THE GLENS OF ANTRIM
THERE are some caves at the Causeway which are said to be well worth
visiting, but we found, next morning, that a stiff wind during the night
had kicked up such a sea that it was impossible to get to them. So we
spent the morning walking down to a beautiful beach some distance below
the hotel, and building a driftwood fire there, and watching the waves
roll in. Then, while Betty went in to read some just-arrived letters
from home, I went on along the top of the cliffs above the Causeway.
There is a path which follows the edge of the cliff closely, and a more
magnificent view I have never seen. At Chimney Point the rollers were
breaking in especial violence over the black rocks, on which one of the
galleons of the Armada went to pieces. Her name was the Gerona, and some
of her guns were rescued from the surf and added to the armament of
Dunluce castle. Legend has it that she brought her disaster upon herself
by running in too near the coast to fire at the chimney rocks, which she
mistook for the towers of Dunluce. The bay where the bodies of her crew
were washed ashore has been called Port-na-Spania ever since.
A little farther on is the uttermost point of all, Pleaskin, where the
view reaches its greatest grandeur, for one is here four hundred feet
above the sea, and on that bright, clear, wind-swept morning, I could
see the purple peaks of the Donegal coast stretching far to the west,
while to the northeast loomed the misty outline of the Scottish hills,
scarcely discernible against the sky. And all between stretched the
white-capped waters of the North Channel, with a tossing boat here and
there, and at my feet were the last black basalt outposts of Erin, with
the rollers curling over them in regular, heavy rhythm. If Ireland has
anything to show more fair I did not see it.
I went slowly back, at last, along the path, over the springy heather;
and an hour later we had said good-bye to the Causeway, and were
rattling away along a pleasant road toward Ballycastle. We were the only
voyagers, that day, so instead of the heavy bus, a side-car had been
placed at our disposal. It was the first car we had mounted since our
ride around Lough Gill; and how good it felt to settle back again into
the corner of the seat, and swing along mile after mile!
Our jarvey was an old fellow who was loquacious enough, at first, and
who stopped to show us, in a ravine not far from the Causeway, a crevice
in the rock which he said was used as a pulpit by the first Presbyterian
preacher in Ulster--for it should be remembered that for many years the
Presbyterians and other nonconformists were treated as harshly by the
established church as the Catholics were. And then we came to a little
village where the children were gathering for school, and our jarvey
stopped to water the horse, which gave us the opportunity to have a word
with the children.
And fairly surprised we were when they began to talk, for they spoke a
Scotch as broad as any to be heard in the Highlands. Their names were
Scotch, too--Fergus and Angus; and the only thing we encountered on that
drive which astonished us more were the sign-posts at the cross-roads,
the directions on which are all in Gaelic. We had seen Gaelic sign-posts
before, in the west, but they always had the direction in English, too.
Here there was no English. It is a riddle that I have never unravelled,
for I heard no Gaelic spoken here. Of course it is spoken; but so many
wayfarers along this road speak only English that I cannot understand
the contempt for them which the sign-boards indicate.
I have referred already to the Irishman's love for breakneck bridges,
and the prize one of all is at the village of Ballintoy, into which the
road drops down the steepest of hills. A little distance away along the
cliffs is an isolated rock some sixty feet from the shore, and spanning
the abyss between cliff and rock is the craziest bridge ever devised by
man. Two rings, about eighteen inches apart, have been embedded in the
rock on either side, and between these rings two ropes have been
stretched. These are lashed together at intervals by transverse cords,
and to these cords short lengths of narrow plank have been tied side by
side. For a handrail, a slender rope has been stretched between two
rings some three feet higher than the others--and there you are. It is
hardly correct to say that any of the ropes have been "stretched," for
they hang in a long curve, and in the wind that was blowing that morning
the bridge swung to and fro in the dizziest fashion. There was a crowd
of small boys at its land end, who offered to negotiate the passage for
a penny each, but we refused to pay for the privilege of seeing them
risk their lives.
