towards the spots mentioned in a former letter as of specially evil
reputation for agrarian crime, and as being heavily amerced by the
grand jury. A very slight acquaintance with them excites amazement
that cess, rent, or anything else can be extracted from the utterly
wretched cabins looking on the broad Atlantic. A large number of these
are built on the slope of a lofty peninsula rising to 1,172 feet from
the sea-level, and marked on the maps as Rinvyle Mountain. It is
better known to the natives as Lettermore Hill, and forms part of the
Rinvyle estate, one of the encumbered properties alluded to in my last
letter. The hill-folk, who appear, on the best evidence procurable, to
have had hard measure dealt to them by the Mr. Graham who bought part
of the old Lynch property, declaim against the "new man," as others
ascribe every evil to the middleman; but others again hold that the
old proprietors, who remain on the land, fighting against
encumbrances, are the "hardest of all," and that the whips of cupidity
cannot compare with the scorpions of poverty. Be this as it may, the
present holder of Rinvyle is by no means personally unpopular, and has
helped the district lately in getting subscriptions and a Government
grant for building a pier, extremely useful both as a protection to
fisher-folk, and as providing labour for the still poorer people. It
is also only fair to state that much of the local congestion of
inhabitants at Rinvyle is due to the kelp-manufacture. The kelp-trade
was at one time very prosperous, and employed a large number of people
in collecting, drying, and burning seaweed. At that period it was the
object of proprietors on the seaboard to attract population to their
domains, on account of the royalty levied on kelp, which exceeded by
far the rent asked for a little holding. While some proprietors were
wiping off the map great villages, containing hundreds of families,
like that of Aughadrinagh, near Castlebar, the holders of the
sea-coast encouraged people to settle on their estates. No reasonable
person can blame them for doing so. The proprietor was poor, and saw
that a large accession to his means might be secured by attracting
kelp-burners. He made a good thing of it. The people paid about 3l. or
a little more a year for their cottage and little, very little,
paddock, not bigger than a garden; about 11s. a year for the "right to
gather seaweed," and one-third of the proceeds of the kelp they made
as "royalty" to the landlord. It should be added that the owners of
Rinvyle were not themselves dealers in kelp, like some middlemen along
the coast, and that their "people,"--save the mark!--could sell to
whom they pleased, but the lords of the seashore took their third of
the proceeds. Within comparatively recent times kelp has been worth
6l. and 7l. per ton. Putting the "royalty" at 2l. per ton, and the
production of each family at a couple of tons per annum, we arrive at
the position that the landlord drew, in rent and royalty, about half
his tenants' summer earnings. The tenants obtained about 8l. clear per
family for the summer's laborious work in collecting, drying, and
burning seaweed. The rest of their living was made either out of a
conacre potato patch, for which they were charged a tremendous rent,
or eked out by the excursion of one member of the family to England
for the reaping season. It was not a prosperous life, except in
comparison with that which has succeeded it. For the last few years
kelp has been almost thrown out of the market, and such small prices
are obtainable that it is not worth while to collect it. But the
population originally attracted by kelp remains to starve on the rocks
of Rinvyle.
Lettermore Hill, rising directly from the sea level, is a magnificent
object glittering in the sun. It is "backed" rather like a whale than
a weasel, and includes some good rough mountain pasture, as well as
green fields near its base. As one approaches it a ring of villages is
seen delightfully situated, high for the most part above the sea and
the green fields, and lying back against the huge mountain. It is
natural to suppose that here resides a race of marine mountaineers
seeking their living on the deep while their flocks and herds pasture
on the hill. But no supposition could be wider of the actual fact.
Neither the fields beneath nor the mountain above belong in any way to
the villages which form a belt of pain and sorrow half-way up its
side, drooping at Derryinver to the sea. One of these villages,
Coshleen, surely as wretched a place as any in the world, is
unapproachable by a wheeled vehicle. The pasture land in front is
walled off, and, together with the mountain behind, down almost to the
roof of the cabins, is reserved to the use of a great grazier living
far away. Below, near the sea, stands Rinvyle Castle--whence the name
Coshleen, the village by the castle--the ruined stronghold of the
O'Flahertys who ruled this country long ago, either better or worse
than the Blakes, who have held it for some generations, and under
whose care it has become a reproach to the empire. There is a little
arable land farther down Lettermore Hill, which, being also called
Rinvyle Mountain, might well receive the third name of Mount Misery.
