LISSOY AND CLONMACNOISE
SINCE we could not get to Athlone by water, we must needs get there by
rail; so, most regretfully, next morning, we bade good-bye to
Castleconnell and took train for Limerick. Half an hour later, we pulled
out of the Limerick terminus, circled about the town, crossed the
Shannon by a long, low bridge, and were in County Clare.
Ruins are more numerous here than almost anywhere else in Ireland, for
this western slope of the Shannon valley, so fertile and coveted, was
famous fighting-ground. There are one or two in sight all the time,
across the beautiful rolling meadows. Near Cratloe there are three,
their great square keeps looming above the trees, and looking out across
the wide Shannon estuary. A little farther on is the famous seat of the
Earls of Thomond, Bunratty Castle, a fine old fortress, with all the
approved mediaeval trimmings of moat, guard-room, banqueting-hall,
dungeons and torture-chamber, and I am sorry we did not get to visit it.
Indeed, there are many places in the neighbourhood worth a visit--but if
one is going to visit every Irish ruin, he will need ten years for the
task. Only it does cause a pang of the heart to pass any of them by.
We must have passed at least fifty by, that day; but I found that the
train stopped for a while at Ennis, the chief town of Clare, and I
hurried out to see what I could of it. It is certainly a picturesque
place, with narrow winding streets, and queer little courts, and houses
painted pink or washed with yellow ochre. I glanced in at the new
Catholic cathedral, whose most impressive feature is a rather good
picture of the ascension over the high altar; and then spent a few
minutes among the ruins of the Franciscan friary, a queer jumble of
buildings which I did not have time to untangle.
As usual, the two biggest buildings in the town are the jail and the
lunatic asylum, and I passed them both on my way back to the station.
Some of the lunatics were languidly hoeing a big potato patch that day,
with five or six guards looking on. I have never looked up the
statistics of lunacy in Ireland, but if all the asylums are full, the
rate must be very high.
About half a mile beyond Ennis, the train passes a most imposing ruin,
very close to the railway. It is the ruin of Clare Abbey, and is
dominated by a great square tower, which must be visible for many miles
around. There is still another ruin, that of Killone Abbey, only a few
miles away, and for a connoisseur in ruins, Ennis would be an excellent
place to spend a few days.
From Ennis, we turned almost due northward toward Athenry, and the
landscape became the rockiest I have ever seen. Every little field was
surrounded by a high stone wall, and as these walls did not begin to
exhaust the supply, there were great heaps of rocks in every available
corner--every one of them dug from the shallow soil with almost
incredible labour. The fact that any one would try to reclaim such land
speaks volumes for the hard necessities of the people who settled here.
I don't suppose they enjoyed the labour, but they had no choice--at
least, their only choice was to wrest a living from these rocky fields
or starve. No doubt many of them did starve, but the rest kept labouring
on, with insect-like industry, reclaiming this corner and that, adding
to the soil of their fields inch by inch.
There is an old saying that in this district, and in others like it in
Connaught, the first three crops are stones, and I can well believe it.
The green appearance of these hillsides is a delusion and a snare, for
it is nothing but a skin of turf over the rocks, and these rocks must be
dug away to the depth of two feet, sometimes, before the soil is
reached. In any other part of the world, a man who would attempt to
convert such a hillside into an arable field would be thought insane;
here, in the west of Ireland, it is the usual thing. Most tragic of all,
after it was fit for tillage, it did not belong to the man whose labour
had made it so, but to his English landlord, who promptly proceeded to
raise the rent!
We ran out of this rocky land, at last, and crossed a vast bog, scarred
with long, black, water-filled ditches, from which the turf had been
taken. There were a few people here and there cutting it, but a woman
who had got into the compartment with us said that the continued wet
weather had made the work very difficult and dangerous. All the people
hereabouts, she added, lived by the turf cutting, at which they could
earn, perhaps, ten-pence a day; but in bad seasons they were soon close
to starvation. I remarked that, with such wages, they must be close to
it all the time, and she smiled sadly and said that that was true.
Only, of course, in the bogs the children can work, as well as the men
and women, and that helps. Indeed, we saw them many times--little boys
and girls who should have been at school or running free, gaining health
and strength for the hard years to come, tugging at the heavy,
water-soaked blocks of peat, and laying them out in the sun to dry. It
takes a month of sun to dry the peat; in wet weather it won't dry at
all, and so isn't salable. Truly, the lives of the poor Irish hang on
slender threads!
