The hills between Westport, Louisburgh and Leenane in southwest Mayo are rugged, beautiful and once carried more sheep than almost anywhere else in Ireland.
One hundred and seventy years ago, they became the unlikely setting for one of the country’s most audacious and ruthless agricultural experiments: a 45,000ac commercial sheep enterprise known as Dhulough Farm.
A new book, Seventy Years in the Wild West by former Teagasc agricultural adviser Seán Cadden, tells this extraordinary story – how vast tracts of land were cleared of tenants in the wake of the Famine to create a Scottish-style hill sheep system on an industrial scale, and how those lands would eventually return to the hands of local families.
Captain William Houstoun, a Scottish land agent with grand ambitions, first took the leases on Dhulough in the 1850s.
The landlords of the area, the Marquis of Sligo and the Earl of Lucan, cleared tenants from 44 townlands across southwest Mayo.
The Dhulough Farm was located on 37 of them with Killary Farm on the remaining seven.
Land policy
“This could be described as the last plantation of Ireland,” writes the former adviser in the book.
“The inhabitants did not have to move to Connacht; they were already there, but to a nearby overcrowded townland with bad land.”
Houstoun then set about converting the land to a system he knew well from Scotland.
Central to this plan was the introduction of Scottish Blackface sheep, a breed capable of surviving in Mayo’s harsh upland conditions.
Stocking rates, grazing rotations, and shepherding methods were all imported wholesale from Scotland, with Houstoun even recruiting Scottish shepherds to oversee operations.
Cadden, who spent decades advising farmers with Teagasc, brings an agricultural lens to this history.
The book delves into stock management, grazing regimes, breed performance, and the economics of running such a massive hill enterprise in a remote location.
Cadden details how the Houstouns battled weather, disease, isolation and sheer logistics.
They experimented with flock structures, lambing practices and pasture utilisation, attempting to prove that Scotland’s successful model could be transplanted onto Mayo’s rugged slopes.
The human cost of clearing families from their land was immense, compounding the trauma of the Famine.
Many were pushed onto marginal land nearby; others emigrated.
A unique case study of Irish agricultural history
By the early 20th century, agrarian agitation and shifting land policy forced change.
The Congested Districts Board purchased Dhulough, breaking it into more than 90 family-sized farms. Remarkably, descendants of some of the families once evicted returned to farm the same hills.
This reversal – from clearance to resettlement – makes Dhulough a unique case study in Irish agricultural and social history.
The seeds of this book were planted more than 60 years ago, when Cadden began work as a young agricultural adviser in Louisburgh.
Elderly farmers spoke to him of the evictions and of the vast sheep farm that replaced their ancestors’ homes, showing the reach of oral history.
It took retirement, and more than a decade of research alongside his wife Peggy — herself a noted local historian — for Cadden to bring the full story to print.
They spent months trawling the Westport Estate papers in the National Library, piecing together leases, letters, flock records and estate accounts to reconstruct how the Dhulough system worked.
Seventy Years in the Wild West blends this forensic archival work with oral histories and a wealth of rare photographs and genealogical material, offering a rich resource for both farm families and historians.
Today, the hills that once hosted Ireland’s largest farm are dotted once again with small family flocks, echoing with the bleats of sheep as they did in Houstoun’s time — though on a much more human scale.
It will have its Westport launch in the Plaza Hotel on Thursday, September 25 at 8pm with Catherine Keena, Head of Countryside Management with Teagasc.
The Castlebar launch will be part of the Wild Atlantic Words Literary Festival on Thursday, 9 October at 7.30pm.
Harry Hughes of Westport Historical Society will launch the book there.
Seventy Years in the Wild West: The Rise and Fall of Ireland’s Largest Sheep Farm, Southwest Mayo, 1851–1923 is published by Mayo Books Press and is available now from bookshops and at mayobooks.ie.
Achill's young sheep farmers staying true to the Blackface