Transcriber's Note: Minor typographical errors have been corrected
without note. Irregularities and inconsistencies in the text have
been retained as printed. Words printed in italics are noted with
underscores: _italics_.
[Illustration: LOUGH BREENBANNIA]
CONNAUGHT
Described by Stephen Gwynn
Pictured by Alexander Williams
BLACKIE AND SON LIMITED
LONDON GLASGOW AND BOMBAY
1912
Beautiful Ireland
LEINSTER
ULSTER
MUNSTER
CONNAUGHT
_Uniform with this Series_
Beautiful England
OXFORD
THE ENGLISH LAKES
CANTERBURY
SHAKESPEARE-LAND
THE THAMES
WINDSOR CASTLE
CAMBRIDGE
NORWICH AND THE BROADS
THE HEART OF WESSEX
THE PEAK DISTRICT
THE CORNISH RIVIERA
DICKENS-LAND
WINCHESTER
THE ISLE OF WIGHT
CHESTER AND THE DEE
YORK
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Page
Lough Breenbannia _Frontispiece_
Lowlands, Ballinlough, Roscommon 8
Mweelrea and the Killary, from Tully Strand, Renvyle 14
A Fisherman's Home under Diamond Mountain, Ballynakill Bay 20
On the Owenbrin River, Lough Mask 26
Castle Kirke and Upper Lough Corrib 32
In the Pass of Delphi, Killary Bay 36
Wrack-Gathering on the West Coast 42
Croagh Patrick, from Oldhead, Clew Bay 46
The Minaun Cliffs, Achill Island 50
Nephin, from Lough Conn 54
Lough Gill 58
[Illustration: CONNAUGHT]
I
Connaught--or Connacht, as it is more properly spelt and spoken--is
geographically the best-marked among the provinces of Ireland; and, as
usual, other discriminations follow. I would not say that it is of all
provinces the most Irish; nobody has better rights to stand for Ireland
than the "boys of Wexford", and at a Wexford fair or meeting you will
see scores of big farmers the very picture of Mr. Punch's John Bull,
only not so round about the abdomen. But Connaught, Connaughtmen, and
Connaught ways certainly come nearest to an Englishman's traditional
conception of Ireland and its inhabitants; the stage Irishman is based
upon Connaught characteristics. In West Mayo people do say "shtruck"
(or in moments of emotion "shhtrruck"); and you can see still in
places the traditional costumes. Shawled heads and bare feet are (thank
goodness) to be met with all along the Atlantic seaboard; but the red
petticoat (home-dyed with madder, though alas! aniline dyes are fast
replacing the costlier and more beautiful crimson) is characteristic of
Galway and Mayo; and in remote recesses of Joyce country and Connemara
old and lovely fashions of braiding the hair and training ringlets to
stray over the forehead still hold their own. In Connemara and on Aran,
the tall lad of thirteen may still, though rarely, be seen in the
long-petticoated shirt (his only garment) of red or blue flannel; but
this is only a relic of sheer poverty. The men's clothes, however, keep
to antique and excellent fashions: throughout Galway, east of the
Corrib, almost everyone wears the cut-away skirted coat of dark heavy
frieze, and for the most part its wearers hold to the custom of
clean-shaven face with a narrow strip of close-cropped whisker past the
cheekbones. In Connemara the "bawneen" or sleeved waistcoat of whitish
flannel is general and very becoming to its wearers, among whom are to
be found the handsomest men in Ireland. Kerry women, who in certain
parts really have the "black-blue Irish hair and Irish eyes", may
perhaps hold their own even with the girls of Connaught; but for
fine-looking men I would back Galway against any county in the British
Isles.
There is much talk of a Spanish strain on this coast, and undoubtedly
commerce was constant between Galway Bay and the Iberian peninsula: but
the truth is that you have in western Ireland, as in western Spain,
survivals of a race which the red-haired people pushed off the good
lands towards the limit of the sea. On the Claddagh at Galway I have
seen a man at work in his cottage mending a net, who might have posed
for the model of a Basque peasant; and the olive-skinned fisher folk
about the great mackerel-curing station at Cleggan (near Clifden) are
simply variants of a type that repeats itself along the coasts of
Spain.
The people have changed very little in themselves since Lever wrote of
them: where food has always been too scarce, as at the extremity of the
Mullet peninsula curving about Blacksod Bay, famine and famine fever
have weakened the stock terribly, and in such places you can see that
looped and windowed raggedness and that squalor of hovels which go to
make up the Englishman's conception of the sister island. But you can
see also in markets in north Mayo many a handsome old man, springy and
active even in his extreme age, who wears the blue tail coat, with its
complement of brass buttons, which perhaps his father handed down to
him--and a fine figure he makes in it, especially if he still keeps to
the tight knee breeches and buckled shoes which were universal in his
boyhood.
Here and there, too, the ancient beaver hat with its long nap still
lingers: such things must be almost indestructible. A few years ago the
beautiful ruin of Ross Errilly Abbey near Headford was guarded by an
old peasant in this headgear; corduroy breeches and gaiters completed
the picture. But on the whole, Connaught--more's the pity--is
trouser-wearing like the rest of Europe: yet for all that the
Connaught-man remains distinctive.
