THE BRIDGE OF THE GIANTS
THERE is no busier place in Derry than the stretch of quays along the
river, and one may see ships there not only from England and Belgium and
France, but from Australia and Argentina and India and Brazil. The river
is wide and deep, with the channel carefully marked by a line of buoys
extending clear out into Lough Foyle; but there are no better facilities
here for shipping than at any one of half a dozen ports along the
western coast, all of which are silent and deserted. For a port is of no
use unless there is something to ship out of it in exchange for the
things which are shipped in, or money to pay for them--and there is
neither in the west of Ireland.
And, just as there is no more dismal sight than a line of deserted
quays, so there is no more interesting sight than a line of busy ones,
and we loitered for a long time, next morning, along those of Derry, on
our way to the Midland station, on the other side of the river. There is
a big iron bridge across the river just above the quays, but that seemed
a long way around, so when we came to a sign-board announcing a ferry we
stopped. My first thought was that the ferry-boat was on the other side;
then I perceived a small motor-propelled skiff moored beside the quay,
and one of the two men in it asked me if we were looking for the ferry,
and I said yes, and he said that that was it.
So we clambered down into the boat and started off; and I scarcely think
that that trip paid, for we were the only passengers, and the river is
wide, and gasolene is expensive, and somebody had to pay the men their
wages--and the fare is only a penny.
The part of the town which lies east of the river is industrial and
unattractive. There are some big distilleries there, and a lot of mills
and a fish-market, and row upon row of dingy dwellings; but the biggest
building of all is the workhouse--one point, at least, in which the
towns of the north resemble those of the south. There is another point,
too--the jail, without which no Irish town is complete. Derry has one of
which it is very proud--the latest word in jails, in fact--a great,
circular affair, with the cells arranged in so-called "panoptic"
galleries, that is in such a fashion that the guards stationed in the
centre of the jailyard can see into all of them.
But we had crossed the river not to see the town which lay beyond it,
but to take train for Portrush, and we were soon rolling northward close
beside the bank of the river, with a splendid view of "The Maiden on her
hill, boys," on the opposite shore, dominated by the cathedral tower and
Walker's white monument. Just before the river begins to widen into the
lough, the train passes the ruins of an old castle of the O'Dohertys,
standing on a point which juts out into the water--a castle which saw
rather more than its share of siege and sally; for this is Culmore,
which was always the first point of attack when any expedition advanced
against Derry.
Beyond it the water widens, and on the farther shore, which is
Inishowen, there are pretty villas, standing in luxuriant woods--the
homes of some of Derry's wealthy citizens. Then the train turned inland
across a stretch of country so flat and carefully cultivated that it
might have been Holland; and then the hills began to crowd closer and
closer to the shore, until the train was running along its very edge,
under precipitous crags, past grotesque pinnacles of white chalk or
black basalt, and fantastic caverns worn in the cliffs by the
century-long action of the waves. For that stretch of blue water
stretching away to the north, so calm and beautiful, was the Atlantic,
and it thunders in upon this coast, sometimes, with a fury even the
rocks cannot withstand.
We turned away from it, at last, up the wide estuary of the River Bann,
and so we came to Coleraine, chiefly connected in my mind with that
beautiful Kitty, who, while tripping home from the fair one morning with
a pitcher of buttermilk, looked at Barney MacCleary instead of at the
path, and stumbled and let the pitcher drop; but, instead of crying over
the spilt milk, accepted philosophically the kiss which Barney gave her;
with the result that
"very soon after poor Kitty's disaster
The divil a pitcher was whole in Coleraine."
Among the innumerable other laws for which Lloyd-George is responsible,
there is one requiring all the shop-keepers of the United Kingdoms to
close their places of business one afternoon every week in order to give
their employes a short vacation; and in every town the shop-keepers get
together and decide which afternoon it shall be; and if you arrive in
the town on that afternoon, you will find every shop closed tight, often
to your great inconvenience. It was Thursday afternoon when we reached
Coleraine, and Thursday is closing day there; and we found that not only
were the shops closed, but the train schedule was so altered that we had
a long wait ahead of us.
But we were richly compensated for the delay, for, as we started out to
explore the town, we saw written in chalk on a wall just outside the
station,
To hell with the pope!
and under it in another hand,
To hell with King Billy!
and then a third hand had added,
God save King Will! No more pope!
