"Hugh Dorian (1834-1914), a writing-clerk, watches the 'Donegal prisoners' arrive at Derry gaol under a military escort. Indignant at their treatment - in print as much as in prison - he writes a 'true historical narrative' of the transformation of his home community in the nineteenth century. That community, though never named by Dorian, is the Fanaid peninsula on the Atlantic coast of north Donegal.

Dorian describes the ordinary and the everyday - births, deaths and marriages, hedge-schools and schoolmasters, the poitin industry and donkey races, local systems of land holding, the social position of craftsmen and musicians, and the personal and sectarian hatreds that shaped his childhood. And then he describes the extraordinary and the incomprehensible - the Great Famine and the 'mournful silence', the sense of communal bereavement, that followed in its wake.

The lasting image is of people who had sat late into the small hours debating politics in the years before the blight congregating now in silence, lacking words for their experience.".

"Hugh Dorian died in great poverty in the Bogside in April 1914 and was buried in an unmarked grave in Derry City Cemetery. He never saw his narrative - which contains the most extensive lower-class account of the Great Famine - in print.

Prefaced by a scholarly introduction which traces the personal and political troubles that befell the author, this first edition of a unique 'history from below' will rivet the general reader and all interested in social and cultural history and the politics of memory."--BOOK JACKET.