This bit of arable land is let to the surrounding tenants on the
conacre principle--that is, the holders are not even yearly tenants,
but have the land let to them for the crop, the season while their
potatoes or oats are on the ground. By letting this conacre land in
little patches, a high rent is secured, which the tenants have no
option but to promise to pay. Apparently it is these wretched people
who, maddened by the sight of a stranger's flocks and herds pasturing
above and below them, have risen at times and driven his animals into
the sea. All the notice he has taken of the matter is to make the
county pay his loss, and leave the county to get the amount out of the
offending townlands if it can. He is not to be scared, for he lives
far away, and apparently his herds are not much afraid either--at
present, that is. How any compensation money is to be got from the
hundreds of miserable people who inhabit Coshleen and Derryinver I
cannot conceive. They have, it is true, potatoes to eat just now, and
may have enough till February; but their pale cheeks, high
cheek-bones, and hollow eyes tell a sorry tale, not of sudden want but
of a long course of insufficient food, varied by occasional fever.
With the full breath of the Atlantic blowing upon them, they look as
sickly as if they had just come out of a slum in St. Giles's. There is
something strangely appalling in the pallid looks of people who live
mainly in the open air, and the finest air in the world. Doubtless
they tell a good story without, as I have already said, any very
severe adherence to truth; but there can be no falsehood in their
gaunt, famished faces, no fabrication in their own rags and the
nakedness of their children. I doubt me Mr. Ruskin would designate the
condition of Mount Misery, otherwise Lettermore Hill, as "altogether
devilish."
The cabins of Connemara have been so frequently described that there
is no necessity for telling the English public that in the villages I
have named anything approaching the character of a bed is very rare. A
heap of rags flung on some dirty straw, or the four posts of what was
once a bedstead filled in with straw, with a blanket spread over it,
form the sleeping-place. Everybody knows that one compartment serves
in these seaside hovels for the entire family, including the pig (if
any), ducks, chickens, or geese. Few people hereabouts own an ass,
much less a horse or a cow, and boats are few in proportion to the
population. Such a cabin as I have rather indicated than described is
occupied by the wife of one John Connolly, of Derryinver. When I
called the husband was away at some work over the hill, and the two
elder boys with him, the wife and seven younger children remaining at
home. I had hardly put my foot inside the cabin when a "bonniva," or
very little pig, quietly made up to me and began to eat the
upper-leather of my boot, doubtless because he could find nothing else
to eat, poor little beast. Besides the "bonniva," who looked very
thin, the property of the entire family consisted of a dozen fowls
and ducks, some potatoes, a little stack of poor oats, not much taller
than a man, and a still smaller stack of rough hay. An experienced
hand in such matters, who accompanied me, valued the stacks at 2l.
15s. together. This was all they had at John Connolly's to face the
winter withal, and I was curious to know what rent they paid for their
little cabin and the field attached. An acre was quite as much as they
appeared to have, and for this they were "set," as it is called here,
at 3l. per annum, and, in addition, were charged 2s. 6d. for the
privilege of cutting turf, and 5s. 6d. for the seaweed. This toll for
cutting seaweed is a regular impost in these parts, sometimes rising
for "red weed" and "black weed" to 11s. The latter is used only for
manuring the potato fields, the former being the proper kelp weed, and
must be paid for whether it is used or not. As a matter of fact, Mrs.
Connolly's place assigned for cutting red-weed is the island of
Innisbroon, some four or five miles out at sea, and as her husband has
never been worth a boat she has paid her dues for nine years for
nothing. The seaweed dues in fact have for several years past
represented merely an increase of rental. It should not, however, be
forgotten that when kelp was valuable the lords of the soil took their
third part of it when it was burnt, in addition to the first tax for
collecting the weed, a most laborious and tedious operation.
It may be asked, and with some appearance of reason, why, if people
are hungry, they do not eat what is nearest to hand. That one owning a
dozen fowls and ducks and a stack of oats, be the same never so small,
should be hungry, seems at a superficial glance ridiculous. But the
fact is that this is just the flood time of harvest, the oats are
stacked and the potatoes stored, but there is a long winter to face;
and, what is more depressing to hear, these people who rear fowls
would as soon think of eating one as of flying. They do not even eat
the eggs, but sell them to an "eggler," and invest the money in Indian
corn meal, a stone of which goes much farther than a dozen or a dozen
and a half of eggs. Those, and they are greatly in the majority, who
have no cow are obliged to buy milk for their children, and find it
difficult and costly to get enough for them.