I had heard, of course, that the accepted retort for Catholics to make,
when the Pope was insulted, was to consign William of Orange to the
infernal regions; but such a retort seemed so weak and ineffective that
I could hardly believe in its reality. Yet here it was, and some
Orangeman had paused long enough to add what is probably the usual third
article of the controversy. What the fourth article is I can't guess;
perhaps it is at this point that the cudgels rise and the rocks begin to
fly. And it seems to me characteristic of Ireland that the Catholic in
this case, instead of erasing the offending sentence, should have let it
stand and answered it in kind.
Cheered and heartened by this encounter, we walked on to look at
Coleraine, but found it an uninteresting manufacturing town, with
nothing in it of historical importance, for it is one of the plantations
made by the London Companies, some time after 1613. It was closed as
tightly, that afternoon, as on a Sunday, and we soon wearied of looking
at ugly houses and silent factories, and made our way back to the
station, meditating upon that black day for the Irish when this whole
county, having been duly confiscated, was made over by royal edict to
the hundred London adventurers, whose heirs or assigns still own it. Yet
the conquest had one advantage: the O'Dohertys and the O'Cahans knew
only the arts of war; the newcomers brought with them the arts of peace.
One of them was distilling, and the Irish had never drunk such whiskey
as the "Coleraine" which was produced here in the succeeding years.
There is no more popular story in this region than that of the priest
who was preaching a temperance sermon, and, after pointing out the evils
of over-indulgence, continued with great earnestness, "And, me boys,
'tis the bad stuff you be takin' that does the worst of the mischief. I
niver touch a drop meself--but the best Coleraine!"
We got away from Coleraine, at last, and ran northward toward the sea
again, across uneven sand-drifts, past Port Stewart, where Charles Lever
was once a dispensary doctor and occupied his leisure hours, which were
many, in setting down the adventures of Harry Lorrequer; and then the
road ran on close beside the sea to Portrush, with its pleasant beach
and rock-bound bathing-pool, which was full of people on this holiday.
But Portrush is a place of summer hotels, so we did not linger there,
but transferred quickly to the electric line which runs on to the
Giant's Causeway, fourteen miles away.
This line was established in 1883, and so is the oldest electric road in
the world; and I judge that it is still using the cars it started out
with. At least, the two which composed the train that day were
exceedingly primitive; one was open and the other was closed, and you
took your choice. We chose the open one, of course, on the side
overlooking the sea; and presently we started through the town, a man
ringing a bell with one hand and waving a flag with the other, preceding
us to make certain the track was clear. The bell, I suppose, is for
blind people and the flag for deaf people, and the fact that the man is
armed with both proves how thorough the Irish can be when they really
put their minds to it.
Although the line has been in operation for thirty years, it is still
evidently regarded with fear and wonder by the people who live along it.
Time was when the power was conveyed by means of the "third rail," so
common in the United States. With us, however, the rail is only used
along a guarded right-of-way. Here it was exposed close up by the fence
at the roadside, and though it was well out of the way, it was
nevertheless stumbled over by many men and beasts, with the usual
result. There were many protests, and in the course of fifteen or twenty
years, the Board of Trade was moved to investigate.
The evidence at the hearing was most conflicting. The people of the
neighbourhood asserted that their lives were in constant danger. The
company, on the other hand, claimed that no sober man would ever step
on the rail, since to get to it he had to cross the tracks. The people
of the neighbourhood protested indignantly against this reflection upon
their habits, and asked triumphantly if the horses and cows and other
poor beasts that were killed were also drunk. The company retorted that,
so far as the horses and cows were concerned, it was the practice of the
natives, for miles around, whenever they had an animal about to die, to
lead or, if it was unable to walk, to haul it to the railway, and prop
it against the fence with a foot on the rail, and then to demand
compensation for its death. There was, perhaps, a grain of truth in
this; but the board, nevertheless, ordered the company to take up the
rail and substitute an overhead wire for it, and this has been done.
The only way the natives can get damages now is to inveigle a car to run
into them, and this is well-nigh impossible, for the cars are run very
slowly and carefully, and at every curve there is a signal cabin, where
a watchful guard, armed with a red flag and a white one, keeps careful
eyes upon the track.
