3-028-505 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Sketches From Ireland: interior of 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...[a] 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...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 are 12 ft. by 9 ft. Seven men are lodged in this small apartment; they sleep in hammocks, slung one above another; and they have a stove for cooking. 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...[This hut] stands at Newfield, about six miles west of Newport...It is [near] the spot where Mr. James Hunter, the Scotch farmer, was murdered 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.