There are ruins of castles and monasteries and raths and cashels all
through this region, and a lot of them cluster about the dirty little
town of Athenry, which can boast a castle, two monasteries, city walls
and an old gate. Such richness was not to be passed by, and we left the
train, checked our luggage at the parcel office, fought off a jarvey who
was determined to drive us to the ruins which we could see quite plainly
just across the track, crossed the road by the overhead bridge, and came
out in the streets of the village.
Athenry is typically Irish, with streets running every way, houses built
any way, and their inhabitants leaning over the half-doors, or braced
against the walls at the street corners, or going slowly about such
business as they have. Life has stood still here for at least a century;
and yet Athenry was once a royal town--"The Ford of the Kings" its name
signifies--and a royal court was held here in the great castle, and a
beautiful monastery was built near by at the express wish of St.
Dominick himself, and it became a famous place of learning, to which
scholars flocked from all over Europe. Alas and alack!
Vanished, those high conceits! Desolate and forlorn,
We hunger against hope for that lost heritage.
For the red tide of war swept over Athenry more than once, and left it
but smoking ruins. Eleven thousand Connaughtmen lay piled about the
walls one summer day in 1316, all that was left of the army that tried
to make Edward Bruce king of Ireland; two centuries later, when the
Earls of Clanricarde swept Connaught with fire and sword, Athenry fell
before them, and was left in ashes; and when it struggled to its feet
again, it was only to fall before the destroying hand of Red Hugh
O'Donnell, who left scarcely one stone upon another, and from that blow
it never rallied.
One of the old gates still survives, well preserved in spite of war and
weather, and near it is a quaint old market cross, with the Virgin and
Child on one side and Christ on the other. All that is left of the
thirteenth century castle is the gabled keep, looming high on a rock
just back of the town, and some fragments of the battlemented curtains.
All the floors have fallen in, and its four massive walls are open to
the heavens. Red Hugh, when he destroyed it, did his work well!
The ruins of the abbey nestle in the shadow of the rock on which the
castle stands, and we made our way down to them, along disordered
streets swarming with geese, ducks, dogs, chickens and children, only to
find the way closed by an iron gate, securely padlocked. But a passer-by
told us that the village blacksmith had the key, and indicated vaguely
the way to his shop, which we found after some circuitous wanderings.
The smith was a gnarled little man, quite the reverse of Longfellow's,
and as soon as we had made our errand known, he snatched down the keys
and hastened to lead the way to the ruins, leaving his work without
pausing to remove his apron, and without a backward glance at his
helper, who stood open-mouthed by the forge.
[Illustration: THE CHOIR OF THE ABBEY AT ATHENRY]
[Illustration: A COTTAGE AT ATHENRY]
There were three gates to unlock before we reached the ruins, and then
the blacksmith hurried back to his work, leaving his daughter to keep an
eye on us. The church is all that is left of the monastery, for the
domestic buildings, and even the cloisters have been swept entirely away
by the rude hand of time, and the far ruder ones of the villagers who
needed stone for their houses. The church itself has suffered more than
most, for not only is the roof gone, but the tower and one transept and
most of the window-tracery, and the whole interior has been swept by a
savage storm, the tombs hacked and hewed, and the carved decorations
knocked to fragments. Doubtless if we had questioned the girl who stood
staring at us, she would have said that "Crummell did it," and in this
case, history would bear her out, for the Puritan soldiery _did_ do a
lot of damage here. They and the sans-culottes suffered from the same
mania--a sort of vertigo of destructiveness before memorials of kings or
Catholics!
But they couldn't destroy everything, and what is left in this old
church is well worth seeing, for there are some graceful pointed
windows, and six narrow lancets in a lovely row along the north wall of
the choir, and a fine arcade in the north transept, and many details
of decoration beautiful in spite of mutilation. The place is crowded
with tombs, for this was the burial place of the Dalys and the Lynchs
and the De Burgos, and is still in use as such. The tomb of the "noble
family of De Burgh" is in one corner, and there are many mural tablets,
with inscriptions in French and Latin and Gaelic, as well as English. In
fact one of them announces in French and Latin and English, presumably
so that every one except the Irish might read, that "here is the antient
Sepulchre of the Sept of the Walls of Droghty late demolished by the
Cromellians."