Smooth-tongued you will find them: supple you may think them: but the
fire which kindles in Connaught is no flicker. Michael Davitt was born
in a Mayo peasant's cabin, his earliest memory the eviction which drove
him and his adrift on the world. He died in early middle age, yet
before he died, what he himself called the Fall of Feudalism was
accomplished: he himself, more than any other man, had destroyed the
old order under which such eviction was the universal terror hanging
over every peasant's head. Lord MacDonnell of Swinford was a poor man's
son in Connaught, his parents hardly rich enough to equip him for the
priesthood. He got an even cheaper education at the Queen's College in
Galway, won his place in the Indian Civil Service, and there proved
himself a governor as imperious and as capable and as beneficent as
India had known since the Lawrences. It is a poor province, but it
breeds notable men. I sat at dinner not long ago with three who had
been at school together in the west, poor lads all of them. One had
become bishop of his diocese; one was the best-known journalist in
England and no mean force in politics; the third, perhaps, the greatest
orator in America, something of a party to himself--but beyond all
doubt a power.
[Illustration: LOWLANDS, BALLINLOUGH, ROSCOMMON]
It is perhaps well to remember such facts in visiting a country where
poverty stares you in the face, where, at least in certain parts, it
has become a disease. Courtesy in the poor is apt to seem obsequious;
yet courtesy is of all things most native to Connaught, and it is
finest shown where the folk have acquired some stable security. I
fished one afternoon with an old man in a lake in the mountains behind
Leenane, a poor man but evidently not needy; he and his wife pressed on
us the best they had to give, and because our fishing had been
unsuccessful, wanted to refuse all payment. What we paid was little
enough for those hours of easy paddling in the sunshine amid noble
hills, and for the pleasure of that old boatman's wise, shrewd, and
witty company.
That lake--Lough na Fooey--lies midway, beautiful itself but
unutterably wild, between the two most beautiful centres in Connaught:
between Killary Bay and the upper end of Lough Corrib. With Lough na
Fooey for centre, a radius of twenty miles would take in all or almost
all the scenic beauty of County Galway--and a good deal of what is
finest in Mayo. North of that again is fine scenery about Westport:
then comes the superb cliff-front of Achill: then after a long
interval, you come again to Sligo with yet another noble grouping of
mountain, lake, river, and sea.
In the other two of Connaught's five counties--Roscommon and
Leitrim--there is very little to tempt the tourist; though a great deal
of interest for the student in Irish history, whether of to-day or the
remotest past. Croghan, Cruachan, was the seat of Connaught's kingdom
when Emain Macha at Armagh made a fortress for the Red Branch chivalry.
It was from Cruachan that Maeve and her army set out to win the Brown
Bull of Cooley to enrich the Connaught herds; and to-day no part of
Ireland has greater store of fine cattle, fine sheep, and fine horses
than Roscommon's fertile plains. Nor is there anywhere better to see
that work of resettling on the good land (left for decades in mere
prairie) those people whose fathers were huddled too thick on the bogs
and moors where grass would not grow. Roscommon contributes more than
its share--though five counties take a part--to what is still the great
event of the year in Connaught, the fair of Ballinasloe, lasting
through the first week in October. To that wonderful muster comes the
pick of all the sheep and cattle, and above all, of the horses from
western and central Ireland. The sheep fair, held in Lord Clancarty's
demesne, covers a huge space of the park--Galway, Roscommon, and
Tipperary each having its allotted quarter: but unless you rise early,
all you will see is trampled ground, over which hangs the greasy smell
of wool, and only some few scores of the twenty thousand animals that
were gathered there, by pen and pen, in the grey dawn, bleating and
huddling together. But any day and all day in the week, on the broad
fair green outside the town you may see the best of Ireland's horses
being galloped and trotted and shown off and examined--for the benefit
of buyers from over all Europe. You may hear German, Italian, French,
Spanish, all, or any of them spoken on that astonishing mart; and you
may observe the likeness in diversity which stamps itself upon horsey
men, whatever their nationality.
Except on a fair day, Ballinasloe has no special interest or beauty,
but five miles west of it lies the field of Aughrim, where was fought
the greatest though not the most decisive battle of the Williamite
wars. It is easy to trace the lie of the fight, along the range of
hillocks by Aughrim where St. Ruth, James's general, took up position,
facing the bog which divided him from Urrachree, to which Ginkel had
moved out from Ballinasloe. Till quite lately a thorn-tree marked the
spot where St. Ruth lay, struck down by a cannon shot as he headed what
should have been the decisive charge. One can guess, too, at the
position behind the ridges, where the Frenchman's jealousy kept
Ireland's own leader, Sarsfield, out of action with the reserves,
chafing for action, till St. Ruth's fall disorganized everything, and
the call for Sarsfield came too late. In the north of Ireland they
still perform a play representing this great encounter, and every
Orangeman is more anxious to be Sarsfield than any hero on the Orange
side.
