish, regardless of their professed denomination.
Not surprisingly there was a lot of what would now be called ‘fake news’ connected with Boyse - one a report about 600 farmers from Bannow emighrating to the USA - much of it inspired by the adherents of the Orange Order and like-minded severely conservative Protestants who feared that Boyse’s espousal of civil and religious liberties and comparatively extreme liberalism would undermine the residue of Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland. But Boyse had his supporters. Mr McDonald said that on May 27 1851 ‘Fair Play’, a pseudonym for John C. Tuomy, a schoolmaster in Taghmon and fervent admirer of Boyse, wrote a long missive to the Wexford Independent correcting some of the propaganda.
‘In rebuttal of that astounding claim of hundreds of farmers emigrating from Bannow’.
At the outset he recalled other previous pre-truth nonsense written of Mr Boyse: the story (of which there were variants) that 40,000 French troops had landed on the hill of Graigue, presumably seeking the leadership of Boyse, a man who had a congenital lameness and whose only experience of guns was of an old blunderbuss that his Orange opponents alleged he used to frighten off the men of Tintern from rowing across in boats to steal seaweed off the coastline along his estate!
Mr Tuomy, in skilled juggling of the census figures of 1841, demonstrated that if 600 farmers emigrated from Bannow, they would leave behind a deserted wasteland. Maybe T. S. Elliot would eventually write a poem about it. It would become, Mr Tuomy asserted, ‘a second Connemara’.
And in a commentary on the demise of the mines that had once held out such promise to people like Boyse and people of south Wexford, Mr Tuomy said that since the Barrystown mines had closed, ‘ two years hence’, many of the miners and their families had taken refuge in the Wexford Workhouse, ‘at the expense of the Bannow ratepayers’.
The rule was that if a person was admitted to the Workhouse, then the electoral division in which that person had resided for the previous 12 months, became liable for his or hermaintenance in the Workhouse, paid by an increase in the Poor Law Rate on all ratepayers in that division.
Mr Tuomy seems to be lumping together two distinct types of paupers: the redundant miners and their desperate families and the miserably poor people who drifted into the villages and towns,
Instead of creating wealth in the county, the mines ultimately cost it lives and money. They were never to be revived and remain a few piles of crumbling ruins dominated by an old chimney stack and stories about what might have been.
THE MEN, WOMEN AND CHILDREN WHO LABOURED ON THESE PROJECTS BRAVED MIND-NUMBING COLD AND WET WEATHER AND WERE EVER IN RISK OF DANGEROUS ACCIDENTS