We went back through the town, at last, and while I was manoeuvring
for the picture opposite page 270, Betty got into talk with a girl who
was leaning over a half-door, and found, marvellous to relate, that she
had once lived in Brookline, Mass. We asked her why she had come back to
Ireland, and after a moment's thought she said it was because "America
wasn't fair." We thought of aristocratic Brookline, the abode of
millionaires, and then we looked about us--at the ragged donkey standing
across the way, at the pig wandering down the middle of the dirty
street, at the low little houses and the shabby people--and perhaps we
smiled, but be sure it was in sympathy, not in derision.
We crossed over to the railway hotel, finally, and had lunch, and when
we came out, the woman who managed the place waylaid us at the front
door for a chat. She told us of a woman from the village who was on the
_Titanic_, but was saved, and discussed various scandals in high life,
which she had gleaned from the half-penny press; and then we spoke of
the girl we had met in the village, and she deplored the high-and-mighty
airs which some of the girls who come home from America give themselves.
"But I once heard one of them put well in her place," she added, "when
she came back with her hat full of flowers and her petticoat full of
flounces, and walked about the town as though we were all dirt beneath
her feet. Well, one day an old man stopped her for a word, a friend of
the family who wished her well, but she put up her nose at him--and
perhaps he was not very clean--and was for going past. But he put out
his hand and caught her by the arm. 'You're after bein' a fine lady
now,' says he, 'but I mind the time, and that but a few years since,
when I've seen ye sittin' on your bare-backed ass, with your naked legs
hangin' down--yes, and I can be tellin' ye more than that, if so be ye
wish to hear it!' She didn't stay long in the village after that," added
the speaker, with a chuckle of relish.
Our train came along, presently, and we were soon running over as
dreary, bleak and miserable a land as any we had seen in Ireland. Vast
boggy plains, bare rocky hillsides, with scarcely a house to be seen
anywhere--only a ruin, now and then, marking the site of some ancient
stronghold; and so, in the first dusk of the evening, we came to
Athlone.
One would have thought that, with so important a town, the station would
have been placed somewhere near it; but habit was too strong for the
builders of the line, and so they put the station about a mile away, at
the end of a dreary stretch of road, beyond a great barrack, along the
river, past the castle, and over the bridge.
Athlone has been famous for its widows ever since the days of Molly
Malone, ohone! who
Melted the hearts
Of the swains in them parts;
and we found that the best hotel in the place, which was not as good as
it might have been, was managed by a widow, who might well have posed
for the lovely Molly. She had not been a widow long, and I judged would
not be if the swains of the town had any voice in the matter, for the
bar was very popular when she was behind it.
We went out, after dinner, to see the town, and found it one of the most
ugly and depressing we had yet encountered--a sort of cross between a
town and a village, but with the attractions of neither. The water-front
is its most interesting part, for a fragment of the old castle which was
built to guard the second of the all-important fords of the Shannon
still stands there. Kincora, you will remember, guarded the other. But
Kincora was three days' march to the southward; and for two days' march
to the northward there was no other place where the Shannon could be
crossed; and so here at the ford just below Lough Ree, in the old days,
a franklin named Luan set up a rude little inn, and the place came to be
known as Ath Luan, Luan's Ford--Athlone. Here in the year 1001, hostages
were sent from all Ireland to meet Brian Boru and proclaim him High
King; and here, a century later, the O'Conors built a rath and a tower
to guard the ford and levy tribute upon all who used it. In another
hundred years, the Normans had seized it, and put up the strong,
round-towered castle, parts of which still remain; and for seven
centuries after that, the English power "sat astride the passage of
Connaught," save for the brief time, after the battle of the Boyne, it
was held by the Irish. But Ginkle captured it, as he was soon to capture
Limerick, and a few years later, most of what was left of the town was
destroyed when the magazine of the castle blew up during a thunderstorm.
But though there is little in Athlone to delay the visitor, there are
two places in the neighbourhood worth seeing. Nine miles to the north is
Lissoy, made immortal by Goldsmith as
Sweet Auburn! loveliest village of the plain;
and ten miles to the south, on the bank of the Shannon, are the ruins of
Clonmacnoise, whither, twelve centuries ago, men in search of knowledge
turned their faces from all the corners of Europe.
* * * * *
It was for Lissoy we started next morning, on a car for which I had
bargained the night before. Our jarvey was a loquacious old fellow, who
talked unceasingly, but in so broken a brogue that it was only with the
greatest difficulty we could follow him. He had known some people who
had gone down on the _Titanic_, and he told us all about them; but most
of his talk was a lament for the hard times, the sorrowful state of the
country, the paucity of tourists, and the vagaries of the landlady, of
whom he spoke in the most mournful and pessimistic way. She was not, I
gathered, a native of Athlone, but a Dublin woman whose ideas were
new-fangled and highfalutin, and who, I inferred, did not look kindly
upon the careless habits of her "help."
