Griffith's Valuation

Between 1848 and 1864 an exhaustive survey of Irish land occupation was conducted by Sir Richard Griffith, an Irish geologist. The survey took in some one million individuals for the purpose of establishing rental and tax rates. The results survive to this day, and are now available in digital format as a searchable database.

The lands were concentrated in Ballee, Ballyedock was across the water.
Map from Ros Davies' County Down Site

There are a number of references in Griffiths valuation to the representatives of one Mrs Wombwell and providing information about the immediate tenants or occupiers, the land in question, and the rental paid to the `immediate leaser’. To take just one instance, a John Lowey was leasing land of just over 7 acres in Ballyhossett, Milltown, from the representatives of Mrs Wombwell for a rental of just over 7 pounds per annum.

The late Mrs Wombwell in question is Harriett’s late mother, Maria West, and from the Conditions of Sale that came with the auction lots, it transpires that Maria had in turn inherited the lands from one Elizabeth Carson. Potential bidders are warned that in no case are they entitled to dispute the wills either of Maria Wombwell, nor Elizabeth Carson, and nor for that matter the decision of Vice-Chancellor Malins in the Robinson vs. Neale case (1865), that Harriett Robinson was the only living daughter of Maria Wombwell at the time of death of Elizabeth Carson. It was not for a very long time in the researching of this history that the import of this judgement and all that it entailed was to become apparent. For the family involved, as we shall see later, it was to be something of a mid-Victorian bombshell.

It also emerges from the auction documentation and Harriet Wombwell’s will that the representatives of Mrs Wombwell referred to included initially Hugh Wallace, Seneschal of Downpatrick, and thereafter his son, William Nevin Wallace. Somehow the Wombwell family had also acquired for themselves representation by one of Ireland’s most famous and prestigious legal families with offices in Dublin, Belfast, and Downpatrick.