Castlebar is not a large town at all. It is, like all other towns which
I have yet seen in Ireland, swarming with houses licensed to sell
liquors of different kinds to be drunk on the premises. In one street I
noticed on the side of the car on which I sat every house for quite a
little distance was a licensed whiskey shop.
The country people bring in ass-loads of what they have to sell. Very
few horses are to be seen in the hands of country people. Their trading
is on a decidedly small scale. The number of women who attend market
barefoot is the large majority. The ancient blue cloth cloak is the
prevailing hap. Upon a day my friend and I went out to see the glories
of Ballintubber Abbey. It was not possible for him to go in plain
clothes so soon again; so I had the appearance of an obnoxious lady of
the land, protected by a member of the force.
We drove out of Castlebar some seven or eight miles in the opposite
direction from where Pontoon Bridge lies. Our road lay for miles through
the country wasted of inhabitants by the Marquis of Sligo after the
great famine. Here and there a ruin where a cabin has been speaks that
it was once inhabited. The people tell that Lord Sligo's people were
rented the land in common by the settlement. All but two of one
settlement had paid; as those two could not pay, the whole were evicted.
My informant thought the settlement deserved eviction when they did not
subscribe and pay for the two who could not pay. He never seemed to
think they might not be able to do so, nor that it was cruel to evict
all for the sake of two.
Lord Lucan made a great wasting also at that time. Between the land near
the town devoted to private demesnes, laid out for glory and beauty, and
the lands wasted of inhabitants, you can travel miles and miles on more
than one side of Castlebar and see scarcely a tenant; a herd's cabin, a
police station, being the only houses. As soon as we come to barren land
over-run with stones, tenant houses become thicker.
We passed a cabin of indescribable wretchedness; a woman who might have
sat for a picture of famine stood at the door looking at us as we
passed. She had a number of little children, of the raggedest they were,
around her. Some time ago the father of these scarecrows was suspected
of having stolen some money, and a posse of the much enduring police
were sent out to search in the dead of the night. The family were in
bed. The bed was a few boards laid on stones, on which was spread a
little green hay, and among the loose hay they slept. The terror of the
little creatures pulled out of bed, while the wretched lair was searched
and they stood on the floor naked and shivering, was described to me by
one who assisted at the search. The bed was overturned, but the money
was not found. We drove on through the "stony streak" out to a clearer
grass country to Castle Bourke, a lonely looking ruin sitting among her
own desolations. It once covered a great deal of land, and there is
evidence of additions having been made to it at different times. This
Castle Bourke was one of the castles of the Queen of the West, the
celebrated Grace O'Malley. This castle is one of those given to Grace by
her husband of a year, Sir Richard Bourke.
There are still the remains of three buildings; one, said to be the
prison, was loopholed through the solid stone, some loopholes being
quite close to the ground, some straight through, some slanting, so as
to cover a man come from what direction he might, or what height soever,
even if he crept on the ground. Most of the castle, as well as these
buildings attached, had their roof on the floor, but in the square tower
of the castle proper still remains a stone staircase of the circular
kind.
As you go up this stair lit by narrow slits in the wall formed in hewn
stone you find an arched door at three different places admitting to
three arched galleries roofed and floored with stone. These have their
loophole slits to peep out of, or fire out of, stone spouts through
which molten lead or boiling water could be poured on the besiegers. In
one gallery a trap door let down to an underground passage which came
out at the lake some distance off. By this they could send a messenger
to raise the O'Malley clans, or by it could escape if necessary.
The goats of Mayo are inquisitive, and would persist in climbing the
circular stair and exploring the galleries. Whenever they found this
secret passage, for pure mischief they fell down and were killed, to the
great loss of their owners; so the secret passage is filled up, for
which I was very sorry.
We must take our car again and rattle back over the road to Ballintubber
Abbey. Ballintobar (town of the well) near this was one of the sacred
wells of St. Patrick. The abbey gates were locked, and it was some time
before the key was forthcoming. The church part of the abbey is entire
except the roof and the lofty bell tower. The arch that supported the
tower was forty-five feet in height, but I do not know how high the
tower was which it supported. At last the key was found and we were
admitted into the church. The chancel is still roofed, and here in these
solemn ruins, watched over by the crows and the jackdaws, the few
inhabitants still left assemble for mass. There is a rude wooden altar
and a few pine benches; the ivy waves from the walls; the jackdaws caw
querulously or derisively; the dead of the old race for centuries sleep
underneath, and now in a chancel the remnant gather on a Sabbath. I
cannot describe it as an architect or antiquarian, and these classes
know all about it better than I do, but I want to convey as far as I can
the impression it made upon me to others as delightfully ignorant on the
subject. The roof is made in the same way as all arched roofs of old
castles which I have yet seen, of thin stones laid edge-wise to form the
arch and cemented together. The country people tell me that a frame of
wood was made over which they formed the arch and then poured among the
stones thin mortar boiling hot. On the inside of the arch run along ribs
of hewn stone cemented into their places, running up to meet in a carved
point at the extreme top. These groinings spring from short pillars of
hewn stone that only reach part way down the wall to the floor and run
to a point. These consoles are highly ornamented with sculpture. The
mouldings round the doors, and the stone window frames and sashes, are
wonderfully well done, and would highly ornament a church of the
nineteenth century.
I think we undervalue the civilization of the far past of Connaught.
Those who erected such churches, such abbeys and such castles were both
intelligent and possessed of wealth in no small degree. The ingenuity of
the cut stone hinge on the stone that closes the tomb in the chancel,
the carving on the tomb of the Prince of the O'Connor line, the staunch
solidness of every wall, the immense strength of every arched roof, show
skilled builders, whether they worked under the direction, of the Gobhan
Saer or another man. The plans of the castles, for offence, defence or
escape, show them to have been built by men of skill for men of large
means and great power.