"Famine advances on us with giant strides," wrote an official in the August of 1846. "Towards the end of August," says Mr. T. P. O'Connor, "the calamity began to be universal and its symptoms to be seen. Some of the people rushed into the towns, others wandered along the highroads in the vague hope of food. They plucked turnips from the fields, were glad to live for weeks on a single meal of cabbage a day, feasted on the dead bodies of horses and asses and dogs. There was a story of a mother eating the limbs of her dead child. Dead bodies were discovered with grass in their mouths and in their bowels; weeds were sought after with desperate eagerness; seaweed was greedily devoured; so were diseased cattle and diseased potatoes. Despair fell on all hearts and faces. The ties of kindred in some cases failed, parents neglecting their children and children turning out their aged parents. On the other hand, there were stories of parents dying of starvation to save a small store for their children. The workhouses, usually shunned, were overcrowded. In one, three thousand persons sought relief in a single day. They crowded even into the jails. Driven from the workhouses, people began to die by the roadside or alone in their despair within their cabins. Roads and streets were strewn with corpses. One inspector buried one hundred and forty bodies found on the highway. The scenes inside the cabins were even more horrible; husbands lay for a week in the same hovels with the bodies of their wives and children. The decencies of burial were no longer observed. Then came the plague, attacking bodies already weakened by hunger." "A terrible apathy," says an eye-witness, "hangs over the poor of Skibbereen; starvation has destroyed every generous sympathy; despair has made them hardened and insensible, and they sullenly await their doom with indifference and without fear. Death is in every hovel; disease and famine, its dread precursors, have fastened on the young and the old, the strong and the feeble, the mother and the infant; whole families lie together on the damp floor devoured by fever, without a human being to wet their burning lips or raise their languid heads; the husband dies by the side of the wife, and she knows not that he is beyond the reach of earthly suffering; the same rag covers festering remains of mortality and the skeleton forms of the living, who are unconscious of the horrible contiguity; rats devour the corpse, and there is no energy among the living to scare them from their horrid banquet; fathers bury their children without a sigh, and cover them in shallow graves, round which no weeping mother, no sympathizing friends are grouped; one scanty funeral is followed by another and another. Without food or fuel, bed or bedding, whole families are shut up in naked hovels, dropping one by one into the arms of death."[3]