Book Tickets Online
About
Step back in time with local expert Cathy O’Neill who will bring your imagination to life with stories of a famine-struck people. These were the people of the mid-19th Century who set out from the most deprived parts of Northern Ireland to make new lives for themselves, with almost nothing in their pockets, but the bright flame of hope in their hearts.
You will trace their near-barefoot journey across the rugged, boulder-strewn landscape of Carntogher, spectacular in Spring and Summer, but often harshly unforgiving in Autumn and Winter. In step and sympathy with them, you will get to place your own Emigrant Stone amongst their countless stones at the carn on the mountain summit.
The lives and hopes of those emigrants echo across this land and you will hear and experience that resonant echo in Friel’s Bar & Restaurant, built on the site of an original Famine-era soup kitchen. Wonder at the authentic Famine Pot from which the emigrants were fed and get a taste for the heartening nettle soup with which they fortified themselves for the next leg of their fateful journey. Emigrants were often sent on their way with a final poitin toast, a dram of which is the perfect way to complete this fascinating and spell-binding journey through time. As a memento of your experience you will get to take an engraved stone home with you, a memorial gesture towards the people whose footsteps you walked in.
