ROBERT WILLIAMS BUCHANAN (1841 - 1901)

What I did on my holidays (2). A Trip to Belmullet in Ireland.

“This is a wild place, breeding wild moods. There is nothing but dead  waste, squalor,
& the Ocean all one sombre tint of gray. But I am  happier here than in England.”

                                                                                 (From a letter to Roden Noel, 5th November, 1873)

In May, 2025, we (me and the good lady wife) had a holiday in Ireland. A few days in Dublin (much changed since my last visit in 1966), then a trip across country (running foul of one of the toll roads - there is just one which doesn’t have tollbbooths, but nobody told us) to Galway. While there I was allowed to spend one day on Robert Buchanan business, so I set out to find Rossport, where he had lived for four years between autumns of 1873 and 1877. In a similar fashion to my Scottish adventure in Oban, I was unsuccessful in my quest, but, in this case I had done a bit more research. I had been told a while back that the Rossport estate and the lodge where the Buchanans lived was no more and nothing remained. I then had a look on Google Maps and the road to Rossport and that leading off to where the house had been, had grass growing in the middle of it which is always a bad sign. Plus, for reasons I won’t go into here, I was driving an Insurance Company Courtesy Car, so I didn’t want to push my luck. So, instead, I decided to just go to Belmullet, which was always in the Rossport address, and then strike out to the edge of coast, just to get a taste of the landscape which Buchanan would have seen.

First a couple of old phoitographs of Belmullet, courtesy of the Mayo County Library:

And as it is now (May, 2025):

And this is the Belmullet Civic Centre, which houses the Belmullet Library. The librarian was very helpful and put me out of my misery confirming that it was pointless going to Rossport. She had not heard of Robert Buchanan or Harriett Jay, but I have no idea what I’ll do if I ever come across anyone who’s heard of them.

So, onto the wild coast of County Mayo. Just thought it might be interesting to see what the Buchanan family woke up to every morning. It’s not Rossport, but it’s close enough. The following photos were taken at the extreme edge of the map marked as ‘Wild Atlantic Way Discovery Point’.

It is a very barren place, very flat and open. Not very impressive at all and one wonders why Buchanan chose to settle there. Although, it has to be said, during the four years he was ‘resident’ in Rossport, he made several trips to London, and presumably, left his family behind. He does seem to have had an affinity for the sea and, apart from London, most of his ‘family homes’ and his holidays, were near the coast. The Mayo County Library does have a virtual tour of Belmullet and the environs (needn’t have bothered going) which is very impressive, so you can have a go at finding Rossport. I did look up Rossport on wikipedia and came across the following:

Robert Buchanan

Robert Buchanan, a Scotsman, left his medical studies in Britain and came to Rossport Lodge in 1874. He was an amateur doctor, and he and his wife tended the sick of the townland. They showed great tenderness towards all the sick and afflicted. He and his wife fed half the starving villagers, and they were generous to the Buchanans in return. He was also a poet. When the  Buchanans’ dog died the villagers of Rossport came to offer their condolences and sympathy. A song of mockery called ‘Madadh Buchanan’ was composed by a Glengad man ridiculing the Rossport people for mourning Buchanan’s dog.

It is true that Buchanan was very generous towards the local population (although he was not an amateur doctor) and in a letter William Canton, quoted in Harriett Jay’s biography (Chapter XVII: Life In Ireland), there is the following:

     “Don’t imagine me ‘looking out from a garden’ on the Atlantic! We have no gardens here. My ‘Lodge’ is a little place in the centre of a bog, surrounded by huts even wilder than those you paint in Romaine. I am ten miles from Belmullet, a wretched little town something like Tobermory in the Highlands. There is fair snipe-shooting and salmon- fishing in summer. I wish you could see Kid Island, a weird place out in the sea surrounded by wondrous caves and haunted by legions of birds. Photographs quotha! You have a dim notion indeed if you think a photographer has ever been here. A young ‘kern’ of my acquaintance went the other day forty miles distant to Ballina, and saw the Train! He trembles at the memory of that appalling sight. They tried to persuade him to get into a carriage, but he was not such a fool! Superstition flourishes. They believe implicitly in the Mermaid, the Second Sight, the Water Bull, and all the rest of it. Such are we here; and as we vary our monotony by occasionally shooting a landlord, our life is not uneventful.”
     The main reason for his going to Rossport, that of retrenchment, was not accomplished. “I came here for economy” (he wrote), “and just now, calculating up, I find it costs me as much as London, though we only live in a tiny cottage. There are so many Poor who must and will be assisted.”

I did search for the poem about Buchanan’s dog, and, if you search for “'Madadh Buchanan' dog” the google AI comes up with this:

"Madadh Buchanan" refers to a song ridiculing the people of Rossport for mourning the dog of President James Buchanan. The dog, a Newfoundland named Lara, was a well-known companion of Buchanan during his presidency. A song mocking the mourning for Lara was composed by a Glengad man.

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