Bogged Down by Mistakes
Tracking 200 Years of Irish Misinformation
A version of this article was written for the NZ Skeptics newsletter.
If you have read my previous articles, you will see that I’ve recently been researching an area in County Limerick, Ireland, for a genealogy project. I came across a bog burst, one of the deadliest bog disasters in Ireland. If you try to look up the Castlegarde bog disaster in Ireland that killed 21 people, you will find conflicting information. This was one of the initial articles I found:
“A correspondent points out that in the Wonderful Magazine for 1794 there appears the following curious parallel to the disaster which has just caused such consternation in the Killarney district. The occurrence is reported as follows:
Singular Phenomenon of a Moving Bog in Ireland -- On a night in December last a portion of the bog of Castle-guard or Poulenard moved in a body in length about a mile and breadth about a quarter of a mile along a valley that runs through part of the bog, and buried three houses, containing twenty-one persons (three only of whose bodies are yet found), six cows, some pigs, stacks of corn, hay, &c. It has not yet reached the Lough of Coolnapish, and is yet moving…”
-Westminster Gazette, 30 December 1896
If you compare that with something recent:
Large tracts of bog are characteristic of Irish uplands and the phenomenon of recorded landslides, although rare, dates back to the 16th century. In 1708, 21 people died when Castlegarde bog in Limerick collapsed.
-The Irish Times newspaper, 11 February 2021
Other dates also showed up in the records. Did the Castlegarde bog disaster actually happen in 1792, 1793, 1794, or even 1708? Were there two disaster events? Where is Poulenard? Just about every modern source about the disaster has recorded the wrong date. The location, including the county, can be incorrect. I compiled a chart from all the sources I discovered about this disaster to unravel this historical puzzle and tried to go back as far as possible. I utilised resources such as the Internet Archive to find old books, and the Irish News Archives and British Newspaper Archive to find old news articles. Thanks to Irish News Archives, they sponsored a subscription (for Ryans of Coolnapisha part 4).
The further back you go, the more accurate the information becomes. All early sources point to the night of December 22nd, 1792. The bog started at the townland of Portenard, aka Portnard, travelled to Castlegarde, and continued its path of destruction. Portenard was misspelt as Poulenard or Poulevard. Most of the facts in the story remained correct—21 people died, so we know it's only one event.
I can make some educated guesses on how some of these errors came to be.
Printing was not always perfect in the 18th century, so reading Portenard as Poulenard could have been an easy mistake.
Some papers had “Castleguard” broken up because of line wrapping, which could be why it was copied as “Castle-guard” in other papers.
Castlegarde was an alternate spelling of Castleguard, so no mistake there.
Not all papers list the county, and there is a Castleguard in County Louth.
Papers simplified details, so Portenard and Castlegarde's townlands became one.
Most papers don’t mention an exact date but say something like the event happened on “the night of Saturday se'nnight” (sennight meaning week) or the article “is copied from the Dublin Journal of Saturday last”. I found it super easy to mess up the dates, especially with two “Saturday se'nnight” in the article.
Some papers don’t mention any type of date, even when the event happened over a month ago.
I'm not sure how the date "1708" came to be; maybe it was a badly printed "1793". I could not find any record of the event date of "1708" before 1897, so it has been used for over 120 years. The Report of the Committee of Investigation on Bog Flow in Kerry made this date popular, as it was commonly used as a reference. So, most modern sources still use the "1708" date today.
Sadly, there is very little information about the Portnard bog burst—the explosion and fire at the Public Record Office in Dublin in 1922 probably didn’t help. Perhaps this is why misinformation about it has been spread for so long. Only now, with newspaper archive websites like the British Newspaper Archive and Irish News Archives, can we access these long-forgotten papers of the 18th century. So, I have decided to write a journal article once I finish collecting as much information as possible.
This is a cautionary tale: just because something has been copied for over 200 years doesn’t mean it’s true!
Thanks
Thanks to those I have annoyed trying to find more sources:
Dr Seán Gannon, Local Studies Department
Vera Moynes, National Archives
Sarah Hayes-Hickey, Archives and Records Management, Limerick City and County Council
Tristram Whyte, Irish Peatland Conservation Council
Historian Janet Crawford
David Thompson, owner of Castlegard castle
Fergal O’Reilly, Family History Service, National Library of Ireland
Mary McCormack, Tipperary Studies
Sarah, Limerick City Library
Diarmuid O’Callaghan, Special Collections
Ger Breen, Bord Na Mona
Paddy McCormack, Cappamore Historical Society
Peter Manning, Irish Genealogical Research Society
And those who I’m waiting on a reply from:
Geological Survey Ireland
Our Irish Heritage
Doon Beisce
Update:
04/08/24: Added more names to the Thanks section, and added a new source.
21/07/24: Included all the people and organisations who have helped or tried to help me find more information. I also added more sources to the list.