Bath Estate Lecture

The Land Remembers Longer than Names: Uncovering the Famine in the Bath Estate Archives

by Dr. Michelle McGoff-McCann

New groundbreaking research from the private archives at Longleat House, reveals untold stories of the Great Famine through the Bath Estate records in Co. Monaghan. The lecture uncovers the human drama behind estate management during Ireland’s greatest humanitarian crisis. Drawing on ten years of archival research, Dr. McGoff-McCann brings to light the correspondence of Tristram Kennedy, the land agent who served the tenants of the Bath Estate from 1846—1851. This contribution to heritage week reveals the complex web of relationships between an absent English aristocracy, struggling Irish tenantry, and the agents caught between duty and devastation.

The Bath Estate Series will feature lectures that trace the complex social and political history of one of Ireland’s most significant estates, from Elizabethan plantation to post-Famine transformation. Drawing on the extraordinary private archives of the Thynne family at Longleat House, the series reveals how this corner of South Ulster became a microcosm of Anglo-Irish relations and colonial power dynamics.