But no one goes to Aughrim in search of beauty (in truth no one goes
there at all, which is a strange effect of indifference to history),
and on the main Connaught line you do not reach fine scenery till at
Oranmore an old castle rises by the inner shallow waters of Galway Bay,
here strewn with numberless little reefs and islets.--Salute the best
stretch of oyster-breeding water which these counties know: Galway Bay
oysters, from Red Bank on the Clare side, to Ardfry where the
Department of Agriculture controls a spawning ground a few miles from
Galway itself, are not only the best in flavour but the freest from any
suspicion of pollution of all oysters in the world, and in Galway at
the proper season they should always be demanded by every visitor while
it is still time: for the English market will almost certainly engross
them, when it becomes really aware of their existence. Ten years ago as
you travelled in summer round the coast of Galway or Mayo, the hotels
were not splendid, their menu was rudimentary, but always there was a
dish of lobsters big and little piled up in careless profusion; you ate
one or two or three as the fancy took you. Now, you hardly buy a
lobster along that coast; a company has contracted for the whole take,
fishermen bring them in their curraghs to a depot where they are put
into anchored crates, until the steamer comes up to collect and direct
them into that vast maw which has its tentacles exploring the very
shores of Iceland and Russia for daily supply.
Still, when you get to Connemara or Mayo, you will not grudge these
folk the access to a market which makes lobster fishing almost the most
profitable of their industries. Along Galway Bay you look out over one
of the most beautiful scenes in Ireland, and the most barren. Across,
opposite you, is the mountainous shore of Clare, where, in the
limestone district called Burren, Ireton (down there on some errand of
mercy) reported that there was not water enough to drown a man, soil
enough to bury him, nor wood enough to hang him. Off the mouth of the
bay, making a natural breakwater for its superb natural harbour, lie
the three islands of Aran which are, like Burren, built up of flat
limestone slabs--in whose crevices there grows herbage, sweet and
nourishing for cattle; but how human beings, let alone cows, travel
those rocks without breaking a leg a week in the fissures passes all
comprehension.
Rocky though the soil, these waters are not barren, and Aran lives by
its nets, and lives much better than it did in the old days before the
Congested Districts Board set up the folk with strong boats and good
gear, and established a steamer to bring them in touch with the market.
Yet Synge's wonderful and terrible little drama, _Riders to the Sea_,
tells the true story of their life, shows how encompassed it is at any
moment by the deadliest peril; for the waves on that western coast have
been seen to break where there was nearly a hundred feet in depth of
water, so vast, so tremendous are the movements of storm where the
Atlantic swings in its full force upon the first bulwark it meets--a
bulwark planted in the deep, and dreadfully sudden therefore in its
check to the whole power of ocean.
[Illustration: MWEELREA AND THE KILLARY, FROM TULLY STRAND, RENVYLE]
That is what gives a special character to all the scenery of western
Ireland. It is not only sea you are looking at, it is ocean: ocean in
its full depth within a few miles of the shore, and the blueness of
deep water is a very different thing from the blue of the Irish Channel
or the English, to say nothing of the yellowish waters of the North
Sea. And the wash of waves there, even on a calm day, has in it a slow,
heavy rhythm, a sense of power which rocks and soothes the senses. But
to face that sea on that coast, not only rockbound but flanked with a
line of reefs and islands, in hooker or pookaun or canvas-covered
curragh, is an enterprise that might well dismay. Yet, oddly enough,
these men whose daily life is one long risk of drowning, who endanger
themselves times innumerable in the mere act of entering or leaving a
curragh when a sea runs, are more frightened than women by the unknown
adventure of sailing in a strong vessel clear away to sea, and when
they first lose sight of land and see only water round them, they will
lie down and give themselves over for lost.
All the north shore of Galway Bay is long, low, and indented with a
hundred creeks and bays. It is the paradise of fishermen, full of small
lakes connected by little rivers up which the white trout run as
nowhere else, and on a good day you may kill three or four dozen--but
such fishings are of course not for the chance comer. The most famous
and beautiful of these lake and river systems is that of Ballynahinch,
once the home of the Martins--types of all that was kindest, oddest,
wildest, and most feudal in the old feudal days. Miss Edgeworth came
there on a journey in the early days of last century, while roads as
yet were little more than a name, and the illness of a travelling
companion detained her party as guests for a stay that ran into weeks:
lucky chance, to which we owe a picture, such as she only could sketch,
of that primitive family hospitality, its table loaded with delicacies
of the wilds, salmon, venison, oysters, and the rest, presided over by
a host used to administer patriarchal justice among the clansmen,
sometimes by form of law, sometimes by the strong fist. The hostess was
a lady of the old school; but strangest and most picturesque of all,
was their one child, a daughter, the lovely "Princess of Connemara",
creature of the mountains no less than any Flora MacIvor with her train
of ragged gillies--yet instructed not only in the modern tongues but
also in the ancient classics. She read the Greek poets, back there
among her ragged mountain peaks: she spoke fluently a French which
savoured oddly of the camp, for her teacher was a waif from Napoleon's
armies, and this young chieftainess had the French Revolution in her
heart.--God be with the old days, now passed clean out of sight, if not
out of mind. When the Martin estate went down in the ruin that involved
so many of the landed gentry sixty years ago, it at least perished
nobly; for the Martin of that day beggared himself in the effort to
feed the population that was starving by thousands in the great famine.
