When Derry and Donegal were battered by Oíche na Gaoithe Móire or ‘The Night of the Big Wind’

Ships and boats were wrecked in the Foyle and Swilly, fully-grown trees were uprooted and flung like cabers far from where they stood, homes were destroyed, there was extensive flooding, and some poor people were so terrified they thought the end of the world was upon them.

On January 8, 1839, the 'Journal' reported on a 'storm of extraordinary violence' that had pummelled the entire country over January 6 and 7.

Derry had experienced snowfall in the days leading up to Oíche na Gaoithe Móire. Little did the inhabitants know of what was yet to come.

"About midnight, the storm broke out...it blew long and heavy gusts, between which the intervals were very brief, and brought with it rain which descended in deluges and did not subside until about six o'clock in the morning.

"So noisy was the elemental strife that it must have banished sleep from every eye. In the morning there was not a street or lane in the city that did not exhibit proofs of its violence.

"The Courthouse was much damaged, the glass in the windows of the Grand Jury Room having been shattered to pieces, and one of the scales in the hand of the figures of Justice in front of the building carried away."

Joanna Donnelly, the Met Éireann meteorologist, gives an account of what happened in her excellent 2023 book ‘From Malin Head to Mizen Head: A Journey Around the Sea’.

On the afternoon of January 6, 1839, a deep area of low pressure began to move towards Ireland with the first reports of stormy weather coming from Mayo around noon.

“By midnight the winds had reached hurricane force 12 on the Beaufort Scale. That’s a sustained wind speed of greater than 64 knots,” writes Donnelly.

She explains that with a barometric pressure of 918 hectopascals ‘it was the worst storm in 300 years, according to remembered history recorded during that time’.

Recently Laura O’Brien, of the School of Mathematics and Statistics, UCD, and colleagues, in an examination of extreme weather events in Ireland, concluded that ‘The Night of the Big Wind, 6–7 January 1839, was one of the most damaging storms Ireland has ever encountered’.

“The description of how high the waves were at the Cliffs of Moher and the Aran Islands indicates that a storm surge most likely occurred: ‘the waves actually broke over the tops of the Cliffs of Moher...the ocean tossed huge boulders onto the cliff tops of the Aran Islands’. (Bunbury, 2005),” the authors report.

Analysis by Lisa Shields and Denis Fitzgerald for Met Éireann, carried out in 1989, suggests that over the night of January 6-7, 1839, there could have been ‘thundery or even tornado-type activity in places at the height of the storm’.

A report in the ‘Journal’ on January 15, 1839, provided witness to the force of the wind:

“It was remarked of several of the full-grown pines at Brookhall that they were carried to some distance, in a direction opposite to that in which the storm blew: from which it is to be inferred that they encountered a powerful eddy.”

Other contemporary newspaper reports cited by Shields and Fitzgerald confirm ‘heavy rain in places (for example in Derry, where it fell in torrents) prevented the spread of fires, but doubtless contributed to the flooding which was experienced in parts of the country’.

"Another cause of flooding could have been the sudden melting of snow as a result of the marked rise in temperature just before the storm. Strabane was flooded,” according to one report.

“In Lough Swilly, Co. Donegal, there were many ships wrecked,” the Ballyshannon Herald reported on January 11, 1839.

Tragically, many people lost their lives including the captain and 14-man crew of the ‘Andew Nugent’ that was wrecked at Arranmore while bound for London from Sligo.

“At least thirty-seven died in the seas off the Irish coast, including the captain, pilot and crew of fourteen of the ‘Andrew Nugent', the 2(K)-ton sailing vessel that was wrecked off Arranmore Island. Co . Donegal,” according to accounts from the Ballyshannon Herald.

People were absolutely terrified at the force of the storm and some believed that the end times were nigh. This again from the ‘Herald’:

"Donegal town, including the old castle, suffered greatly, and there was destruction of property along the sea coast from Bundoran to Rossnowlagh and Coolmore, where the sea rose to such a height that the poor inhabitants thought it was the end of the world.”

But it wasn’t just coastal areas affected. The Dublin Evening Post noted: “Ireland has been the chief victim of the hurricane — every part of Ireland — every field, even town, every village in Ireland have tell its dire effects, from Galway to Dublin — from the Giant's Causeway to Valencia. It has been, we repeat it, the most awful calamity with which a people were afflicted.”

A report in the Belfast News-Letter on Friday, January 11, 1839, reported on the impact in South Derry:

“A correspondent informs us, that at Draperstown the destruction caused by the storm was frightful. The ridges of three of the best houses in the village were entirely blown down, and even the elegant Market-house lately erected by the Drapers’ Company was considerably injured.

"Scarcely a house escaped, and numerous stacks of hay and oats were entirely carried away. Happily no lives were lost, but the Parish Church is a scene of desolation — the spire is levelled to the ground, the walls are uncovered, and then whole edifice is nearly a mass of ruins.”

As aforementioned that evening has been immortalised in folk memory in Ireland as Oíche na Gaoithe Móire or ‘The Night of the Big Wind’.

Shields and Fitzgerald are unable to say for certain when the term first came into use but do note that it occurs in ‘a poem or song of twenty-five verses composed by Michael Burke of Esker, near Athenry, Co. Galway, reputedly on the day after the storm’.

"It is not surprising that Michael Burke was impressed by the awfulness of the occasion: it was in Esker that a house collapsed and took fire, killing and consuming a mother and four of her children, and mortally injuring the father and another child (Dublin Evening Mail 9 January 1839),” write Shields and Fitzgerald.

A version of the song was recorded by Ciarán MacMathuna of RTÉ from Eamon MacAoidh in Achill island in 1957:

The Night of the Big Wind, or The End of the World

The night of Epiphany

Will be clearly remembered for ever.

Many thousands perished

At home, at sea and abroad.

It was a night of big wind.

A night of storm and burning.

That caused floods, tore trees to shreds.

And made work for craftsmen.

Oíche na Gaoithe Móire, ná Deireadh an tSaoil

Ar oíche ceann an dá lá dhéag

Béidh cuimhne grinn go h-éag.

Is iomaí mílte d'éag

I mbaile, muir's tír.

Oíche gaoithe móire.

Oiche stoirme's dóite.

A déan, dílte. crainnte a' stroiceadh.

Agus obair ag na saoir

Shields and Fitzgerald suggest that the great storm of 1839 became mythical in the Irish imagination due to the damage it wreaked despite comparable wind speeds having since been recorded.

“Two factors...would have added to the feeling of awe which the 1839 storm provoked, and ensured that its memory would endure: it occurred at night, and it came without warning,” they write.

Donnelly concurs: "To put yourself in the position of the people of rural Ireland that night is near impossible. It was January 6 in Christian Ireland. Nollaig na mBan held significant religious meaning, and this strange weather that started with drifts of snow menaced the families as they sought shelter in the darkness.”

Just weeks after the solstice the night would have been pitch and no candle or fire would have been able to survive the gales.

"It would have been complete darkness. When roofs were lifted off structures that should have given shelter the walls started to fall, families would have had to gather in ditches, but these ditches rapidly filled with water from surges, rain and the recently melted snow.

"It's very hard to appreciate the terror these people must have felt that night," she observes.

Donnelly informs us that when the British Chancellor David Lloyd George introduced the old age pension in Ireland in 1909 applicants were sometimes asked to account for their whereabouts on ‘The Night of the Big Wind’ in order to prove they were old enough to apply.

"For those who lived through it, trying to prove their eligibility for the pension nearly 70 years later, they'd certainly have remembered where they were on the 'Night of the Big Wind'," she concludes.

It must indeed have felt like it was the end of the world.