THE LEACHT-CON-MIC-RUIS
WE wanted to drive around Lough Gill, a distance of about twenty-five
miles, and I had mentioned this project to our landlord the day before,
and asked the price of a car. He said it was a long trip and a trying
one on a horse, and that the price would be twenty shillings, and I saw
the same glitter in his eye which had been there when he named the price
of a room.
That afternoon, I happened to see a sign over a shop announcing that
posting was done in all its branches. Remembering the glitter in the
landlord's eye, I stopped in and asked the woman in charge if a car
could be had for the trip around Lough Gill. She said it might, and the
price would be twelve shillings, including the driver. I closed with her
on the spot, and told her to have the car ready at nine o'clock next
morning; and somewhat to my surprise it was; and we set forth on what
was to prove one of the most beautiful and adventurous excursions we had
had in Ireland.
It was a bright, warm day, and our jarvey, a picturesque old fellow, was
quite certain it would not rain; but we put our rain-coats and all our
other waterproof paraphernalia in the well of the car, so as to be
prepared for the worst; and we elected to go out by the northern shore
and come back by the southern one. For a mile or two our road lay
through beautiful fragrant woods, and then we came out high above the
lake.
There is no prettier lake in Ireland than Lough Gill, with its green
islands, and its blue water reflecting the blue sky and the fleecy
clouds, and its banks covered with a vegetation almost as varied and
luxuriant as that about Killarney, and the purple mountains crowding
down upon it--only it is hardly fair to call them purple, for they are
of many colours--the grey granite of their towering escarpments gleaming
in the sun, the wide stretches of heather just showing a flush of
lavender, the clumps of dark woodland clothing the glens, the broad
spread of green pastures along their lower slopes, all combining in a
picture not soon forgotten. For two or three miles we trotted on with
this fairy scene stretched before us, and then we turned back into the
hills, for we wanted to see the Leacht-Con-Mic-Ruis, the Stone of Conn
the Son of Rush, set up on a neighbouring hilltop as a warning and a
sign.
At least, Murray calls it the Leacht-Con-Mic-Ruis, but our driver had
never heard of it, though he protested that he knew every foot of the
neighbourhood. Perhaps he did not recognise the words as I pronounced
them, and as he could not read, it did no good for me to show them to
him in the book. So I described it to him as well as I was able, never
having seen it myself and having only the vaguest idea what it looked
like, as a collection of great standing stones on top of a hill not far
away; and still he had never heard of it. He was inclined to turn back
to the lake, but I persisted; and finally he stopped a man who was
driving a cart in to Sligo, and they talked together awhile in Irish,
and then our driver turned up another road, not very hopefully.
[Illustration: SLIGO ABBEY FROM THE CLOISTER]
[Illustration: THE LEACHT-CON-MIC-RUIS]
It was a very hilly road, and our horse developed an alarming propensity
to gallop--a propensity which the driver encouraged rather than strove
to check, so that we felt, a good part of the time, as though we were
riding to a fire at break-neck speed. The jaunting-car, it should be
remembered, is a two-wheeled vehicle, and when the animal between the
shafts takes it into his head to gallop, it describes violent arcs
through the air. But we hung grimly on, and finally our driver drew up
at a house near the roadside.
"'Tis here," he said.
We got down and looked around, but saw nothing that resembled the
Leacht-Con-Mic-Ruis; and then a woman came out of the house, and we
asked her if she knew where it was, and, wonder of wonders! she did.
Most wonderful of all, she had been to see it herself, so she knew where
it was not vaguely but precisely, and she told us just how to go. It was
on the hill back of the house, and she showed us the path which we must
follow, and told us to look out for the rabbit-warrens, or we might
sprain an ankle; and we set off through knee-deep heather up over the
hill. It was quite a climb, and when we got to the top we saw no
standing stones, and I wondered if we were going to miss them, after
all; but we pressed on, and then, as we topped the next rise, my heart
gave a leap--for there before us was the Leacht-Con-Mic-Ruis--the most
remarkable stone enclosure I have seen anywhere, with the exception of
Stonehenge--and Stonehenge is more remarkable only because its stones
are larger.