In equally poor case with the cottiers is the woman who keeps the
village shop at Derryinver. Those who know the village shops of England
and the mingled odour of flour, bacon, cheese, and plenty which
pervades them, would shudder at Mrs. Stanton's store at Derryinver. It
is a shop almost without a window; in fact, a cabin like those occupied
by her customers. The shopkeeper's stock is very low just now. She
could do a roaring trade on credit, but unfortunately her own is
exhausted. Like the little traders during English and Welsh strikes,
her sympathies are all with her customers, but she can get no credit
for herself. She has a matter of 40l. standing out; she owes 21l.; she
has sold her cow and calf to keep up her credit at Clifden, and she is
doing no business. When I looked in on her she was engaged in combing
the hair of one of her fair-skinned children, an operation not common
in these parts, where the back hair of even grown women in such centres
of commercial activity as Clifden has a curious knack of coming down.
It is part of the tumble-downishness of the neglected West. At some
remote period things must have been new, but bating Casson's Hotel, at
Letterfrack, there is nothing in good order between Mr.
Mitchell-Henry's well-managed estate at Kylemore and Galway. At Clifden
and all through the surrounding country things appear to be decaying or
decayed. The doors will not shut, and the windows cannot be opened; the
bells have no handles, and if they had would not ring; the wall-paper
and the carpets, the houses, the land and the people seem to be all
very much the worse for wear. The dirt and slovenliness are
unspeakable. I tried to write on the table of the general room of a
well-known inn, or so-called hotel, the other day, and my arm actually
stuck to the table, so adhesive was the all-pervading filth. The white
flannel cloaks and deep red petticoats of Connemara women are
picturesque enough on market-day in Clifden, but, like Eastern cities,
they should be seen from afar. I have a shrewd suspicion that the
blight has gone beyond the potato, and it is not very difficult to see
how it strode onward. The little towns of the West depend entirely upon
the surrounding country for their subsistence, and, when the peasantry
are poor, gradually undergo commercial atrophy. Just at this moment
they are in a livelier condition than usual, somewhat because the
comparatively well-to-do among the peasants have taken advantage in
many places of the popular cry to pay no rent, and have, therefore, for
the moment a little ready money. But there is no escaping the saddening
influence of a general aspect of dirt and decay.
It is a significant feature of the present agitation in Ireland that
all parties are nearly agreed so far as the Connaught peasant
cultivator is concerned. That anything approaching agreement on any
part of the complex Irish problem should be arrived at is so
remarkable that I am inclined to hearken to the popular voice.
Whatever may be done for the benefit of other parts of the country,
something must, it is thought, be attempted for the counties of Mayo
and Galway. So far as I have been able to arrive at facts and
opinions, it is not altogether a question of rent. A general remission
of rent in these two counties would merely have the effect of
enriching those farmers who are already "snug," but would leave the
peasant cultivators exactly as they are at present. It is quite true
that in some of the most wretched places I have seen the rent is
extravagantly high; but while exclaiming against attempted extortion,
I cannot shut my eyes to the fact that for the last two years the
attempt has been in the main abortive. Everybody is not so deep in his
landlord's books as the irreconcileable Thomas Browne, of
Cloontakilla; but a vast number of poor tenants owe one and a half and
two years' rent. I speak of those whose holdings are "set" from 3l. to
8l. per annum. The rent has not impoverished them this year at any
rate; they have had a fair harvest, their beast or few sheep have
fetched good prices, and yet they are miserably poor. It is quite true
that two very bad years preceded the good one, but allowing for all
this there is no room for hope that under their present conditions of
existence they will ever be better off than they are now--when they
are practically living rent free.
