3-028-301 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Sketches from Ireland: portable hut for police in Mayo, 1870. 'Our Special Artist, who has lately visited the scenes of the agrarian outrages and conspiracies in Ireland, sends Illustrations of the kind of portable hut used for the temporary lodging of detachments of the armed constabulary force, when sent into a district where some notorious act of violence has been perpetrated. One of these huts can be taken to pieces, or put together again, in a few hours. They are made of wooden planks, lined with iron plates half an inch thick...the dimensions of the hut are 12 ft. by 9 ft. Seven men are lodged in this small apartment...Each piece of the wall, plank and plate, has a round loophole, which can be closed by the inmates with an iron flap, so as to enable them to fire at an attacking party, but to shelter themselves against hostile bullets in this shot-proof iron fort. The hut sketched by our Artist...stands at Newfield, about six miles west of Newport...It is within a few hundred yards of the spot where Mr. James Hunter, the Scotch farmer, was murdered in the summer of last year. The extra police force was sent to that district immediately after the murder, and has been kept there ever since, at the cost of the neighbouring farmers'. From "Illustrated London News", 1870.