In every other way--in extent and in complexity--this enclosure far
outranks Stonehenge. Great upright rocks, lichened and weatherbeaten
by the rains and winds of forty centuries, form a rude oblong, about a
hundred and fifty feet in length by fifty feet across. It stretches east
and west, and at the western end is a square projection like a
vestibule, divided into two chambers; while at the eastern end are two
smaller oblongs some ten or twelve feet square, and their doorways are
two trilithons--that is to say, two great rocks set on end with another
rock laid across them, just as at Stonehenge. I despair of trying to
picture it in words, but I took two photographs, one of which is
opposite the preceding page, and gives some idea of the appearance of
this remarkable monument--at least of the trilithons. But it gives no
idea of its shape or its extent. There was no vantage point from which I
could get a photograph that would do that.
Its effect, here on this bleak hilltop, with other bleak hills all
around as far as the eye could see, was tremendously impressive. Nobody
knows who built it, nor when it was built, nor why. That it was a shrine
of some sort, a holy place, seems evident; and to me it seemed also
evident that the holy of holies were those two little chambers back of
the trilithic doorways; and it seemed to me also significant that they
should be at the east end, nearest the sunrise, just as the altars in
Gothic churches are, and that there should be a vestibule or entrance at
the west end. Surely it was built with some reference to the sun; and I
tried to picture the horde of panting men, who had, with incredible
labour, hacked out these giant stones from some quarry now unknown, and
pulled them up the steep hillside and somehow manoeuvred them into
place. Some powerful motive must have actuated them, and I can think of
none powerful enough except the motive of religion--the motive of
building a great temple to the God they worshipped, in the hope of
pleasing Him and winning His favour.
[Illustration: A RUIN ON THE SHORE OF LOUGH GILL]
[Illustration: THE LAST FRAGMENT OF AN ANCIENT STRONGHOLD]
What strange rites, I wondered, had these old stones witnessed; what
pageantries, what sacrifices, what incantations? Of all that ancient
people there remains on earth not a single trace, except in such silent
monuments of stone as this, so mighty the passing centuries have been
powerless to destroy them, more mysterious, more inscrutable than the
Sphinx.
We tore ourselves away, at last, and went silently down through the
heather, which was fairly swarming with rabbits; and we mounted our car
and headed back toward the lake. We came out presently close beside the
shore, and followed it around its upper end. Just there, out at the end
of a point of land, stands the fragment of a tower, and our jarvey told
us it was all that was left of the castle from which Dervorgilla eloped
with Dermot MacMurrough--a tale already told by the little tailor of
Limerick.
Of course I wanted a picture of it, and after much manoeuvring, I
managed to get the one opposite this page, which I include only because
of the beautiful Japanesy branch across one corner; for this wasn't
Breffni's castle at all, as we were presently to find. A little farther
on, and quite near the road, was another ruin, and a most imposing one,
with drum towers at the four corners, and a dilapidated cottage hugging
its wall; and I took a peep within the square enclosure, used now as a
kind of barnyard. There were little turrets looking out over the
lake, and a spiral stair in one corner, and mullioned windows and tall
chimneys and yawning fireplaces; and it looked a most important place,
but I have not been able to discover anything of its history. Then we
went on again, with beautiful views of the lake at our right, and high
on our left the flat-topped mountain called O'Rourke's Table, where,
once upon a time, as told by the old ballad, "O'Rourke's Noble Feast"
was spread:
O'Rourke's noble fare will ne'er be forgot
By those who were there, or those who were not.
His revels to keep, we sup and we dine
On seven score sheep, fat bullocks and swine,
and so on. It is, indeed, a table fit for such a celebration--a rock
plateau with sheer escarpments of grey granite dropping away from it,
and a close cover of purple heather for a cloth.
The road curved on along the lake; then turned away from it through a
beautiful ravine; and then a sparkling river was dashing along at our
right, and beyond it loomed the grey walls of a most extensive ruin; and
then we dropped steeply down into the town of Dromahair, and stopped at
a pretty inn to bait the horse.
I wanted to get closer to the ruins, and I asked if there was a bridge
across the river, and was told that there was, just behind the hotel. So
I made my way down to it, to find that the "bridge" was a slender plank,
without handrail or guard, spanning some ugly-looking rapids. I looked
at the plank, and I looked at the swirling water, and I looked at the
grey ruins on the farther shore, and I hesitated for a long time; but I
wasn't equal to it; and I turned away at last and made my way back to
the village in the hope of finding some more stable bridge there.
The dominating feature of the village is not the workhouse or lunatic
asylum, but an enormous mill, five stories high, built of black stone as
hard as flint, to endure for all eternity, but forlorn and deserted; and
while I was gazing at it and wondering where the money had come from to
build it, a man came out of the house attached to it and spoke to me. He
was an Englishman, he said, who was spending his vacation at Dromahair.