The road lay through a pleasant, rolling country, with glimpses of Lough
Ree to the left, and on a hill to the right a tall shaft which our
jarvey told us marked the exact centre of Ireland. When one looks at the
map, one sees that it is at least somewhere near the centre. But it has
been explained to other passers-by in many ways: as the remains of a
round tower, as a tower which a rich man built in order to mount to the
top of it every day to count his sheep, as a pole for his tent put up by
Finn MacCool, as a wind-mill in the old days, and as a dozen other
things--anything, in fact, that happened to occur to the man who was
asked the question. One answer, you may be sure, he never made, and that
was that he didn't know!
There _are_ some remains of old windmills in the neighbourhood--we saw
one or two on near-by hillsides, close enough to recognise them; and if
I had known at the time what a divergence of opinion there was about
that lonely tower in the distance, I would have driven over to it and
investigated it on my own hook. But our jarvey's answer was so positive
that it left no room for doubt, so we drove on through a village of tiny
thatched houses, with the smoke of the turf giving a pleasant tang to
the air; then up a long hill, to the left at a cross-roads, and at last
our jarvey drew up before a five-barred gate. We looked at him
questioningly, for there was no village in sight.
"'Tis here it was, sir," he said, "sweet Auburn, the loveliest village
of the plain. 'Twas up that path yonder the village preacher's modest
mansion rose, though there is little enough left of it now; and over
yonder, behind that wall with the yellow furze atop it, unprofitably
gay, was where the village master taught his little school, and there is
nothing at all left of that; and a little furder on is the 'Three Jolly
Pigeons,' where news much older than the ale went round."
[Illustration: THE GOLDSMITH RECTORY AT LISSOY]
[Illustration: THE "THREE JOLLY PIGEONS"]
I looked at him wonderingly.
"Where did you pick up all that patter?" I asked.
He snickered.
"Ah, you would not be the first gintleman I have driven out here, sir,"
he explained; "and many of them would be speakin' parts of the poem."
"I suppose ale is still to be obtained at the 'Three Jolly Pigeons'?"
"It is, sir, if so be your honour would be wantin' some. And they have
one of the big stones of the old mill for a doorstep," he added, as an
extra inducement not to pass it by.
We got down from our seats, went through the gate, and up the path which
Goldsmith and his father trod so many times; for, whether or not Lissoy
was really Auburn, there can be no doubt that the elder Goldsmith was
really vicar here, and that he lived in the house, the rectory of
Kilkenny West, of which only a fragment of the front wall remains, and
that Oliver was a boy here. The ash trees which shadowed the path have
disappeared, but there are still plenty of gabbling geese around, and a
file of them went past as I took a picture of the remnant of the
rectory. A shed with a hideous roof of corrugated iron has been built
behind it, and near by is a two-storied house where the present tenant
lives. We found an old woman, for all the world like Goldsmith's
"widowed, solitary thing," carding wool in an outhouse, and she showed
us the old well, deep in the ground, walled around and approached by a
steep flight of steps.
There was nothing more to see, so we went back to the gate, escorted by
three friendly pigs, and clambered up to our seats again, and looked out
over the valley. There is nothing in that valley but gently-rolling
pastures, and nothing lives there now but sheep and cattle. And it sends
a chill up the spine to realise that once a village stood there, and
that it has melted away into the earth. Not a stone is left of its
houses, not a sod of its walls, not a flower of its gardens.
But that village was Lissoy, not Auburn. No such village as Auburn ever
existed in Ireland, where the young folks sported on the village green,
and the swain responsive to the milkmaid sung, and the village master
taught his school during the day, and argued with the preacher in the
evening, and a jolly crowd gathered every night at the inn to drink the
nut-brown ale. There is not a single Irish detail in that picture; it is
all English, just as Goldsmith intended it should be, for it was of
"England's griefs" he was writing, not of Ireland's. In that day, few
people here in Westmeath spoke anything but Irish; the village children
knew nothing of schools, except hedge-row ones, taught by some fugitive
priest; the "honest rustics" had no "decent churches," but only hidden
caves in dark valleys, where Mass was said secretly and at the risk of
life; and, rest assured, when any inhabitant of this valley had money to
spend for drink, he wasted it on no such futile beverage as nut-brown
ale!
