Conolly's Folly, built in 1740 by laborers hired during an earlier Irish famine, anticipated the make-work projects of the Great Famine a century later.

The Ghost Roads of Ireland’s Great Famine

Starving families were forced to earn aid by carving roads through rock, fields, and mountainsides.
Turf Cutters 1869 by Thomas Wade 1828-1891

Peat’s Place in Art

Since the nineteenth century, peat (or turf) has brought social consciousness to art. In the 1800s, Pre-Raphaelite paintings focused on the fact that the poor harvested it.