We were just gathering speed outside the town, when we saw in a near-by
field an aggregation whose bills had attracted our attention, more than
once, in our journeyings about Ireland. It was "Buff Bill's Circus," and
the picturesqueness of its lithographs had made us most anxious to see
it. Here it was, at last, and it consisted of three tiny tents and one
van and three or four horses, and five or six people, who at this moment
were eating their midday meal, seated on the ground about a sheet-iron
stove, while the youngsters of the neighbourhood looked on. I am sorry
we did not get to see the show, for I am sure we should have enjoyed
it.
Then the road mounted to a terrace high above the sea, and the views
over coast and water were superb. The effects of erosion are especially
fantastic, and the line passes fretted spires, and yawning caverns, and
deep gullies and mighty arches, all worn in the chalk and basalt cliffs
by the ceaseless action of the waves; and at one place there is a
grotesque formation which does indeed, as may be seen from the picture
opposite the next page, resemble a "Giant's Head."
And there is one most picturesque ruin, for, ten miles out from
Portrush, all that is left of Dunluce castle overhangs the sea from the
summit of a precipitous rock, separated from the mainland by a deep
chasm. The chasm is twenty feet wide, and in days of old there was a
drawbridge over it; but the bridge has disappeared, and now there is
just an arch of masonry about two feet wide and without protection of
any sort. It takes a steady head to cross it, but the Irish are fond of
just such breakneck bridges. The castle itself, with its roofless gables
and jagged walls, seems a part of the rock on which it is built. It is
said to possess a banshee, and one can well believe it!
Dunluce is interesting because it was once a stronghold of the Scotch
invaders who succeeded in conquering all this northeast coast of Ireland
from here around to Carlingford Lough, away below Belfast. Scotland is
only a few miles away across the North Channel--one can see its coast on
a clear day from the cliffs above Benmore; and it was natural enough
that there should be sailing back and forth. Owen, first lord of
Tyrone, brought a wife from Scotland--that Aileach, after whom he named
his fortress; and they had many children, one of whom went back to
Scotland and became the head of that princedom whose chief afterwards
called himself "Lord of the Isles." In Ireland, the family was
O'Donnell; but in Scotland the members of Clandonnell were not Os but
Macs. Angus MacDonnell married a daughter of the great house of O'Cahan,
and by this means and by that, the Scotch gradually won a foothold on
the Irish coast and built castles up and down it; and finally, in a
pitched battle, defeated the Irish who held the land about Dunluce and
had built this castle here.
[Illustration: THE "GIANT'S HEAD," NEAR PORTRUSH]
[Illustration: THE RUINS OF DUNLUCE CASTLE]
It was besieged and captured after that, once by the Irish under Shane
O'Neill, and once by the English under Sir John Perrot; and during the
troubled times of the Commonwealth and Restoration fell into ruins and
was never restored--partly, no doubt, because it was no longer safe; for
one night in 1639, there was a great party in the castle, and a storm
arose, and the waves dashed against the rock below it, and suddenly part
of the rock gave way and carried the kitchen and eight servants down
into the abyss.
Just beyond the castle, the road rounds a point and runs down into the
valley of the Bush River, where stands the little town of Bushmills,
known all over the world because of the whiskey which is made there; and
then it passes a great house on a cliff overlooking the sea, Runkerry
Castle; and then high up on the slope ahead loom two big hotels, and the
tram stops, for this is the Causeway.
Both the hotels at the Causeway are owned by the same man, but each
maintains its runner, and each runner makes a lively bid for your
custom; and then, when you have made your choice and started toward it,
you will suddenly be conscious of a rough voice speaking over your
shoulder, and you will turn to find a man striding at your heels, a man
unshaven and clad in nondescript clothes; and if you listen very
attentively you will presently understand that he is offering to guide
you about the Causeway.
Everybody in the vicinity of the Causeway makes his living off the
people who visit it, and the favourite profession is that of guide. Now
a guide is wholly unnecessary, for a broad road leads directly to the
Causeway, and once there it is simply a question of using one's eyes.
But from the persistence of the guides, one would think there was great
danger of getting lost, or of falling overboard, or of experiencing some
other horrible misfortune, if one ventured there unattended. Every guide
carries also in his waistcoat pocket one or more fossils, which he found
himself and prizes very highly, but is willing to sell for a small sum,
as a personal favour. When his supply is exhausted, he goes and buys
some more from the syndicate which ships them in in quantity.
For it should be remembered that the Causeway is as strictly organised
for profit and as carefully exploited as is Killarney.