Old folk remember still the _droch-aimsir_, the bad times, all over
Ireland: yet in the nakedness of Connemara I have not heard any such
awful tales as come down by word of mouth and written record relating
to places far less out of reach of help.
The Martins are gone from Ballynahinch and a newcomer has their home,
and for the moment something of their lordship, though here the
Congested Districts Board is at last seriously at work, striving to
settle the people not only on holdings of their own, but on holdings
which may support them. But the beauty of that region is unchanged: the
mountain group which we call the Twelve Pins rises in peaks from out of
moor and lake and river: the marble which it holds glistens in rain and
sun: and whether you see it from the south by the shore of Galway Bay,
from Camus water near Rosmuck, or beside the broader water of
Kilkerrin, or from the west where Ballinakill Bay runs up in creeks and
windings towards the pretty village of Letterfrack,--wherever you take
your view point, no mountain group in all Ireland can quite compare
with it for grace and for perfection of line.
At Recess, near Ballynahinch, where is the railway hotel, one is too
close under the heights, too shut in; to see the Connemara Mountains
rightly, they should be seen from the shore of the sea. Clifden, where
the railway has its terminus, is a little too far off; and upon the
whole my choice would be for Letterfrack (_Leitir-bhreac_, the speckled
meadow) on the shore of Ballinakill, where a delightful river has its
outfall. Yet perhaps one who cared less for the running water and its
chance of fish would like that country best of all from Renvyle, where
an old country house is kept open as a hotel--facing the Atlantic, and
commanding full view not of the Twelve Pins only but of the mountains
which lie about Killary harbour and beyond.
Killary is the deep narrow cleft which strikes far in past the base of
Mweelrea, the highest mountain in all Connaught, and runs up to where
the flank of the Devil's Mother divides the village of Leenane from the
outflow of the Erriff river, plunging over the fall at Aasleigh. I
recite a litany of names well known to every angler in the west--and to
more than anglers, for the hotel at Leenane is a halting place on the
coachroad which follows the coast from Clifden to Westport; and no sea
lough in all Ireland is more beautiful than Killary on its own day.
Leenane is on the boundary of the two counties, Galway and Mayo (which
latter name is properly pronounced with the accent on the _o_). From
the hamlet a steep road runs back climbing the skirts of the Devil's
Mother--where eagles build--and then plunges down the pass which leads
to Maam at the upper end of Lough Corrib, and so to the isthmus of
Cong, under which water makes a subterranean pathway for the eels of
Lough Mask into Corrib, whence they go by the weir at Galway (where eel
traps take toll of them) to their spawning grounds in the deepest sea.
This road is one of the boundaries about the region of the Twelve Pins,
through which wild sanctuary no made track for wheels has been driven.
You have the Pins (or "Bens" rather) on the south as you go from
Leenane to Maam; on the west as you go from Maam to Maam Cross; on the
north from Maam Cross to Recess, and on the east as you take the
beautiful road from Recess by Lough Inagh, and so through the defile at
Kylemore, where the great house stands with long terrace facing on to
the exquisite lower lake, approached by a roadway along which are
mile-long hedges of crimson fuchsia. Kylemore means the Big Wood, and
the name is natural enough, for here only in Connemara is there any
considerable growth of trees; the country is too bare and wild for
them. At Carna, on the shore of Galway Bay, can be seen the lamentable
remains of an experimental plantation, replaced now by a new and much
more successful planting of the New Zealand flax, which with its
yucca-like fronds grows very freely on the west, and gives some hope of
a new industry.
But beyond Maam, on the shores of Corrib, is wooding and to spare; none
denser, more undisturbed. About Cong are the famous woodcock covers
where Lord Ardilaun's guests have killed five hundred birds in a day.
Almost every island on the lake (and there is said to be an island for
every day in the year) is set thick with leafage, and there are those
who claim that Corrib where it broadens out between Cong and Oughterard
is a rival to Killarney. I do not seek to decide such a contention; but
the place is far richer in antiquarian interest than Killarney, and
infinitely less tourist-ridden.
[Illustration: A FISHERMAN'S HOME UNDER DIAMOND MOUNTAIN, BALLYNAKILL
BAY]
It is no business of mine here to write about hotels; but still one
wishes to show what is practicable for those who may care to explore
this great line of western lakes. By far the easiest way to go is by
the little steamer from Galway to Cong--a run of some thirty miles,
done very leisurely. There is a comfortable inn at Cong: a larger one
three or four miles off at Clonbur; at Ballinrobe, I suppose, quarters
can be had, and certainly in Tourmakeady on the west shore of Mask. If,
however, you have followed the line from Recess to Letterfrack, and so
to Leenane, then there is an admirable possibility for varying the
journey. Take the road from Leenane to Maam. Halfway down it, near
Kilmilkin, another road turns off steeply to the left so that you still
contrive to skirt the Devil's Mother; and after a mile or two through
bog, it goes corkscrewing down a woeful hill, and you are in the basin
of Lough na Fooey, high among the hills of Joyce Country. Beyond the
lake the road climbs again to emerge from that basin, and you pelt away
down the long slope of Maamtrasna, the valley at the head of upper
Lough Mask. Savage memories dwell there; memories of killings between
peasants in the land war of the 'eighties, memories of high diplomatic
slaughter when the heir to the earldom of Ulster was done away with in
Illaun an Iarla, a little island which your driver will show you. The
Stauntons who carried out that killing kept a bad name from it through
centuries of Irish tradition.
