Of this, little was fit for cultivation, even with the help of capital and civilised management.

There was not a road in the district, nor a drain.
Lord George came and established himself here.

He went to work systematically to improve the country, reclaiming bog-lands, building roads, and laying out the property into regular farms.

He went about among the people himself, trying to get their confidence, and to let them know what he wanted to do for them, and with their help.
For a long time they wouldn't believe him to be a lord at all, "because he spoke Irish"; and the breaking up of the rundale system, under which they had lived in higgledy-piggledy laziness, exasperated them greatly.
Of the first man who took a fenced and well-defined farm from Lord George, and went to work on it, the others observed that he would come to no good by it, because he would "have to keep a maid just to talk to his wife." Men could not be got for any wages to work at draining, or at making the "ditches" or embankments to delineate the new holdings; and when Lord George found adventurous "tramps" willing to earn a few shillings by honest work of the kind, conspiracies were formed to undo by night what was done by day.

However, Lord George persevered.
There was not a shop, nor a dispensary, nor a doctor, nor a warehouse, nor a quay for landing goods in this whole populous and sea-washed region.