And yet, probably, it would not have been risking them, for they were
used to the bridge and thought nothing of crossing it. Nay, more, the
men of the neighbourhood cross it carrying heavy burdens, for they are
fishermen and keep all their ropes and nets and even their boats out on
the rock, round which, at certain stages of the tide, the salmon circle,
so that they can be caught by nets shot out from the rock. There is no
harbour for the boats, so they have to be hoisted up to a terrace in the
rock some twenty feet above the water by means of a windlass; and then,
having made everything snug, the fishermen cross back over the bridge
with the catch on their shoulders. It need scarcely be added that I, who
had balked at the far more substantial bridges at Dromahair and Dunluce,
never for an instant thought of crossing this one.
We climbed out to the top of the cliffs again, and jogged along with the
beautiful sea to our left, and the beautiful rolling country to our
right, its meadows brilliant with the lush green of the young flax; and
then we turned back inland between high hedgerows; and the bright sun
and the soft air proved too much for our jarvey, who dropped gently to
sleep--a fact we didn't notice until the horse, after a backward glance,
stopped to take a few bites from the hedge. The driver woke with a start
and jerked the horse angrily back into the middle of the road, and then
glanced guiltily at us, but we were gazing far away into the distance;
and then he dropped off again, and again the horse, feeling the
slackened reins, stopped for a bite; and then, for fear that a
motor-cycle or something might run into us, I filled my pipe and offered
my pouch to the driver, and he filled up thankfully, and that kept him
awake until we dropped down into the beautiful old town of Ballycastle,
nestling under the high hills of Antrim. "Bally," which figures in so
many Irish place-names, is from the Gaelic "baile," meaning town or
village, and so Ballycastle is merely the Irish form of what in English
would be prosaic Castletown.
We had tea at a clean and pleasant inn, and then spent an hour wandering
about the place--to the site of the old abbey, near a sweet little
river, and then down to the shore, which has been desecrated with
golf-links; but the green slopes of Rathlin Island, just off the coast,
are very lovely, and just outside the bay the cliffs culminate in a
mighty bluff called Fairhead; and then back to the town along an avenue
of beautiful trees, for a visit to the "Home Industry Depot," a room
crowded with fantastic toys and some good wood-carving, all done in the
neighbourhood--about the only industry of any kind, so the keeper of the
shop said, now carried on in Ballycastle.
Time was when Ballycastle fancied it was destined for greatness, for a
seam of coal was discovered in the hill above the town, and an
enterprising Scotchman named Hugh Boyd leased the right to work it from
the Earl of Antrim, and built foundries and tanneries and breweries to
consume it; but unfortunately the seam turned down instead of up, Boyd
died, and nobody was found with sufficient energy to contend against so
many difficulties; so the whole enterprise dropped dead. I don't know
how the inhabitants came to turn to toy-making and wood-carving; perhaps
some expatriated Swiss settled here,--that shop certainly did remind us
of Lucerne!
There are far older memories which cluster around Ballycastle; for the
stream which ripples past the abbey was in the old days called the
Margy, and it was here, according to the most ancient of Irish legends,
that the children of Lir, King of the Isle of Man, sought shelter after
they had been turned into four white swans by their step-mother. I
should like to tell that story, but there is no space here--besides, it
has already been most nobly told by Mr. Rolleston. It will be found,
with many others, in his "High Deeds of Finn," a book I most heartily
recommend.
We were not yet at the end of our day's journey, for we had still to go
on to Cushendall, sixteen miles away, and so we went back to the hotel,
to find a long inside-car waiting. There were two other passengers,
women of the neighbourhood, who had come in to town to do some shopping;
and their gossip was most entertaining; but we dropped them before long,
and then the road mounted up and up along the valley of a little river,
which we could see gleaming far below us; and at last we came out upon a
bog as wild and desolate as any in Connemara. There were again the
familiar black cuttings, the piles of turf, and here and there a group
of men and women labouring at the wet, back-breaking work. This bog, so
our driver said, supplied the fuel for the whole district, and nobody
hereabouts ever thought of burning coal.