Striking in, then, behind Kilbreedy Mountain, which sunders upper Lough
Mask from the main water, you soon come out on the shore of the lake,
and I wish you the luck to see two as pretty girls as met me just where
the counties join at the little Owenbrin river. A few miles of
tolerable road will bring you to the prosperous-looking little village
of Tourmakeady, where is a hotel. Here is fishing to be had for pike
and for big trout, and here much that is pleasant and profitable can be
studied. At the Franciscan monastery, a civil-spoken stranger will
always find a welcome, and, at least while Brother Leo is still living,
one of the best of talkers to instruct him in the history of all that
countryside. These monks have largely helped on the work of the
Congested Districts Board in teaching improved methods of farming, and
the like: they have been what monastic centres were often in old days.
Close by is another factor in the modern development of Ireland, the
Connaught college for study of the Irish language, here where it is
living on the lips of young and old. In summer you shall find from
eighty to a hundred students working there, with classes held largely
in the open air: but all centring about a farmhouse converted to these
unforeseen uses. Most of the students will be school teachers, desirous
to advance themselves in a subject for which there is a swiftly growing
demand; but you will almost to a certainty find a sprinkling there who
have come, it may be, from France, from Hungary, from the Western
States of America, from heaven knows where, to pursue this
long-neglected but now eagerly followed branch of learning. And you
may hear, and perhaps see, how with the study pleasant festivities
interweave themselves of an evening, dances, jigs, reels, hornpipes,
and the rest--or simply the _céilidhe_, a gathering for talk and
story-telling round the fire.
From Tourmakeady, I would have you proceed by boat, crossing the lake
to Ballinrobe, and seeing on your way _Caisleán na Caillidhe_, Hag's
Castle, a very early example of the fortifications which Irish chiefs
began to build when they had learnt from the Normans how much stronger
were stone walls than earthen ramparts. Yet here the stone wall is on
the model of an earthen dun, built circular, and of no great height--an
enclosure for defence rather than a dwelling place--doubly defended
too, for it stands on an island near to the Ballinrobe shore.
As you drive from Ballinrobe to Cong, you shall see on your left a huge
cairn of stones crowning a low height. This is an outlying monument of
that famous battle of Moytura, fought, it is said, between the
legendary Tuatha de Danann, warrior demigods, against those older
inhabitants of Ireland, Firbolgs, men of the leathern wallet. Who
fought that fight, when they fought it, is obscure, but fought it was,
and the cairns rise thick over the battlefield, a couple of miles
behind Cong. All this lore was studied out and set down by the notable
father of a still more celebrated son. Oscar Wilde must have spent no
small part of his boyhood at Moytura House where his father, Sir
William Wilde, passed what holidays a great surgeon could secure, and
where he wrote his _Antiquities of Lough Corrib_.
There is another legendary battlefield in Sligo called the northern
Moytura, which tradition identifies with the site of a second and final
battle in which the De Danann defeated the men of the wallet, and it is
marked by the same profusion of cairns and stone circles--which, it
must be allowed, can be constructed with less labour in the west of
Ireland than elsewhere, because the whole surface of the ground is
covered with the material for them. Yet assuredly some great event must
be marked by monuments so laborious: though I find their associations a
trifle too shadowy for interest.
The great cairn on the road to Ballinrobe is said to be that of King
Eochy, the Firbolg leader, who was slain on the last day of the fight.
But near it stands a modern landmark of undisputable authenticity.
Lough Mask House was in the early 'eighties the residence of Captain
Boycott, against whom was first organized the "boycott" which proved to
be the peasantry's most effective weapon in the revolution which has
been in progress for the past thirty years. All this countryside is
peaceable enough nowadays, but there was wild work there before
compulsory rent fixing, followed by voluntary purchase, began to settle
the land war.
In Cong itself is a wealth of things to be seen: first of all, the
demesne, planted by one of the Guinness family, who showed his fine
understanding of trees in the disposal of that varied wooding: and
leave can be had also to visit the gardens whose owner, Lady Ardilaun,
is famous among Irish lovers of flowers. But apart from this, there is
the strange river which past Cong flows crystal clear over a limestone
bed, and about half a mile off issues from its underground journey out
of Lough Mask in a strange cavern called the Pigeon Hole. Near by is
costly and deplorable evidence of the queer tendency to fissure in this
limestone formation: for sometime in the last century a canal was dug
laboriously to connect Mask and Corrib, and so open traffic by boat and
barge to Tourmakeady and Ballinrobe from the sea. But when the long
digging and hewing was finished, they let the water in, and it promptly
leaked away through a hundred clefts and crannies--making, no doubt,
wonderful and mysterious noises. All through East Galway (for west of
Corrib the stone is mostly granite) there are rivers that appear and
disappear in this strange fashion, running now overground, now under;
and where the stream sinks out of sight can often be heard queer
rhythmic throbbings and beatings, in which the sound of a fairy mill is
easily detected; and about these popular imagination quickly builds
legends, telling how in old days corn would be laid there and in the
morning its owner would come back to find it ready ground, till at last
some covetous man failed to leave the unseen miller his due portion,
and so no more corn was miraculously ground for deceitful mortals.