I asked him if there was any other bridge across the river except the
slender plank, and he said there was not; and that it was characteristic
of the Irish that there should not be, for a more careless, shiftless,
happy-go-lucky race did not exist anywhere on earth.
I asked him about the mill, and he said that it was just another example
of Irish inefficiency and wrong-headedness; that it had been erected at
great expense and equipped with the most costly machinery to grind
American grain, which was to be brought up Sligo Bay from the sea, and
up the river and across the lake; and then, when all was ready, there
was no grain to grind--or none, at least, which could be brought to the
mill without prohibitive expense. Furthermore, the power was so poor and
costly that it would have been impossible to operate the mill profitably
even if there had been plenty of grain. But the owner of the mill, with
some sort of dim faith in the power of Home Rule to produce the grain,
was preparing to install a turbine to run the machinery, and had already
started to build a big aqueduct to bring the water in from above the
rapids.
The rapids are just above the mill, and are quite imposing; and there,
just beyond them, is the abbey. I was near enough to see it fairly well,
though not, of course, in detail as I should have liked to do; but I
comforted myself with the thought that it is a comparatively modern one,
dating from the sixteenth century, when Margaret, the wife of another
O'Rourke, having, perhaps, like Dervorgilla, done something she
regretted, built it for the Franciscans.
I had another comfort, too; for I asked the Englishman if he had seen
the Leacht-Con-Mic-Ruis; and he said that he had been hunting for it for
a week, but hadn't been able to find it, as none of the people
thereabouts seemed to know where it was; and he was astonished when I
told him that we had found it, and commented with envy upon the energy
of Americans. He asked me where it was, and I told him as nearly as I
could; and then he wanted me to come in and have tea, and was for
sending up to the hotel for Betty; but I had to decline that invitation.
I think he was lonely and glad to find some one to talk to, for he was
unusually expansive for an Englishman; and he said he would send his car
in to Sligo after us, if we would come out next day; but I told him we
were going on to Bundoran.
And then I left him and went back up the hill to the ivy-covered ruin
which was really the castle of Tiernan O'Rourke. It stands on the edge
of the hill overlooking the valley--the same valley which lay smiling
before him that evening he came back from his pilgrimage to Lough Derg;
and up there was the battlement from which no light burned. It was
battered down in the sixteenth century, in some obscure fight, and all
that is left of the castle now is the shell of its walls.
I am afraid Tom Moore, as well as O'Connell, journeyman tailor, has
invested the story with a glamour which did not belong to it; for
Tiernan O'Rourke was a one-eyed bandit who had sacked the abbey of
Clonard a few years before, and who certainly had need of pilgrimages to
shrive him from his sins; and Dervorgilla, so far from being a "young
false one," was forty-two years old; and MacMurrough took care to carry
off, not only the lady's person, but all her movable property, and most
of her husband's, as well.
* * * * *
The clouds were gathering in the west as we set out from Dromahair, and
presently the rain began to slant down, slowly and softly at first, and
then in a regular torrent. I do not know when I have seen it rain
harder; but we were soon fixed for it and didn't mind. Dromahair is
about twelve miles from Sligo, and they are hilly miles, so we knew that
we had at least three hours of this wet work ahead of us; but the people
working in the fields or plodding along the road paid no attention to
the rain, so why should we? In fact, most of them, though without any
sort of protection, seemed to be quite unconscious that it was raining
at all.
And then, just when the rain was hardest, I saw to the left a circle of
stones crowning a little hill, and I knew it was a cashel. A cashel, as
I have explained already, is a fort made of stones, just as a rath is a
fort made of earth, both being in the form of a circle; and I knew I
could get pictures of raths without much difficulty, but I didn't know
when I would see another cashel; so I made the driver stop, and got my
camera out of the well, and started off through a field to get a picture
of this one, not heeding Betty's anxious inquiry if I had suddenly gone
mad.
That field into which I plunged was thigh-deep with dripping grass, and
I didn't realise how wet it was until I was well into it, and then there
was nothing to do but go on. So I scrambled up the hill and took two
pictures, shielding my lens, as well as I could, against the driving
rain; and I hadn't any idea that the pictures would be good ones, but
they were, and one of them is opposite the next page.
There was no vantage point from which I could take a picture which would
show the circular shape of the cashel; but it had been built in a
perfect circle about sixty feet in diameter. It was on top of a steep
hillock, of which it occupied nearly the whole summit. The walls,
pierced only by a single narrow entrance, were about six feet high, and
four or five feet thick, and the lower stones were very massive, as the
picture shows. They had been roughly dressed and laid without
mortar--the ancient Irish knew nothing of mortar, apparently, for all
these old stone circles are uncemented; but they had been so nicely
fitted that they were still in place after many centuries, though the
clambering ivy was doing its best to pull them down.