The road was quite deserted, save for a cart now and then, loaded high
with turf, lumbering heavily down toward the town; and presently even
these ceased, and there was no single sign of life as far as the eye
could reach--only the silent bog, desolate, vast, impressive, rolling
away into the distance with a beauty all its own--a beauty difficult to
express, but very poignant.
How high we were upon that moor we did not realise until we came to the
verge of one of the beautiful Glens of Antrim and saw, nestling away
below us, the spires and roofs of Cushendall. They were perhaps half a
mile away, but we travelled at least three miles to get down to them,
winding back and forth along the side of the glen, crossing a great
viaduct eighty feet high, past picturesque thatched houses, past the
fairy thorn which no man in the village would touch for love or money,
past a fragment of ruin which was once the castle where the MacDonnells
stood off the English; and then we turned away to the right and began to
climb again; and presently we had climbed out of Glendun into Glenaan,
and I should hate to have to decide which is the more lovely.
We emerged, at last, into more open country, with high hills at our
right pierced by shadowy valleys; and then the houses became more
frequent, and we could see the people gathering down from the fields for
the night. Twilight was at hand; but, though it must have been nearly
nine o'clock, we were amused to see that the ducks and chickens were
still pecking cheerfully about the door-steps, apparently with no
thought of retiring. Poultry, in Ireland, leads a strenuous life, for in
summer the sun rises at three and does not set till nine. Perhaps it is
these long hours which give Irish chickens an indolent air, and which
explain the frequent naps one sees them taking on the family doorstep.
The houses grew more and more frequent, until we were rattling down a
wide street of them, under an avenue of lofty trees, and knew we were at
Cushendall.
* * * * *
Some three miles west of the town, on the top of a bare and windy hill
looking down over the Glenaan valley, is a circle of stones placed
there, so legend asserts, to mark the grave of Ossian, son of Finn
MacCool, and sweet singer of the Fianna of Erin; and it was to find this
spot I set out next morning, through fine, windy weather. I knew where
the valley of the Glenaan was, for we had passed its mouth the evening
before, but as to the position of the grave itself I knew nothing. The
guide-book devoted only a vague line to it; but I have a firm belief in
my luck, and I knew I should find it somehow.
For a mile or more my road lay back over the way we had come, mounting
steadily toward the entrance to the Glenaan Valley; and I met many
little carts coming in to market, for it was Saturday; and every one who
wasn't going into town was taking advantage of the fine day by working
in the fields, or putting new coats of dazzling whitewash upon their
houses, or digging in the little flower-gardens in front of them. And
everybody was in cheerful humour and passed the time of day with the
heartiest good will.
And then I came to the entrance of the valley, and turned westward along
the road which traverses it. The mountains soon began to close in on
either hand, and the houses strung along the road or perched on narrow
plateaus grew smaller and smaller; slate gave way to thatch, stone
floors gave way to dirt ones, and the windows shrank to a single
immovable sash of four small panes. In a word, as the land grew poorer,
the people grew poorer, too; and the conditions of life seemed not so
very different from those in far Connaught. Indeed it may very well be
that this is one of those "congested districts" which are scattered over
the east of Ireland.
I stopped, at last, and asked an old man in a blue flannel smock if he
could tell me the way to Ossian's grave; and he told me to fare straight
on till I came to some stepping-stones, and to cross the stones and push
right up the hill. So I went on happily, for the air was very sweet, and
the sun just warm enough, and the great wind was driving white clouds
before it across the sky, and the sunshine in the faces of the people I
met added to the beauty of the day; and at last I came to a cluster of
thatched cottages where the little river turned in close to the road and
rippled between a row of stepping-stones; and I asked a pleasant-faced
woman if that was the way to Ossian's grave, and she said it was; to
cross the stones and go right up the hill, and I would find a house
there where I could get further directions.
The road beyond the stones ran up the hill and into the yard of a
farm-house; and in the yard there was a dog with a very savage bark; but
there was also a blue-eyed girl who quieted him, while she stared at me
curiously. I asked her the way to the grave, and she pointed up the
hill, with a little motion of her hand toward the right, and I set off
again. The road had dwindled to the merest mountain path, with a wall on
either side of earth and stones, crested with prickly gorse; but I came
to a break in it, at last, opening to the right, and scrambled through;
and then, a minute later, in the midst of a heather-carpeted field on
the very summit of the hill, I saw the grave.