I am sure that little of it is sold to-day at the "Three Jolly Pigeons,"
where we presently arrived, a low wayside tavern with thatched roof and
plastered wall, kept by John Nally, who welcomed us most kindly, and
grew enthusiastic when I proposed to take a picture. There was a rickety
donkey-cart standing by the door, and its owner came out to be in the
picture, too--raggeder even than his donkey, disreputable, dirty,
gin-soaked, and with only a jagged tooth or two in his expansive mouth,
but carefree and full of mirth.
Betty, who had been admiring the supreme raggedness of the donkey, asked
its name.
"Top o' the Mornin', miss," answered the man, with a shout of laughter,
and I am sure the name was the inspiration of the moment.
And then, while our jarvey drank his whiskey, I had a talk with Mr.
Nally, who, of course, for reasons of trade perhaps, is firmly of the
belief that Auburn is Lissoy and no other. And he told me of another
poet who was born down on the banks of the Inny, a mile or two away, and
who, in the old days, spent many an evening at the Pigeons--Johnny Casey
he called him, and it turned out to be that same John Keegan Casey, who
wrote "The Rising of the Moon," and "Maire my Girl," and "Gracie og
Machree," and "Donal Kenny,"--Irish subjects all, and most of them local
ones, as well. Donal Kenny, for instance, was a bold blade, a clever
hand with the snare and the net, who turned the heads of all the girls
in the neighbourhood, and broke those of most of the boys, until it was
glad they were when he went off with himself to America. I have looked
up the poem since, and I fear that Casey enveloped the parting scene
with exaggerated sentiment; yet the verses have a swing to them:
Come, piper, play the "Shaskan Reel,"
Or else the "Lasses on the Heather,"
And, Mary, lay aside your wheel
Until we dance once more together.
At fair and pattern oft before
Of reels and jigs we've tripped full many;
But ne'er again this loved old floor
Will feel the foot of Donal Kenny.
We tore ourselves away, at last, taking a road which ran along the
border of the lake--a beautiful sheet of bluest water, dotted with
greenest islands, with the rolling plains of Roscommon rising beyond.
And then, from the top of a long hill, we saw below us the spires of
Athlone, and soon we were rattling down into the town.
* * * * *
That morning, while looking through our guide-book, we had encountered a
sentence which piqued our curiosity. It was this:
"Some of the walls of St. Peter's Abbey remain, in
which can be seen one of those curious figures
called 'Sheela-na-gig."
I remembered dimly that, back at Cashel, John Minogue had called our
attention to a grotesque figure with twisted legs and distorted visage
carved on a stone, and had called it something that sounded like
Sheela-na-gig; but I wasn't sure, and so we started out blithely to find
this one.
Right at the start, we met with unexpected difficulties, for nobody at
the hotel, not even the ancient jarvey, had ever heard of the
Sheela-na-gig. The barmaid, however, said that St. Peter's Abbey was on
the other side of the river, past the castle, so we went over there, and
found that part of the town much more dilapidated and picturesque than
the more modern portion on the Westmeath side. We wandered around for
quite a while, asking the way of this person and that, and finally we
wound up at St. Peter's church, a new structure and one singularly
uninteresting. It was evident that there was no Sheela-na-gig there; and
at this point Betty surrendered, and went back to the hotel to write
some letters.
But I had started out on the quest of the Sheela-na-gig, and I was
determined to find it. I thought possibly it might be somewhere among
the ruins of the Franciscan Abbey, which stand close to the other side
of the river, so I crossed the river again, and after walking about a
mile along a high wall through a dirty lane, reached a gate, only to
find it locked. There was a man inside, raking a gravelled walk, but he
said nobody was admitted to the ruins, and anyway he was quite positive
that there was no such thing as a Sheela-na-gig among them. He added
that a portion of the ruins had been torn down to make room for an
extension of the Athlone Woolen Mills, and perhaps they had the
Sheela-na-gig there.
I had no faith in this suggestion, but for want of something better to
do, I turned in at the office of the mills, and was warmly welcomed by
the manager, who invited me to inspect the place. It is an exceedingly
rambling and haphazard structure, but it gives employment to hundreds of
people, mostly girls and women, whose pale faces and drooping figures
bore testimony to the wearing nature of the work. The mill gets the wool
in the raw state, straight from the grower, and the processes by which
it is cleaned and carded and spun into thread, and dyed, and woven into
cloth, and inspected, and weighed, and finally rolled up ready for the
market, are many and intricate. The manager told me that the mill turned
out thirty thousand yards of tweed a week, and he hoped to turn out even
more, as soon as a reduction of the tariff permitted him to get into the
American market. Even with a duty of forty-five per cent., he could
compete with American tweeds, and with a lower duty he could undersell
them.