Right in the middle of the circle was a great stone slab, flush with
the ground. The only use I could imagine for it was as a base for a
shrine or altar; but as I went down to the road again, an old man came
out of a little house to talk, and he said that some antiquarians from
Sligo, who believed the slab covered the entrance to a secret passage,
had taken it up and found beneath it, not a passage, but a beautifully
fitted pavement; and that the parish priest, investigating on his own
account, had dug up some wood ashes, and so decided that this was the
place where the fire was built.
[Illustration: A CASHEL NEAR DROMAHAIR]
[Illustration: ST. PATRICK'S HOLY WELL]
"But no one knows," my informant rambled on. "Maybe some day some wise
man like yourself will be able to tell us what it was for."
I remarked that the man who did so would have to be far wiser than I;
but he protested that he knew a wise man when he saw one; and I suspect
that there is a blarney stone in some of these ruins, which the general
public doesn't know about.
I was sorry it was raining, for there was another cashel on a hill to
the right, and a great rath a little farther off, and I should have
liked to explore both of them; but really the weather was too bad, so I
went back reluctantly to the car, which our jarvey had driven close
under a clump of trees for shelter, and we were soon jogging contentedly
on again.
The valley which slopes down here to Lough Gill seems very fertile, and
the little farms have a more prosperous look than is usual in Ireland.
This is partly due to the fact that a number of neat labourers' cottages
have been built to replace the usual tumbledown hovels, and still more
are going up.
This erection of labourers' cottages, which is going on to-day all over
Ireland, seems to me almost as important as land purchase. If there is
any class of Irish more deserving of pity than another, it is the
agricultural labourer. He is worse off than the tenants; he has no land,
however poor, to cultivate, except perhaps a tiny patch in front of his
door; he has no means of livelihood except the unskilled labour of his
hands; if he can manage to earn ten shillings a week he is unusually
fortunate. In most cases, his average income throughout the year will be
scarcely half that. So naturally the labourers and their families live
in the most wretched of all the wretched hovels, in want, discomfort and
peril of disease.
It is for the relief of these unfortunate people that the new houses are
being built. They are very plain; but they have large windows which can
be opened, and stone floors which can be cleaned, and tight slate roofs,
and sanitary outbuildings; and each of them has a half acre or so of
garden, where vegetables enough to support the family can be raised
during the summer; and they rent for from two to three shillings a
week--just enough to pay interest on the amount invested in the house,
with a small sinking fund for upkeep and repairs. The money needed is
borrowed from the government by the county council, and the council has
control of the houses, decides where they shall be built, what rent
shall be asked for them, and exercises a general supervision over the
tenants.
The same thing is being done in the towns, where the insanitary
dwellings of the poorer artisans are being replaced by comfortable
houses, rented at a very low rate. Nearly a hundred thousand of these
cottages have been built within the past ten years, replacing as many
insanitary shacks, which, for the most part, have been torn down. The
shacks were much more picturesque, but nobody regrets them. And the
severely utilitarian aspect of the new dwellings will no doubt soon be
masked with vines and climbing roses.
It was such cottages as this, then, that gave the valley sloping down to
Lough Gill an unusually prosperous appearance, and many more were in
course of erection throughout the neighbourhood. We padded past them,
along the road above the lake, between beautiful hedgerows, gay with
climbing roses; and then we turned away through a luxuriant wood, where
the bracken was almost waist-high and the trees were draped with moss
and ferns, just as we had seen them along the southern coast. And then
we passed through a gate and jolted down a very rough and narrow lane;
and finally our driver stopped at the edge of a wood, and pointed to a
path running away under the trees.
"'Tis the path to St. Patrick's holy well," he said; and we clambered
down, and made our way under the trees and up the hillside, and there
before us was the well.
It is a lively spring, which bubbles up from the ground in considerable
volume, fills a deep basin, and then sparkles away down into the valley.
A wall has been built around it, with an opening on one side, and steps
by which one may descend and drink of the magic water. Just above it on
the hillside is a shrine, something like the one we had seen at St.
Senan's well--really an altar, where, I suppose, Mass may be
celebrated; and it was crowded with figurines of the Virgin and small
crucifixes and rosaries and sacred pictures, and the bushes all about
were tied with rags and strings and other tokens which the pilgrims to
the shrine had left behind.
