Joseph Sproule and Rutland

When I first saw the name 'Joseph Sproule of the Rosses' on the Upper Grennan family tree of Jack Elder, I really was stunned. The Grennan Sproules were were farmers and their money came largely from the good farmland of Tyrone and Fermanagh. Those sons of  Grennan who were not on the land were lawyers and doctors, living in areas that could generate good income. There were none of these characteristics in the small collection of townlands in the far west of Donegal called 'The Rosses',  no good land, a small population and above all, these folk were poor. I found it very hard to imagine what could have taken a Grennan Sproule to the Rosses.

Some of my own pictures of the Rosses

The key to this mystery, I believe, came from those very revealing couple of lines in the family tree of Sue Gress,

“Joe, half brother to the first George of Crillan, lived at Feddins.  He fell in love with a Miss Boggs, daughter of contractor for Lubrid Buildings (Lubrid is near Crillan and there is a church and Vaughans Charter School still there)”

Mary Boggs, who had met and married Joseph Sproule of our story, was the daughter of the contractor involved in the Tubrid buildings. These Tubrid Buildings, the Church and the Vaughan Charitable School, were all completed by about 1781ish. So Mr Boggs, father of Mary Boggs, needed a new building project. That building project was big, and it arose in one of tha most unlikely spots in Ireland, in the wilds of The Rosses.

The Rosses is a remote place of sea and rocks and bog. The land here is so poor that up until the early 1600s, the whole area was almost totally uninhabited, with only a few folk living at the mouths of the small rivers. Then came the Plantation in Ulster, when people were put off their land in Tyrone and Fermanagh, and so they moved west. The folk who came to live in this area were poor, Irish-speaking folk that came here mostly from Tyrone, and they lived on common land or on small plots in the Rosses. 

William Burton by
 Anton Raphael Mengs

In the 1780s the whole of West Donegal was owned by the Conyngham estate, headed at that time by William Burton Conyngham (1733-1796). William Burton was the second son of the right honourable Francis Burton of Buncraggy, County Clare and he was nephew of the heirless first Earl Conyngham, who owned over 100,000 acres in West Donegal. William Burton inherited this West Donegal land, along with the name ‘Conyngham’,  on the death of the Earl in April 1781. Burton Conyngham set about campaigning for a really ambitious project to make this poverty stricken Rosses area more productive. [1]

The Government in London had, for all of the 1700s, been pushing to develop the Irish fishing industry, which had some of the richest fishing grounds in Europe. They offered bounties for the development of boats and more bonus money was given for catches. However, there was a conundrum. [2] The richest herring shoals in all of these Irish waters were off the north-west coast of Donegal, but the poor people of this area had no resources to develop a fishing fleet and no way of catching these herring. There was also no port in the area capable of supporting such an industry.

Burton Conyngham led a consortium to get financial backing from the British Government. They chose an area in The Rosses where there was a small group of islands just off the coast. There was a small pier there at the time, in the townland of Lackbeg, but it could not be expanded for a port.  

The little pier at Lackbeg still there today

So the plan was to develop a bigger port nearby, to be called Burtonport, named after its founder. Just off  the proposed pier at Burtonport is a series of islands, and rather than site the proposed Fishing Station at Burtonport, the decision was made to build the station over three of the islands,  Inis Mhic an Doirn, Inniscoo and Edernish. On the biggest of the islands, Inis Mhic an Doirn, Burton Conyngham began to build the main part of the Fishing Station, with the main port. This involved building good houses and all the facilities for a thriving fishing industry – including whole streets that were a rarity in this land of tiny thatched cottages. The Fishing Station was given the name Rutland, and this name later became the name of the whole island, Rutland Island.

Map showing plans on Rutland, Inniscoo and Edernish,
from Sue Gress

The Plan of Rutland dated 1786 [1]

The building project was officially underway in Rutland by 1783 - and this was shortly after the building works in the Charity School in Tubrid was completed. Putting two and two together, then, it does not take a great leap to see that Mr Boggs, father of Mary Boggs, could well have become involved in these buildings, either in the port of Burtonport or on the island of Rutland where the station was being built.

His father-in-law being the connection between Tubrid and Rutland is my best guess, but what do I know for certain is that Joseph Sproule himself very definitley was involved with this Rutland Project. The first record we have of him is in Registry of Deeds, in a deed dated May 1795 where our Joseph Sproule is mentioned.[3] In this deed he is not referred to as Joseph Sproule of Feddans, or Joseph of the Rosses, rather he is called Joseph Sproule of Rutland.

Other Posts in this Series;

1. Joseph Sproule of the Rosses - First Step from Upper Grennan

2. Joseph Sproule and Rutland 

3. Joseph Sproule, from Rutland to Inniscoo

References:

[1] Forsythe, Wes. “Improving Landlords and Planned Settlements in Eighteenth-Century Ireland: William Burton Conyngham and the Fishing Station on Inis Mhic an Doirn, Co. Donegal.” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. Section C: Archaeology, Celtic Studies, History, Linguistics, Literature, vol. 112C, 2012, pp. 301–32. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41714688. Accessed 9 Sep. 2022.

[2] Kelly, James. “William Burton Conyngham and the North-West Fishery of the Eighteenth Century.” The Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, vol. 115, 1985, pp. 64–85. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25508881. Accessed 9 Sep. 2022.

[3] Deed dated 2 May 1795 between Joseph Sproule of Rutland in the County Donegal and John Feeley of Ballyshannon, 485 479 314823, Registry of Deeds, Familysearch.org