The Wrens of the Curragh were an outcast community of 19th-century Irish women who lived rough, brutally hard lives on the plains of Kildare. The name comes from the shelters they lived in, hollowed out "nests" in the ground which they covered with layers of furze.
Throughout the 50-odd years they lived on the plains, they were reviled, stoned, beaten, spat upon and denied basic care. They were refused goods by local shopkeepers and burnt out of their nests. They died in ditches from exposure, as well as from disease. Even the workhouse refused them, putting them into low hovels separated from the main building.
Their number included unmarried mothers, free-thinkers, alcoholics, prostitutes, vagrants, ex-convicts and harvest workers. All of them women who had, in one way or another, put themselves beyond the pale of respectable society.
They shared everything, even children, living by what they called "communistic principles". Many chose to be Wrens because of the relative dignity and control it offered over their lives. Many others saw life on the Curragh as infinitely preferable to the workhouse. And with good reason.
They'd been stoned and beaten off the streets in surrounding towns. That in Newbridge a priest had "torn the thin shawl and gown" from a Wren before flogging her bare shoulders with his riding whip "until the blood spurted onto his boots". All without a voice in the watching crowd raised in protest.
Another priest made a practice of pouncing with a scissors on Wrens who ventured into the towns and "cutting their hair close to the head". That the only local shop to serve them was owned by a widow, but that they were allowed attend the market held in the army camp twice a week. That the British army sent water wagons out to them twice a week.
Other accounts told how gangs of local men crossed the plains for the "sport" of burning down the village (the Wrens would get together and rebuild the burned nests). There were also accounts of gang rapes by soldiers, and tales of terrible drunkenness among the women themselves.
The Wrens went on living, and dying, on the Curragh for more than 50 years. They became a coherent community after the Curragh camp was made a permanent fixture in l856, but there are records of them from the l840s onwards. It is thought they were still on the Curragh at the end of the century.
Their nests were numbered, grouped into villages and so low "you crouched into them, as beasts crouch into cover" with "no standing upright until you crawl out again".