This well is a very famous one, and the number of pilgrims who come to
it prove how general is the belief in its powers. It is really a belief
in the power of prayer, for prayer is always necessary. I tried to get a
picture of the well and the shrine above it, but it was very dark under
the trees, and there was no place where I could rest my camera for a
time exposure; but the photograph opposite page 408, is better than I
had any reason to expect.
We found that the rain had ceased when we came out from under the trees,
and we jogged happily back to the highroad and on towards Sligo; and
presently far ahead the bay opened out, rimmed by romantic hills, green
nearly to the summit, and then culminating in steep escarpments of grey
rock; and beneath us in the valley lay the roofs and spires of the town,
and we were soon rattling through its streets.
We went back to the hotel to change out of our wet things and get a cup
of hot chocolate; and then we took a last stroll about the streets, and
stopped to see the church of St. John, said to be older than the abbey,
but recently restored and now used by a Church of Ireland congregation.
The graveyard about it is full of interesting tombs, and the street it
fronts is one of the most romantic in the town. Indeed, the whole town
is interesting; its greatest drawback for the visitor being the beggars
who infest it, and who are nearly as pertinacious as those at Killarney.
We went back to the hotel, at last, and told the proprietor that we were
going to Bundoran by the four o'clock train.
"You will make a great mistake," he protested, "to leave Sligo without
going around Lough Gill."
It was then I had my revenge.
"We have been around Lough Gill," I explained sweetly. "That's where we
were this morning."
* * * * *
It is no easy task to travel along the west coast of Ireland. The great
bays which indent it, running far inland, and the mountain ranges which
tower one behind the other, make it impossible to follow anything like a
straight line. The only thing to do is to zig-zag around them. Our
journey, that afternoon, was a striking example of this. Bundoran lies
twenty-two miles north along the coast from Sligo; but to get there by
rail, it was necessary to travel ninety-two--forty-eight miles
north-eastward to Enniskillen, and then forty-four miles westward to the
coast again.
The road to Enniskillen parallels Lough Gill, though it is so hemmed in
by hills that we caught no glimpse of the water; and then proceeds
across a dreary bog, climbing up and up with a wide valley opening to
the south; and then runs into woodland and even orchards--the first, I
think, that we had seen in Ireland; and then drops down toward
Enniskillen, whose name lives in English history as that of one of the
most famous of its regiments. It is said to be a pretty town, nestling
between two lakes and entirely water-girt; but we did not stop to see
it.
We changed instead to the Bundoran line, which runs along the northern
shore of Lough Erne; and we found the train crowded with people, on
their way to spend the week-end at that famous resort; at least so we
supposed, but when we got to Pettigoe, there was a crowd on the
platform, waving flags and shouting, and as the train stopped somebody
set off a series of bombs; and most of the passengers piled out of the
train to take part in the celebration; and then we saw a man and woman
standing rather sheepishly in front of another man, who was evidently
delivering an address of welcome. We asked the guard what it was all
about, and he said that the citizens of Pettigoe were welcoming home a
fellow-townsman who had gone to Australia and won a fortune and also a
wife--or perhaps I should put it the other way around--and had come back
to Pettigoe to live.
I was half-inclined to get off there myself, in order to visit St.
Patrick's Purgatory, a famous place of pilgrimage on an island in Lough
Derg, five miles away; but from the map it looked as though it would be
possible to drive over from Donegal, which would be much more
convenient. I found out afterwards that there is a mountain range
between Donegal and Lough Derg, and no direct road over it; so we did
not get to visit the island where, so legend says, St. Patrick had a
vision of purgatory, and which became so celebrated that pilgrims
flocked to it from all over Europe. The time prescribed for the
ceremonies is from the first of June to the middle of August, and the
island is often so crowded with penitents performing the rounds that
visitors are not permitted to land.
Our train moved on, after the address of welcome was concluded, and we
could see the blue waters of Lough Erne stretching away to the south,
while westward the sun was setting in a glory of crimson clouds; and
presently the broad estuary of the Erne opened below us, hemmed in with
high banks of yellow sand; and then we were at Bundoran--a bathing
resort, consisting of a single street of boarding-houses facing the sea;
and a little farther on, a great hotel, built on a projecting point of
the cliffs. As we paused at its door to look about us, we realised that
we had come very far indeed from primitive Connemara, for the first
thing which met our eyes was a huge sign:
BEWARE OF GOLF BALLS!