It is formed of standing stones, covered with lichen and crumbling under
the storms of centuries, and the vestibule, so to speak, is a
semi-circle some twenty feet in diameter opening toward the east. Back
of this are two chambers, one behind the other, divided by two large
uprights, and I suppose it was in one of these that the body of the bard
was laid--if it was laid here at all. My own guess would be that these
weather-beaten stones, like those others on the hill beside Lough Gill,
antedate Ossian by at least two thousand years. But that is an
unimportant detail; and it may be, indeed, that when the great singer
died, his comrades could think of no more fitting place to lay him than
within the guardian circle of this monument of an older race, looking
down across the valley and out toward the sea.
Fact and fancy have been so mingled in the Ossianic legend that it is
impossible to disentangle them, nor is it profitable to try. It is
fairly certain that he was born somewhere about the middle of the third
century after Christ, and legend has it that he spent two hundred years
in the Land of Youth with Niam of the Golden-hair. When, homesick for
Erin, he returned to it, it was to find his father's courts overgrown
with grass and St. Patrick preaching there, and his disputes with
Patrick are recorded at great length in the tales of the Fenian cycle;
for Ossian bewailed the vanished days of those mighty fighters, and
wished for nothing better than to join them, in whatever world they
might be, while Patrick laboured to convert him from such heathen
fancies and to save his soul. It is to this story reference is made in
the stanza from Lionel Johnson's "Ode to Ireland," which I quoted on
page 221.
Up there on the bleak hill-top the wind was roaring; but I found a nook
between two of the great stones where it could not reach me, and I
lighted my pipe and sat there and looked down over the valley and
thought of the old days, and so spent a sweet half hour. The valley had
changed but little, I fancied, with the rolling centuries; there were
tiny, high-walled fields and low thatched houses on the lower slopes;
but above them sprang the primal hills, clothed with heather, their
bones of granite gleaming here and there, back and back over the Glens
of Antrim, through which the red tide of tribal warfare had poured so
many times. And over eastward lay Cushendall, nestling among its trees,
with the gaunt, truncated mass of Lurigethan hill overshadowing it, and
beyond that, faint and far and scarcely distinguishable from the blue
sky, lay the blue sea.
That valley and those hills belong to the Earl of Antrim--his estate
includes some thirty-five thousand acres of Irish soil, around which he
may build walls and post notices and set guards; and as I sat there
gazing out at them, I realised far more keenly than I had ever done the
absurdity of the idea that any portion of this earth's surface can
rightfully belong to any man. Trace any title back, for a hundred years,
or a thousand years, or two thousand years, and one finds that it
started in a theft--theft on the part of an individual from the tribe
which held the land in common; and the solemn farce of sale and transfer
and inheritance after that was merely the passing on of stolen goods.
Perhaps some day we may win through to the ideal of an earth belonging
equally to all men, with private right only in the things man's industry
creates.
[Illustration: THE GRAVE OF OSSIAN]
[Illustration: AN ANTRIM LANDSCAPE]
I knocked out my pipe, at last, reluctantly enough, and took the picture
of the stones which is opposite this page, but which gives a poor idea
of them; and then I started downward, through the break in the hedge,
through the farmyard, going warily for fear of the dog, and so to the
stepping-stones; and when I looked at them, I saw what a perfect picture
they made, with the stream rippling through, and the thatched cottages
beyond, with the smoke whipped from their chimneys, and a single tree
bending before the wind. That picture in miniature is opposite this
page; but I could not snare with my camera the tang of the turf, the
softness of the air, the glory of the sun, nor the murmur of the water.
Those you will have to evoke for yourself, as best you can.