Letting for the moment bygones be bygones between landlord and tenant,
what is to occur in the future? Hunger is an evil counsellor, and
there would apparently always be hunger and consequent discontent
among the little cultivators of Connaught, even if the land were given
to them outright. The fact is that, despite the assertions of
demagogues, the holdings on which the people now live cannot support
them, and, in fact, never have supported them. It is, as I remarked in
one of my previous letters, the harvest money from England and the
labourers' wages brought from Scotland which have kept body and soul
together after a poor fashion. The annual migration of reapers and
labourers has been a matter not of enterprise, but of necessity; for
on the summer savings, varying from 10l. to 15l., the family entirely
depend. It is, therefore, an absolute mistake to speak of the Mayo and
Galway men as peasant cultivators living on the produce of the soil
they cultivate. It cannot be done. I have talked to scores of these
people, and have invariably found that a decent cabin with properly
clad inhabitants depended upon something beyond the food produced on
the spot. Either the father went to England for the harvest, or the
boys were working in a shipyard on the Clyde, or the girls were in
America and sent home money. On the seashore, among the wretched
people who send their children out on the coast to pick shell-fish
worth fourpence per stone, I found here and there a household such as
I have described really depending on money earned far away. I have
thought it well to put the case somewhat strongly because it is sheer
absurdity to expect that a living for a family can be extracted from
five Irish acres of land in Connaught. In very good years, and when
credit is abundant, not so unusual an occurrence as might be supposed,
it is just possible for the peasant to struggle on; but he can never
be said to live. His land is exhausted by the old Mayo rotation of
"potatoes, oats, burn," and he has no manure but guano and seaweed.
It is like inhaling fresh air to turn aside from poorly nourished
people and land to look, from the window of Casson's hotel at
Letterfrack, on two bright green oases rising amid a brown desert of
bog. Turnips and mangolds are growing in great forty-acre squares.
Dark-ribbed fields of similar size show where the potatoes have been
dug, and men are dotted here and there busily engaged with work of
various kinds. The green oases at the mouth of the magnificent pass of
Kylemore are the work of Mr. Mitchell-Henry, M.P. for the county of
Galway. When Mr. Henry first went salmon-fishing in the river Dowris,
which flows from Kylemore Lake into the sea at Ballynakill Harbour,
Kylemore was a mountain pass and nothing more. Now it not only boasts
a castle, but is the centre of extraordinary activity, the first
fruits of which are seen in the villages of Currywongoan and
Greenmount already alluded to as forming conspicuous objects in a
landscape of strange grandeur. Mr. Henry, who was an eminent surgeon
before he became a great landowner, has gone about the work of
reclamation with scientific knowledge as well as vigorous will, and
now has a great area in the various stages of conversion from bog into
productive land. When he began to reclaim land at Kylemore the
neighbouring gentry smiled good-humouredly, plunged their hands into
their (mostly empty) pockets, and wished him joy of his bargain. Now
the Kylemore improvements are the wonder of Connemara. The long
unknown mangold is seen to flourish on spots which once nourished
about a snipe to an acre. Root crops are very largely grown, and it is
to these that the climate and reclaimed bog of Connemara are more
particularly favourable; but there is abundance of grain at
Currywongoan, at Greenmount, and at the home-farm at Dowris.
Neighbouring proprietors are thinking the matter over, and are
wondering whether an Irish landlord ought, like an English one, to do
something to employ and encourage his poor tenants, and help on with
improvements those inclined to help themselves. Even the tenants
themselves on the Kylemore Estate are beginning to wake up under the
care of a resident landlord inclined to set them in the way of
improving their condition. With the run of the mountain in addition to
holdings varying from twelve to forty and fifty acres in extent, Mr.
Mitchell Henry's people are learning by example, are breaking up land,
and every year increasing the area under the plough. It would thus
seem that the Connemara peasant is not unteachable, if only some
patience be shown and fair breathing space allotted to him.
Mr. Mitchell Henry's idea of reclamation was purely scientific at
first, and has only by degrees been developed into a large enterprise.
He was struck by the fact that the bog lies directly on the
limestone, as coal, ironstone, and limestone lie in parts of
Staffordshire, only awaiting the hand of man to turn them to practical
account. Draining and liming are all that bog-land requires to yield
immediate crops. The main difficulty is of course to get rid of the
water, which keeps down the temperature of the land until it produces
nothing but the humblest kind of vegetation. All the steps of the
reclaiming process may be seen at Kylemore. The first thing to be done
is to cut a big deep drain right through the bog to the gravel between
it and the limestone. Then the secondary drains are also cut down to
the gravel, and are supplemented by "sheep" or surface drains about
twenty inches deep and twenty inches wide at top, narrowing to six
inches at the bottom. This process may be called "tapping the bog,"
which begins to shrink visibly. The puffy rounded surface gradually
sinks as the water runs off, and the earth gains in solidity. When
this process is sufficiently advanced the drains are cleared and
deepened, and a wedge-shaped sod, too wide to reach the bottom, is
rammed in so as to leave below it a permanent tubular covered drain,
which is thus made without tiles or other costly material. Then the
surface is dressed with lime, which, as the people say, "boils the
bog" instead of burning it in the old-fashioned Irish manner. On such
newly broken-up ground I saw numerous potato ridges, the large area
of turnips and mangolds already spoken of, grasses and rape for
sheep-feed. The celery grown on the reclaimed bog is superb, even
finer than that grown on Chat Moss, which gave Manchester its
reputation for celery-growing.
