Follies are, by definition, frivolous. They are buildings with no purpose. But there is nothing frivolous about this folly’s history. It was built by the starving as an alternative to simple charity—a way to earn a little money and keep body and soul together.
Conolly’s Folly is an early example of make-work infrastructure. That same model was adopted on a much larger scale when the Great Famine struck just over a century later. The British government was ideologically opposed to providing aid without work. As a result, all across the Irish landscape, there are “famine roads”—running from nowhere to nowhere and now slowly disappearing into the grass.
They are eerie places. In one case, while working on an excavation, archeologists spoke with a local woman who recalled that, in her childhood, anyone who had to go near the road at night would sprint past it for fear of ghosts.