Allihies

Allihies is a coastal parish in County Cork, Ireland. The corresponding civil parish is Kilnamanagh. The largest village in the parish is Cluin, but is often mistakenly referred to by the name of the surrounding parish. Allihies Parish is located on the western tip of the Béara Peninsula and stretches between Cod's Head to the north west and Dursey Island to the south west.History of copper miningFrom the Bronze age the area had been a site of copper-mining. In 1812 John Lavallin Puxley (1772-1856) established a company to operate the Berehaven copper mines at Allihies. During the following century, between 1812 and 1912, 297,000 tons of ore were recorded as passing through Swansea from Allihies mines. An attempt was made to restart mining in the late 1950s by a Canadian mining company, but was not progressed.Daphne du Maurier’s novel Hungry Hill is a fictionalized saga of several generations of a mine-owning dynasty and based loosely on the history of the Puxley family.There are three ruined Cornish engine houses visible from Allihies. The most prominent is the Mountain Mine man engine house, located on the mountain above the village and installed by the noted Cornish engineers Michael Loam and Son in 1862.In the late nineteenth century newly developed sources of copper ore in Africa, the Americas and Australia were being worked. Following a resulting fall in the worldwide price of copper, the Allihies mine closed in 1884. The Berehaven area then saw large-scale emigration, as many of the miners who left Allihies found their way to newly-developing mining centres in the United States and Canada. Among these centres is Butte, Montana, where many families (Lowneys, Harringtons and many others) trace their ancestry to Allihies and the Beara peninsula.