In the road beyond I found a mail-carrier, who had completed his
morning-round among the hillside dwellings, and who was turning back to
Cushendall; and we went on together. He was a tall, lithe lad, as he
had need to be to get over his daily route among these hills; and, like
every one else, he hoped some day to win his way to America. He knew
many of its towns from the postmarks on the letters he carried. In the
last month, he said, there had been fully a hundred from America, and
welcome letters they were, for nearly all of them contained a bit of
money. Many of the dwellers in these hills--like thousands more all over
Ireland--would find life outside the work-house impossible but for the
help from their sons and daughters in America; and it gives one a good
feeling at the heart to think of those devoted boys and girls putting by
every month a portion of the money which was hard to win and harder
still to save, to send to the old people who were left at home.
By the side of the road, as we walked along, I saw a hovel more
primitive and comfortless than most--just a tiny hut of a single room,
dark and cold and bare; but against one end of it grew a great fuchsia
bush, clothing it with glory. A wrinkled old woman, clad in filthy
clothes, was standing in the doorway, and my companion passed the time
of day with her, while I unslung my camera, for I wanted a picture of
the tiny house and the great bush. I would have liked a picture of the
old woman, too; but she said she was too dirty, and went in until the
picture was taken which is opposite the next page. Then she came out and
asked if I would send her one. It was the first time, she said, that any
one had thought her houseen worth a picture; so I promised she should
have one, and she gave me her name, and the postman promised it should
reach her.
We went on together, after that, and I asked him what the people of the
neighbourhood thought about Home Rule.
[Illustration: A HUMBLE HOME IN ANTRIM]
[Illustration: THE OLD JAIL AT CUSHENDALL]
"The truth is, sir," he answered, "that we don't know what to think,
what with this man telling us one thing and that man another; but most
of the poor people about here would be glad to see it, for they can't be
worse off than they are, and a change might better them. Drilling and
arming? Ah, there's none of that around here; there's no army of Ulster
in these parts. That's just talk."
He left me at the crossroads, for he had still a letter or two to
deliver farther down the road, and I went on by myself toward the town.
There were more whitewashers out, and they were splashing the lime about
in the most reckless fashion, besprinkling the hedges and the shrubbery
and even the road, somewhat to the danger of the passers-by; and at the
first houses of the town I met Betty. She had been talking to the
caretaker of the churchyard about the true shamrock; and he said that it
did not grow wild thereabouts, but that he had some in a pot at home and
would be glad to bring her a spray; and he told her of a ruined church
and an old Celtic cross out along the road above the cliffs, very near,
he said--not over eight minutes' walk at the most.
So we determined to take a look at it; but first we walked about the
town a little, and found it quite an ordinary town, except for a great
square tower at the intersection of the principal streets--a tower
erected, so the tablet on it says, "as a place of confinement for
rioters and idlers." I suppose the town has a modern jail now--perhaps
even with panoptic galleries! At any rate, the tower is no longer
used. I took a picture of it, and if you will look at the picture
closely, you will see a girl drawing water from the town pump just below
the tower.
We started off finally for the ruins, first to the cliffs along the sea,
and then on along the path which runs at their very edge. The view was
very lovely, and we didn't notice how the time was flying; but I looked
at my watch presently and found that we had been walking twenty minutes,
with no ruins in sight. We pushed on ten minutes longer, and had about
given them up, when some children directed us which way to go, and we
finally found the few remaining fragments of Layd Church, so overgrown
with ivy and embowered in trees that they were scarcely recognisable as
ruins at all. The cross proved to be a very modern one; and the
graveyard is sadly neglected, with the grass knee-deep among the tombs,
which have fallen into sorry disarray. Most of them cover some long-dead
MacDonnell--they were all MacDonnells, in the old days, who lived in the
Glens of Antrim.
The "eight minute walk" had taken more than half an hour, and we had
need to hasten if we were to get back to the hotel in time for lunch,
for the car which was to take us to Larne was to start at two; but we
made it, and when the car drove up, we found it was a long outside-car
with room for five people on each side. We chose the forward end of the
side next the sea; and then the car proceeded to another hotel in the
town, where five or six more people were waiting; and the two women who
were condemned to the landward side complained bitterly. They were
making the trip, they said, just to see the sea, and here they would be
compelled to sit the whole way facing the blank cliff.
