It has been said, with some truth, that this blog is not that lively; indeed it could be described as dull and sometimes uninteresting.  So, to give some balance, there will be a departure from the usual doom and gloom to a different variety of gloom and doom.

The blog has no wish to promote what may be called shocking events of a tabloid nature, but sometimes life is not a bed of those plants with thorny stems that grow in gardens.  Shocking things happen, and there is no harm in reporting them, it might even serve as an advance warning to vulnerable people.

From time to time the media carry reports of robberies committed on elderly and defenceless people in remote areas.  Terrible as these incidents are, they have a long history, as this report from July 1851 shows:

ROBBERIES AND OUTRAGES

Since the month of February, not less than thirty six robberies have been committed within two miles of Letterkenny, and not a single detection, save in one instance, although most of them were of a very serious and aggravating nature.  You cannot travel out almost any distance in any direction without meeting some party either going to the doctor to have their wounds dressed.  Or people enquiring after some stolen property, horse or cow, meal, money, bed and back-clothing, or other effects of which they have been plundered by these daring and heartless robbers.  One man is lodged in Lifford gaol at present, for being one of the 18 who came by night to the house of an unprotected widow and her son, and a relative who was as servant in the house; When the robbers had broken down their strength so they could offer no further resistance, and that they might not recognise any of the party afterwards, they bound their clothes around their heads, and their arms with ropes, and threw them all into a bed, shutting up the apartment.  This done, they struck [lit up the lamps], kindled a fire, and collected all the butter, milk, eggs, and bread in the house.  On this they feasted for one hour without any apprehensions of danger, no neighbours being near.  When this scene was over, then the work of plunder commenced.  One party collected all the linens, sheets, back-clothes and bed-clothes, all the knives and forks, etc.  Another party collected the sacks, and filled them with meal, not leaving one pound behind.  Another party loaded their own horses first, and then broke open the stable door and took out a horse to carry off what remained.  They left the widow’s house a complete waste, herself, son, and servant, bound with ropes, full of large wounds.  They were bleeding profusely, and rolled up as they believed in their bloody grave-shrouds, without a single article of food or raiment, should they ever require it.  Indeed “so cruel” relates the aged widow, who survives, through greatly disfigured from many large wounds on her face and other parts of her person “was the human monster, who inflicted on her all her sores, that when he had broken down her strength, that she could make no further resistance, and was in the act of binding her with ropes, he stooped down and chewed off part of her nose with his teeth”.