These are the marvels of nature. But by the river of Cong, which
divides Mayo from Galway, stands one of the most beautiful ruins in the
west--all that is left of what was once St. Fechin's monastery. But St.
Fechin belongs to the old days of the seventh century, long before any
builder in these islands had the skill to construct that graceful
cloister. The abbey which we know is pre-Norman, an Augustinian
foundation, and it has a special interest, for to its repose came Rory
O'Connor, last of the native kings to claim sovereignty over all
Ireland. Already he had been sorely driven and harried by the Norman
invaders, before he retired here in 1183 to spend yet fifteen years
more of his life. It was doubtless he who made it into the gem of the
western dioceses; and in all the changes and chances of the centuries
there still was an abbot of Cong till a date hardly outside living
memory. In Cong, too, was treasured--or rather was heedlessly kept--the
most famous of all the jewels which descend from the ancient
craftsmanship of Ireland. The cross of Cong, a reliquary, made to be
borne in procession, enclosing a fragment of the true cross, stands two
feet and a half in height and is covered with gold tracery of the most
incredible complexity and fineness. What the artist could do with his
fine pointed brush in the Book of Kells, this artificer could almost
rival in his twisting of the delicate wire. The thing is priceless and
was bought (in a transaction of doubtful morality) for the Royal Irish
Academy through Wilde's agency. But in truth the National Museum in
Kildare Street where it reposes is the proper place for it: though one
cannot but feel sympathy for the zealous young priest who made his way
from Cong to Dublin, boldly smashed the case and rushed into the street
with the reliquary, prepared at all hazards to bring it back to the
home which it had known for seven centuries.
[Illustration: ON THE OWENBRIN RIVER, LOUGH MASK]
A stone now set up in the street at Cong commemorates in a Gaelic
inscription two Abbots of Cong, Nicol and Gillibard O'Duffy, and I hope
that one of them may be the O'Duffy to whose order the cross was
made--not in Cong, but in the other abbey of Roscommon, by the cunning
craftsman whose name is inscribed on its arms: MAELISU MACBRADDAIN
O-H-ECHAN.
An inscription of even greater interest can be seen in a setting of
the most fascinating beauty. Sail or row across from Cong (you can
fish as you go, and I caught a trout seventeen pounds weight on my
first venture in that water--why should not you be as lucky?) to
Inchagoill Island, and you will see one of the oldest churches in
Ireland, called _Teampul Phadraig_--Patrick's Church. Its walls are of
stone, very roughly put together; its doorway of the oldest type--two
sides sloping towards the top, which is covered by a huge lintel slab.
All this can be matched elsewhere, but the special interest is a stone
graven in the oldest Celtic characters with these letters: LIE
LUGNEEDON MACC LMENVEH: that is, The slab of Lugneedon, son of
Lemenueh. Now Lugneedon was Patrick's nephew and his pilot; and this
inscription may be contemporary--or may have been erected less early
than the sixth century, but yet so early that the tradition was still
alive of him who had died there. For the island's full name is _Inis
an Ghoill Chraoibthigh_, the island of the Devout Stranger, and
certainly keeps a memory of someone who, coming from far away,
identified himself with it either by his life or by his death.
It is set in the most beautiful portion of the lake, midway from Cong
to Oughterard, and you can see thence Benlevi steep over the isthmus of
Cong, and Leckavrea with its grey, slaty cliff frowning over the upper
end of Corrib between Oughterard and Maam.
In this sheet of water, which (by a sudden winding between cliffy
wooded sides where the lake narrows at Doon) is so shut off as to seem
a lake by itself, stands not far from the western end, _Caislean na
Circe_, Hen's Castle. And popular imagination, stimulated by the
name, has invented the story of a miraculous hen which was guaranteed
to lay enough eggs to keep the garrison alive; but they tired of eggs,
killed the bird, and so came by disaster. The truth, however, I believe
to be that this castle, which was built for Rory O'Connor by one of the
great De Burgos who made their way to Connaught, fell later into the de
Burgos' (or Burkes') possession; and the Hen who gave her name to it
was Grace O'Malley, Granuaile; for she proved herself the better bird
when her second husband, the Burke who then owned it, was in danger of
being forced to submit, till the doughty warrioress relieved him.
