The farm records of Rev. Ralph Sadleir, Castleknock, 1857-61

Farm diaries and account books are an important, if imperfect, primary source. For Ireland during the period 1850 to 1914, Ó Gráda observed that ‘[d]etailed analyses of … individual farms have been few’ and discussed two such articles, including one for a farm near Bray. What follows adds another case study to the literature by considering the records for glebe land at Castleknock, County Dublin, kept in five annual diaries by the Rev. Dr Ralph Sadleir (1815-1902), the long-standing and well connected Church of Ireland vicar there. A distant family member living in New Zealand, Dr Richard Sadleir, kindly deposited these diaries in the Representative Church Body (RCB) Library, Dublin, in 2014. If lacking the organization and temporal coverage of other nineteenth-century farm records (including the diary for Lowther Lodge, Balbriggan), nonetheless Rev. Sadleir’s diaries provide useful insights about farming on the fringes of Dublin city at the turn of the 1860s, even though he was not a typical farmer (or clergyman).