As soon as we had arranged for our room, we set off for the Causeway,
running the gauntlet of guides posted on both sides of the road. Then a
man with a pony-cart wanted to drive us to our destination, and one
would have thought, from the way he spoke, that it was a long and
trying journey; then we refused three or four offers of fossils and
postcards; and finally we found ourselves alone on a road which swept
round the edge of a great amphitheatre of cliff; and the face of that
cliff is worth examining, for it is formed of the lava flow from some
long-extinct crater, and the successive flows, separated by the
so-called ochre beds, or strata of dark-red volcanic ash, can be plainly
distinguished. The road gradually drops, until it is quite near the sea;
and then it passes a number of shanties, from which old women issue to
waylay the passer-by with offers of fossils and post-cards and various
curios; and then the visitor is confronted by a high wire fence, beyond
which, if he looks closely, he will see a little neck of land running
out into the water--and that is the celebrated Giant's Causeway.
[Illustration: THE GIANT'S CAUSEWAY]
[Illustration: THE CLIFFS BEYOND THE CAUSEWAY]
It is so small and so seemingly insignificant that Betty and I stared at
it through the fence with a distinct shock of disappointment; then we
went on to the gate, paid the sixpence which is extorted from every
visitor, registered ourselves on the turnstile, and entered.
The misfortune of the Causeway is that its fame is too great. The
visitor, expecting to see something magnificent and grandiose, is rather
dashed at first to find how small it is; but after a few minutes'
wandering over the queer columns of basalt, this feeling passes, and one
begins to realise that it is really one of the wonders of the world. I
am not going to describe it--every one has seen photographs of it, or if
any one hasn't, he will find some opposite this page; and the
photographs picture it much better than I can.
There are some forty thousand of the pillars, the guide-book says;
five-sided or six-sided for the most part, averaging, I should say,
about fifteen inches in diameter, and so close together that a lead
pencil is too thick to be thrust between them. The pillars are divided
into regular, worm-like segments, some six or eight inches thick, and
there are quite a lot of segments lying about, broken off from the
columns. The whole bed is said by geologists to be nothing but a
lava-flow, which broke up into these columnar shapes when it cooled and
contracted.
The native Irish have a far better explanation than that. In the old
days, the mighty Finn MacCool, annoyed at the boasting of a Caledonian
rival on the hills across the channel, invited him to step over and see
which was the better man. And the giant said he would be glad to come
over and show Finn a thing or two, if it wasn't for wetting his feet. So
Finn, in a rage, built a causeway right over to Scotland, and the Scotch
giant came across on it; and of course Finn beat him well (for this is
an Irish legend); but with that generosity which has always been
characteristic of Irishmen after they have whipped their opponents, he
permitted his humbled rival to choose a wife from the many fair girls of
the neighbourhood, and to build him a house and settle down; which the
Scotch giant was very glad to do; for every one knows that the Scotch
women are rough and hard-bitten, also that Scotland is a land of mist
and snow, not fair like Ireland, which has always been the loveliest
country in the world. And presently, since the causeway wasn't needed
any more and impeded navigation, Finn gave it a kick with the foot of
him and sunk it in the sea, all but this little end against the Irish
coast. And there it stands unto this day to witness if I lie.
Whatever you think of the Causeway, you will certainly be impressed when
you pass out between the clustered columns of the Giant's Gateway, and
start on the walk under the beetling cliffs beyond. The narrow path
mounts up and up, under overhanging masses of columnar stone, which all
too evidently crashes down from time to time, for there are great piles
of debris below, and the path is either swept away in places or recently
repaired; so most visitors hurry past with one eye upward, and the other
contemplating the beauty of the scene below.
At least we did; and then we came out at Chimney Point, crowned with its
chimney-like columns--a mass of basalt on top of a red ochre bed. And
here there was a seat where we sat down to contemplate one of the most
impressive views in Ireland--a combination of blue sea and white surf
and black crag and columned cliff not soon to be forgotten.
We went on, at last, around the point of the cliff, where the path
overhangs the depths below and is guarded by an iron railing; on and on,
past clusters of columns named looms or organ pipes, or whatever Irish
fancy may have suggested; and at last we turned slowly back, and spent
another half hour at the Causeway, hunting out the wishing-chair, and
the giant's cannon, and Lord Antrim's parlour--all of which may easily
be found; and then we took a drink from the giant's well, a spring of
pure, cold water, bubbling up from among the rocks; and so back to the
hotel and to dinner.