All these things you can see from Cong by easy pleasant excursions, to
be combined if you so choose with fishing in waters where trout if
caught are worth the catching; and when you have had your fill of Cong,
the steamer will take you to Galway, down that long narrow lake with
rick-shaped Benlevi steep above Cong and Leckavrea making a cliff on
the southwest. To the east all is flat plain, the long level tract of
limestone which stretches out to the Shannon, and which on this side of
Tuam is for the most part stone and nothing else. Only one height rises
on that hand--your left as you travel to Galway; it is the conical hill
of Knockmagh, the greatest mount of fairies in all Ireland; crowned
with a cairn, of course--Carn Ceasair--under which sleeps, they say,
Ceasair, chieftainess of the first invasion that came to Ireland, just
forty days before the Flood. There are lesser cairns on its sides, in
which recent exploration has discovered funeral cists, flag covered,
holding in them bones and even an urn of "bodkin-pencilled" clay.
Anyone who cares to see what is not in the common run of tourist
visitation should make his way from Cong to Tuam, by Headford, where is
the splendid ruin of Ross Errilly, a famous monastery of the
Franciscans, standing almost intact, though unroofed, and stripped of
its ornamentation by the Cromwellian soldiers. The friars clung to this
abode till 1753, though six several times expelled, returning under the
protection of Lord Clanricarde; since in those days Clanricarde, head
of the Burkes in Connaught, was a name of shelter for the native Irish,
among whom his de Burgo stock had been so long and so fully
naturalized. The famous rallying song of 1848, "The West Awake", tells
how "Glory guards Clanricarde's grave", and in truth, with scarcely an
exception, not a Clanricarde of them all but was loved by the people.
And if the name that was once so kindly, bears a very different sound
to-day, Connaught has its own way of accounting for the change.
It is worth climbing Knockmagh to see across that spreading plain,
crossed and chequered with the stone walls which endear Galway to all
who like big jumping in the foxhunt: for the mountains of Connemara
show westward but Croaghpatrick and Nephin away north. Under Knockmagh
beside the road is the church of Donagh Patrick, marking the western
point of St. Patrick's missionary journey here. But his favourite
disciple Benen, or Benignus, had a monastery near Tuam at Kilbannon,
where stands the stump of a round tower, and pushed his journeyings
even to Aran where monuments bear his name.
Tuam itself is well worth a visit for things old and things new--or
shall I say the survival of the remote and the recent past. Its long
street of thatched houses, its marketplace crowded with Irish-speaking
men and women all in characteristic western dress, make it more
typically Irish than any town in Connaught except only Galway--and
Galway is a thing apart. The modern cathedral, too, is of interest for
the sake of sculptured heads wrought by a local craftsman who was a
kind of Cruickshank in stone--preserving in his craft a glorious
tradition of the place. For the great sculptured arch which can be seen
in the ancient cathedral, restored more than a quarter of a century ago
for Protestant worship, is the finest example of native Irish
decorative architecture, before Continental influences came in. It is
the Romanesque half-circle, with six concentric orders of arches
included in the great span. The red sandstone of which it is wrought
lent itself freely to carving, and the unknown and unnamed workers
bestowed a wealth of detail upon it, blending, after the Celtic
fashion, shapes of man, bird, and beast, into the interlaced scroll of
the design.
The rest of the building must have been worthy of this glorious centre:
but, in years of desolation, plunder was made of carved stones for
common building work, and the tall cross which stands now, imperfectly
put together, in the marketplace, was rescued by sections from various
houses and buildings. Eight stones went to complete it and only five
are there: it is a pity that their places are not filled in with
uncarved slabs, for the proportion of the monument is destroyed.
If you drive or motor from Tuam to Galway it is easy to visit another
famous ruin, the Abbey Knockmoy erected for the Cistercians by Cathal
O'Conor of the Red Hand, as a thankoffering for his victory over the
first Norman party of invaders whom, with their leader, Almeric St.
Laurence, he destroyed near the abbey's site. There is a trace of
frescoes discernible on the chancel walls; and it is easy enough to see
how the original and most beautiful twelfth-century building was, so to
say, cut down and curtailed for a reduced community of monks who may
have been there in some interval between persecution and persecution.
[Illustration: CASTLE KIRKE AND UPPER LOUGH CORRIB]
In the graveyard here you can see what is common in all Connaught up to
the present day--tombstones carved with the insignia of the dead man's
trade, the carpenter's plane and saw, the smith's hammer, and so forth.
Apart from this the road is over flat land, little raised above the
level of Lough Corrib, till you near Galway, when it rises over low
hills of limestone rock, in springtime blue with gentian, at all times
singular enough with their flooring of stone. At the last rise you
reach a view point, looking west from which the city comes suddenly
into sight with its bay beyond, and beyond the bay the hills of Burren.
It tells something of what Galway was that the name of this spot is
_Bois le h-eadan_, "Hand to Brow", for here it was supposed that
you would stop and shade your eyes to consider the glory that lay
before you.
Little enough glory is there to-day; but the city keeps a
picturesqueness at this distance, couching there at the outflow of the
vast sheet of water which is comprised in Corrib and Mask; and that
blue expanse of bay reaching up into the level land--brown rather than
green, since bog and stone and scrub cover most of it--has a beauty all
its own; and southward the eye follows with delight the open gap
between the hills of Burren by the western sea, and that other line,
Slieve Echtge, which divides the plain of Gort from the Shannon. Here
was the boundary and pass between Connaught and Munster, the country of
the O'Kellys, Hy Many; and no place in Ireland was so often fought
over. As you go south from Athenry to Ennis, the whole landscape is
studded with old castles and peel-towers, set for the most part in
pairs, every one watching his neighbour, like players lined up at
football.
