Connemara was drastically depopulated during the Great Famine in the late 1840s, with the lands of the Anglo-Irish Martin family being greatly affected and the bankrupted landlord being forced to auction off the estate in 1849.
As that year of 1847 had been the worst of several consecutive years of famine, it was to be understood that those missing tenants had abandoned their holdings to crowd into the workhouses or the emigrant ships to the New World, or they were dead; in any case they no longer infested the ground, which was left as a blank canvas on which Capital could paint a fair and profitable landscape.
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