Some miles to the westward lies the pretty island of Sherkin, which with Tullough to the east, makes the charming little bay of Baltimore completely landlocked.  Out in front of all, like a giant sentinel, stands the island of Cape Clear, breasting with its defiant strength that vast ocean whose waves foam around it, lashing its shores, and rushing up its crannied bluffs, still and for ever to be flung back in shattered spray by those bold and rocky headlands.  The town of Skibbereen consists chiefly of one long main street, divided into several, by different names.  This street is like a horse-shoe, or rather a boomerang, in shape.  Coming to the curve and turning up the second half of the boomerang, we are almost immediately in Bridge-street, a name well known in the famine time; not for anything very peculiar to itself, but because it leads directly to the suburb known as Bridgetown, in which the poorest inhabitants resided, and where the famine revelled—­hideous, appalling, and triumphant.  Bridgetown is changed now.  In 1846 it contained a large population, being not much less than half a mile in length, with a row of thatched houses on each side; when the Famine slaughtered the population, those houses were left tenantless in great numbers, and there being none to reoccupy them, they fell into ruins and were never rebuilt.  Hence instead of a continuous line of dwellings at either side, as of old, Bridgetown now presents only detached blocks of three or four or half-a-dozen cabins here and there.  Coming towards the end of it, by a gradual ascent, I accosted a man who was standing at the door of his humble dwelling:  “I suppose you are old enough,” I said to him, “to remember the great Famine?” “Oh! indeed I am, sir,” he replied, with an expressive shake of his head.  “Were there more people in Bridgetown and Skibbereen at that time than now?” “Ay, indeed,” he replied, “I suppose more than twice as many.”  “And where did they all live—­I see no houses where they could have lived?” “God bless you, sure Bridgetown was twice as big that time as it is now; the half of it was knocked or fell down, when there were no people to live in the houses.  Besides, great numbers lived out in the country, all round about here.  Come here,” he said, earnestly; and we ascended the road a little space.  “Do you see all that country, sir?” and he pointed towards the north and west of the town.  “I do.”  “Well, it was all belonging to farmers, and it was full of farmers’ houses before the famine; now you see there are only a couple of gentlemen’s places on the whole of it.  The poor all died, and of course their houses were thrown down.”  “And where were they all buried,” I enquired.  “Well, sir,” he replied, “some of them were buried in the old chapel yard, near the windmill; a power of them were buried in Abbeystrowry, just out there a bit, where you are going to, but—­” he suddenly added, as if correcting himself—­“sure they were buried everywhere—­at the Workhouse over—­in the cabins where they died—­everywhere; there was no way, you see, to bring them all to Abbeystrowry, but still there were a power of them, sure enough, brought to it.”