It needed only a glance at the shabby, toil-worn men and women working
in his factory to understand why this was true. I didn't ask him what
wages his women earned, but I _did_ ask as to their hours of labour.
They go to work at 6:30 in the morning and work till six in the evening,
with a three-quarter hour interval for breakfast and the same for lunch.
I saw groups of them, afterwards, strolling about the streets in the
twilight, and sad and poor and spiritless they looked. Yet they are
eager for the work, for at least it keeps them alive, and one can
scarcely blame the manager for sticking to the market price, and so
doing his best to meet a remorseless competition. I confess that such
economic problems as this are too stiff for me.
As I was about to leave, I casually mentioned my search for the
Sheela-na-gig--and he knew where it was! It was over on the other bank,
it seemed, not far from the river-front, and he directed me with great
detail how to get to it; but, alas, in such a town of crooked streets,
definite direction was impossible. However, with hope springing eternal,
I crossed the bridge a third time, turned up-stream close beside the
river, wandered into a board-yard, extricated myself, got into a blind
alley that ended in a high wall and had to retrace my steps; asked man
after man, who only stared vacantly and shook their heads; and finally
found a boy who knew, and who eagerly left his work to conduct me to the
spot.
Imagine with what a feeling of triumph I stood at last before the
Sheela-na-gig!
It is carved over the wide arch of the entrance to what was once an
abbey, but what I think is now a laundry--an impish, leering figure,
clasping its knees up under its chin, and peering down to see who
passes. Underneath the imp are the words "St. Peter's Port," and
underneath the words is a grotesque head. On either side of the arch is
a sculptured plaque, that to the left bearing the words "May Satan never
enter," and that to the right, "Wilo Wisp & Jack the Printer,"--the two,
of course, forming a couplet.
While I was staring at these remarkable inscriptions and trying to
puzzle out some meaning for them, an old woman, who had been watching me
with interest from the door of her house, came out and tried to tell me
the history of the gate. But she spoke so incoherently that I could make
nothing of it beyond the fact that the inscriptions originated in two
men's rivalry for possession of the property; so somebody else will
have to untangle that legend.
A little way up the street there was a shop which, among other things,
had post-cards displayed for sale, and I stopped in, thinking I might
get a picture of the gate and perhaps learn something more of its story.
But when I asked for such a card, the proprietor stared at me in
amazement.
"There is no such gate hereabouts," he said.
"But there is," I protested; "right there at the end of the street. Do
you mean to say you have never seen the Sheela-na-gig, nor read that
line about Wilo Wisp and Jack the Printer?"
He rubbed his head dazedly.
"I have not," he admitted. "Look at that, now," he went on; "here have I
been going past that gate for years, and you come all the way from
America and see more in one minute than I have seen in me whole life!"
Then he asked me if I had been up on top the castle, which was just
opposite his shop, and I replied that I had not.
"Nor have I," he said; "but I am told there is a grand view from up
there."
"Why not go up with me now?" I suggested.
"I might," he agreed; and then he looked at the tall keep of the castle
and shook his head. "'Tis not to-day I can be doing it; you see, I must
stay with the shop."
So I left him there, and essayed the heights of the castle by myself.
Only for a little way, however, was I by myself, for some families
connected with the garrison live there, and they are all prolific; so I
soon found myself surrounded by a horde of ragged children, who begged
for ha'pennies in the queer bated voice which seems to go with begging
in Ireland. I distributed a few, but that was a mistake; for when they
found I not only had some ha'pennies but was actually willing to part
with them, they grew almost ferocious; I said "Oppenheimer!" in vain,
and I was only saved at last by a husky woman who issued forth from one
of the towers and swept down upon them, vi et armis, and drove them
headlong out of sight. She was red-headed and curious, and she stopped
for a bit of talk. (I pass over the part about America.)
"How do you like living in the old castle?" I asked her, finally.
"Sure, 'tis a grand place, sir."
"Do you ever see any ghosts?"
"Ghosts? Niver a one, sir."
"Nor hear any banshees?"
"Banshees is it? Sure, they niver come to this place, sir, 'tis that
healthy, bein' so high."