"Sure, there's nothing I can do, miss," said the jarvey, who had
listened sympathetically; "I can't make the car any longer, now can I?
Maybe you might be glancin' over your shoulder from time to time; anyway
I'm thinkin' you'll be seein' enough of the sea before you're home
again."
And with that they had to be consoled.
The road runs inland for about a mile beyond Cushendall, and then turns
down close to the shore of Red Bay, a vast amphitheatre of red sandstone
cliffs, in whose face the road is cut. At the deepest point of the
circle, where the Vale of Glenariff opens up into the mountains, is
clustered a little village of white houses; and then the road runs on
round the base of towering precipices; and suddenly the red sandstone
changes to chalk, and the water washing against the shore, which has
been a lovely green, turns milky white, with outstanding pinnacles of
chalk, worn to fantastic shapes, keeping guard above it.
We had noticed an increasing crowd upon the road, all walking or riding
southwards; and presently two barefooted boys jumped up on the footboard
and asked if they might ride a little way; and they told us that there
was a circus at Carnlough to which every one was going; and they each
had the tuppence necessary for admission gripped in a grimy fist, and
were very excited indeed. Carnlough, as we soon found, is a small town
consisting principally of a curving beach, where a few people were
bathing; and the white tent of Duffy's Circus--a much larger affair than
Buff Bill's--was pitched close beside the road. The urchins dropped off
and made for the entrance; and as we passed, we caught a strain of "The
Stars and Stripes Forever," painfully rendered by the circus band.
We rolled on around another wide bay, and came to Glenarm, where we
paused to change horses; and then on again, under the white cliffs, past
quarries where flint and chalk are mined for the Belfast market; and
always at our feet lay the Irish Sea, stretching away to the dim
horizon, its colour changing with every passing cloud. In and out the
road circled, following the long curves of the coast; past the ruins of
a castle which O'Halloran, a famous outlaw, built for himself on the top
of a small rock with the sea washing round it; past another amphitheatre
where the rocks change back from chalk to basalt; through a short tunnel
and so to Larne.
The most interesting thing about Larne is its handsome new harbour built
for the express steamers which cross several times daily to Stranrear,
the shortest of the routes to Scotland. Edward Bruce chose this route
when he came over with an army of six thousand men to help the Irish
drive the English from Ireland, as his brother Robert had driven them
from Scotland the year before at Bannockburn. It was in May, 1315, that
the Scotch drew up in battle array along this strand; and a year later
Bruce was crowned King of Ireland; but though at first he drove the
Normans before him, his own army was gradually worn down by privation
and disease, and he himself was killed at the battle of Faughart. So
ended one more Irish dream!
We changed at Larne from road to rail, and were soon rolling southward,
still close beside the water, past a string of seaside resorts, each of
which added its quota of passengers--perspiring men and women and tired
but happy children; and so we came to the old town of Carrickfergus,
with its magnificent castle overlooking Belfast Lough. Its great square
keep, ninety feet high, looked most imposing in the gathering
twilight--how many assaults had it withstood in the seven centuries of
its existence! Bruce captured it, but the MacDonnells failed. Schomberg,
William's general, had better luck, and it was on the quay below it that
the great Orangeman first set foot in Ireland. It has some American
associations, too; for John Paul Jones sailed his good ship _Ranger_
under its walls in 1778, and captured the British ship-of-war _Drake_.
Murray, good British guide-book that it is, refers to the founder of the
American navy as "the pirate Paul Jones." But we can afford to smile at
that!
Carrickfergus is doubtless worth a visit, though the castle is used as
an ordnance depot now, and visitors are admitted only to the outer
court. But even that would be worth seeing; and the town possesses an
old church, and some fragments of its old walls, and doubtless many
interesting old houses. I am sorry we did not spend a day there.
But our train rolled on, close beside the border of Belfast Lough, and
presently, far ahead, we saw the gleaming spires and clustered roofs of
the citadel of Ulster.