It is not pretended that all the bogs in Ireland are susceptible of
similar treatment, nor is it by any means necessary that they should
be. For there is plenty of bog-land less than four feet in depth, and
this alone is worth draining and liming at present. According to Mr.
Mitchell Henry's calculation he can drain and lime the land, take a
first crop off it, and then afford to let it at fifteen shillings per
acre. This is thirteen shillings more than it is worth now, and would
return interest for the necessary outlay at five per cent. per annum.
It is well known that Mr. Mitchell Henry has pursued his work at
Kylemore in the spirit of a pioneer, and that he looks to the
employment of the poor Connemara folk on reclamations as the loophole
of escape from their present miserable condition. But, while anxious
for the people, he is not unjust to the landlords who, whatever their
wish may be, are too poor to attempt any extensive improvement of
their estates. With the exception of Mr. Berridge and Lord Sligo,
nobody has much money in these parts besides Mr. Henry, whose example
is followed slowly, because proprietors lack the means to undertake
anything on a grand scale. His impression is, that to effect any good
the matter must be made Imperial. The suggestion is, that suitable
tracts of the best waste lands should be acquired by the Government;
that the work of reclamation should be carried on by labourers who
would be paid weekly wages and lodged in huts close to their work; and
that when the land had been properly fertilised it should be divided
into farms of forty acres and the men who have worked at reclaiming it
settled upon it with their families, and instructors appointed to
teach them farming. It is no part of the scheme that the land should
be given to the people. On the contrary, a rent should be charged
them, calculated upon the basis of a percentage on the original outlay
in the purchase of the estate and of the amount paid in wages,
together with a small sum to pay off the capital in the course of a
term of years. The occupant would thus in time become a freeholder,
and as much interested in maintaining the law as any other proprietor.
Meanwhile he would, like the Donegal folk mentioned by Mr. Tuke, live
on hopefully under the rule, for the time being, of the Kingdom, as
landlord.
I am far from inclined to detract in any way from the merit of Mr.
Mitchell Henry's project for Imperial reclamation any more than from
his scheme for draining and for improving the internal navigation of
Ireland. Although born in Lancashire he is a thorough-bred Irishman,
and naturally hopeful of his country. But, although I am most
painfully impressed by the fearful degradation into which a part of
the Western people has fallen, I cannot on that account shut my eyes
to their failings any more than to their poverty. Mr. Henry's scheme,
if it deferred actual proprietorship in fee simple till the next
generation, would I hope prove of incalculable benefit to Mayo and
Galway, especially if his excellent idea of appointing agricultural
instructors were carried out faithfully. But I fear from what I have
actually seen and heard from the most trustworthy informants of all
classes, that the forty-acre farmer of this generation would require a
firm hand to guide him. This is no insolent Saxon assumption of
superiority, but is said, after due consideration, sadly and
seriously. The poor people of the West have been brought very low, so
low that even their very virtues have become perverted into faults.
They are affectionate to their kith and kin; but this amiable quality
leads to their huddling together in a curiously gregarious way, and in
some cases has been made the means of extorting money from them. It is
this tendency to live together and thus divide and subdivide whatever
little property they may have, which will require to be most
strenuously guarded against.
It is of no use assigning to a man forty acres of land to get a living
out of, if he immediately sublets some of it to a less fortunate
friend, or takes all his remotest relations into partnership. It
requires no prophet's eye to discern that the instant the tenant's son
got married he would bring his wife home to his father's roof, and
that if the energies of the united family did not suffice to cultivate
the whole of the forty acres, part would be let at "conacre," that is,
for the period of one harvest, to a man with or without a holding of
his own. The tendency to bring several families together in one cabin
is almost irresistible, and has, as mentioned above, not been wisely
and firmly met by proprietors, but taken a mean advantage of to wring
money out of tenants.