And it must, indeed, be healthier than the narrow, gloomy, squalid
streets below. I could look down into them from the top of the tower, to
which I presently mounted, and see their swarming life--men and women
idling about, a girl drawing water from the public pump, a boy skinning
some eels at the corner, small children playing in the gutters. On the
other side lay the river, empty save for a few small launches, and
beyond it the roofs of the newer part of the town, and beyond the town
the beautiful Westmeath hills.
Just at my feet was the bridge across the Shannon, connecting east and
west Ireland. It is a modern one, but it stands on the site of the old
one, built while Elizabeth was queen, and the scene of a desperate
conflict when Ginkle stormed the town. Of the castle itself, only the
keep is old. The drum-towers, which frown down upon the river, are of
later date, though one would never suspect it to look at them; but when
one gets to the top of them, one finds embrasures for artillery, and the
approach is up a graded way along which the guns can be taken. The old
drawbridge and portcullis which guarded the entrance to the keep are
still in place, but there is little else of interest.
* * * * *
The ruins of the ancient abbey of Clonmacnoise lie close beside the
Shannon, some ten miles below Athlone, and the road thither winds
through a rolling country down to the broad river, which here flows
lazily between flat banks. One would expect so noble a stretch of water
to be crowded with commerce, but it was quite empty that morning, save
for an occasional rude, flat-bottomed punt, loaded high with turf, which
a man and a boy would be poling slowly upstream toward Athlone.
It was a desolate scene; and Clonmacnoise looked desolate, too, with its
gaunt grey towers, and huddle of little buildings, and cluttered
graveyard. It seemed incredible that this obscure corner of the world
was once a centre of learning toward which scholars turned their faces
from the far ends of Europe, to which Charlemagne sent gifts, and within
whose walls princes and nobles were reared in wisdom and piety. Yet such
it was--the nearest to being a national university among all the abbeys,
for it was not identified with any class or province, but chose its
abbots from all Ireland, and welcomed its students from all the world.
The abbey was founded by St. Kieran in 548. St. Kieran belonged to what
is known as the Second Order of Irish Saints, founders of monasteries
and of great co-operative communities, as distinguished from the First
Order--St. Patrick and his immediate successors--who were bishops and
missionaries and founders of churches, and the Third Order, who were
hermits, dwelling in desert places, often in small stone cells, just as
St. Molua did in his little cell near Killaloe. St. Kieran had already
started an abbey on an island in Lough Ree, but grew dissatisfied with
it, for some reason, and he and eight companions got on board a boat and
floated down the river, rejecting this place and that as not suited to
their purpose, and finally reaching this sloping meadow, where their
leader bade them stop.
"Let us remain here," he said, "for many souls will ascend to heaven
from this spot."
So the abbey was started, and, though Kieran himself died in the
following year, it grew rapidly in importance. Let me try to picture the
place as it was then. The students lived in small huts crowded about the
precincts; the classes were held in the open air; only for purposes of
worship were permanent buildings built. Here, as at Glendalough, there
was not one large church, but seven small ones; and the students seem to
have attended divine service in the groups in which they studied. It was
a self-supporting community, tilling its own lands, spinning its own
wool, weaving its own cloth, and building its own churches; and its
life, while not austere, was of the simplest.
The students, at times, numbered as many as three thousand. The teaching
was free, but from every student a certain amount of service was
required in the interest of the community. The principal study, of
course, was that of religion, but from the very first the heathen
classics and the Irish language, arithmetic, rhetoric, astronomy and
natural science were taught side by side with theology.
The life at Clonmacnoise was typical of that at all the other monastic
schools with which Ireland was then so thickly dotted; and it is the
more interesting because the whole continent of Europe, at that time,
was groping through the very darkest period of the Middle Ages. Culture
there was at its lowest ebb--knowledge of Greek, for instance, had so
nearly vanished that any one who knew Greek was assumed at once to have
come from Ireland, where it was taught in all the schools. Those schools
sent forth swarms of missionaries, "the most fearless spiritual knights
the world has known," to spread the light over Europe; they established
centres at Cambrai, at Rheims, at Soissons, at Laon, at Liege; they
founded the great monastery at Ratisbon; they built others at Wurzburg,
at Nuremberg, at Constanz, at Vienna--and then came the Vikings, and put
an end to Irish learning. For the Vikings were Pagans, and the shrines
of the churches, the treasuries of the monasteries and schools, were the
first objects of onslaught.