Galway town, once you have entered it, is depressing beyond words, but
also more picturesque than any town in Ireland. A hundred years ago it
was the greatest port of the country, in its own way a rival to Bristol
and Liverpool. Those were the days of small towns, and Galway numbered
forty thousand people. To-day the population is barely fourteen
thousand--but it is not the drop in numbers that signifies most. Go
about the streets and you will find tall, solid buildings of black
stone built very high, for the town was walled and space was scarce in
it. Some of these were dwelling-houses, and over their doorways are the
great scutcheons carved in stone belonging to this or that one of the
thirteen "tribes"--Blakes, Lynches, Bodkins, Brownes, Skerrets,
Kirwans, Morrises, Ffrenches, Martins, and the rest--names which to-day
sound Irish of the Irish, yet which in truth belonged to English
settlers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries who established
here a flourishing merchant community. In those early days the great
trade was with Spain; for a glance at the map will show how short a run
it is from the west of Ireland to that other western outpost of
Europe--a run which can be made either way with the prevailing westerly
wind. "Spanish Parade" keeps its memorial of that traffic, but more
clearly is it preserved by a famous story. In the wall which surrounds
the old Church of St. Nicholas is a stone engraven with skull and
crossbones, and a recent inscription commemorating the austere virtue
of James Lynch Fitzstephen, Mayor of Galway in 1493. The Mayor was a
merchant in close commerce with Spain, and on one of his journeys he
brought back with him a young Spaniard, son of his host and friend. But
at home in Galway, quarrel broke out (it is said, over a lady) between
Lynch's own son and his guest, and the Galway man stabbed the Spaniard.
For his offence he was arraigned, and his father passed sentence of
death; but a compassionate horror seized the townspeople, and none
would execute the sentence. So, that justice might be done, the laws of
hospitality asserted--and perhaps, too, lest there should be a break in
the friendly relations with Spain--Lynch Fitzstephen hanged his son
with his own hand.
In the church, a fine building of the fourteenth century, are many
monuments of the "tribes"--but of more interest are the mansions: chief
of them the "Lynch House", standing in the main street and richly
decorated with stone mouldings. Nearer the port are huge buildings of
more recent date, grain-stores erected in the early eighteenth century
when a tremendous export trade to England ran from this port. All of
them, or all but all, mansions and stores alike, have fallen on evil
days, and you shall see the decorated scutcheon over the entrance to
some rookery of wretched tenements.
[Illustration: IN THE PASS OF DELPHI, KILLARY BAY]
The port is hardly less depressing. Admirable as a shelter in the days
of small vessels, it is unfit for these days when even coasting traffic
comes in ships of three thousand tons. It is true they have a dock
hollowed out of rock and holding eighteen foot of water; but the Board
of Works (a department of Dublin Castle) which executed the work at a
cost of forty thousand pounds omitted to notice that there was only
twelve foot of water at the entrance: and the accommodation is thought
as useful as a second storey with no stair to it. Nearly all the
shipping consists in fishing boats: many trawlers, but most numerous of
all, the little hookers worked by the fishermen who live across the
river in the very odd community called the Claddagh. These people till
recently had a "king" of their own (just as happens on the small
islands of the coast) and they lived their own life, and indeed still
live it, almost wholly distinct from the regular townsfolk. Their
thatched cottages scattered in a huddled group without streets or plan
of any kind make a curious feature of the place; but it is a curiosity
rather than a charm.
In the main street of the town lives a jeweller who manufactures still
the Claddagh ring which these folk and the Aran people use for marriage
or betrothal: joined hands surmounted by a crowned heart make an emblem
which needs no posy to expound it. You can get in Galway also another
local object which is worth having, the woman's strong cloak of red or
blue flannel with hood to shelter the head in the stormiest of weather.
Perhaps one of the most interesting sights in the place--at least to
the angler--is to be seen from the bridge which spans the main river
below the broad weir which holds up water for the sluices and mill
powers. Here is a long, swift shallow which in summer becomes crowded
with salmon to a degree almost incredible; the fish lie under you
there, some twenty feet from your eyes, their sides touching as the
dark backs sway in the water, so that at the first glimpse one seems to
look into a mass of weed. Anglers can be seen fishing there close
together, and many hundreds of fish are killed yearly from the bank. It
was here that one enthusiast achieved a fisherman's euthanasia, for he
dropped dead suddenly in the very act of playing a fish. The papers
gave long accounts of the sad event, recalling the dead man's
achievements and qualities as sportsman and citizen; then added a final
paragraph--
"Our readers will be glad to learn that the rod which Mr. ----
dropped was immediately taken up by our esteemed townsman Mr. ----
who found the fish still on, and after ten minutes' play, succeeded
in landing it--a fine clean-run salmon of fifteen pounds."
What more was needed for epitaph? The soul of "Mr. ----" had departed
under the most satisfactory auspices.