Irish Potato Famine - Scalpeen of Tim Downs

This makeshift dwelling, depicted in the Illustrated London News - on December 22, 1849 - is the shelter of Tim Downs. Forced from his home in Dunmore, in the parish of Kellard - where the Downs family had lived for more than a century - Tim had nowhere to go. Destitute and homeless, he and his family were actually fortunate to have this hovel.

The ruins, depicted in this sketch, show other homes which had been deliberately destroyed. As the reporter for the Illustrated London News notes:

[Tim] neither owed rent arrears or taxes up to the present moment, and yet he was pitched out on the roadside, and saw ten other houses, with his own, levelled at one fell swoop on the spot, the ruins of some of which are seen in this Sketch. None of them were mud cabins, but all capital stone-built houses.