For two centuries, the Danes made of Ireland "spoil-land and sword-land
and conquered land, ravaged her chieftaincies and her privileged
churches and her sanctuaries, and rent her shrines and her reliquaries
and her books, and demolished her beautiful ornamented temples--in a
word, though there were an hundred sharp and ready tongues in each head,
and an hundred loud, unceasing voices from each tongue, they could never
enumerate all the Gael suffered, both men and women, laity and clergy,
noble and ignoble, from these wrathful, valiant, purely-pagan people."
The Danes aimed to destroy all learning, which they hated and
distrusted, and they very nearly succeeded.
[Illustration: ON THE ROAD TO CLONMACNOISE]
[Illustration: ST. KIERAN'S CATHAIR, CLONMACNOISE]
I have already told how, under Brian Boru, the Irish drew together, and
finally managed to defeat the Danes at Clontarf; and for a century and a
half after that, ancient Erin seemed rising from her ashes. The books
destroyed by the Danes were re-written, churches and monasteries
rebuilt, schools re-opened--and then came Strongbow at the head of his
Normans, and that dream was ended. There was civilisation in Ireland
after that, but it was a civilisation dominated by England; there was
education, but not for the native Irish; there were great monasteries,
but they were built by French or Norman monks--by Franciscans or
Cistercians or Augustinians; and finally even these were swept away with
the coming of the Established Church.
* * * * *
I shall not attempt to describe the ruins of the seven churches of
Clonmacnoise, except to say that, though they are all small, they are
crowded with interesting detail; and there are two round towers,
somewhat squat and rude, as a witness to the danger of Danish raiders;
but the glory of the place is the magnificent sculptured cross, erected
a thousand years ago over the grave of Flann, High King of Erin, and
still standing as a witness to Irish craftsmanship. It is ten feet
high, cut from a single block of stone, and elaborately carved from top
to bottom, and its date is fixed by an Irish inscription which can still
be deciphered: "A prayer for Colman who made this cross on the King
Flann." It was Flann who built the largest of the stone churches, near
which the cross stands, about 909, and at that time Colman was Abbot of
Clonmacnoise. Flann died five years later, and Colman honoured his
memory with this magnificent tribute.
Its maker's name is lost, but there can be no doubt he was a great
artist. On one side he has represented scenes from the founding of
Clonmacnoise, and on the other scenes from the Passion of the Saviour.
The crucifixion, as usual, is depicted at the intersection, while hell
and heaven are shown on the arms themselves, crowded with the damned or
the blessed, as the case may be. There is another cross in the graveyard
scarcely less interesting, though no one knows on whose grave it stands,
and there is the shaft of a third. And all about them are crowded the
lichened tombstones marking the graves of the fortunate ones who won
sepulture in St. Kieran's cathair, and who, on the last day, will be
borne straight to heaven with him.
For this enclosure was once the very holiest in Ireland. It was here
that Kieran was laid, and then his prophecy was remembered that many
souls would ascend to heaven from this spot; and the belief gradually
grew that no one interred "in the graveyard of noble Kieran" would ever
be adjudged to damnation. In consequence, so many people wanted to be
buried there that there wasn't room for all of them, and in the end,
even powerful kings and princes were forced to contend with great gifts
for a place of sepulture. Here Flann was laid; and hither was borne the
body of Rory O'Conor, the last who claimed the kingship of all Ireland,
after his death at Cong. The great abbey at Cong served well enough as
the retreat for his declining years, but it was only at Clonmacnoise, in
the sacred cathair of Kieran, that he would be buried. And, as I closed
the chapter on the Shannon with some verses of one of Ireland's truest
poets, I cannot do better than close this one with his lovely rendering
of the lament which Enock O'Gillan wrote many centuries ago for
THE DEAD AT CLONMACNOISE
In a quiet-watered land, a land of roses,
Stands St. Kieran's city fair,
And the warriors of Erin in their famous generations
Slumber there.
There beneath the dewy hillside sleep the noblest
Of the clan of Conn,
Each below his stone with name in branching Ogham
And the sacred knot thereon.
There they laid to rest the seven kings of Tara,
There the sons of Cairbre sleep--
Battle-banners of the Gael that in Kieran's plain of crosses
Now their final hosting keep.
And in Clonmacnoise they laid the men of Teffia,
And right many a lord of Bregh;
Deep the sod above Clan Creide and Clan Conaill,
Kind in hall and fierce in fray.
Many and many a son of Conn the Hundred-fighter
In the red earth lies at rest;
Many a blue eye of Clan Colman the turf covers,
Many a swan-white breast.