THE GRAVE OF ST. PATRICK
THE shops of Belfast, with their embroidered linens (duty, forty-five
per cent!), proved a magnet too great for Betty to resist, but I hied me
away, next day, into County Down, on a pilgrimage to the grave which is
said to hold the three great apostles of Erin--Saint Brigid and Saint
Patrick and Saint Columba. It is in the churchyard of the village of
Downpatrick that the grave lies, and the thirty mile run thither from
Belfast is through a green and fertile country covered with broad fields
of flax. There are raths and tumuli here and there, and a few ruins
topping the neighbouring slopes, but it is not until one reaches
Downpatrick that one comes upon a really impressive memorial of the old
days.
The cathedral is visible long before the train reaches the town,
standing on the edge of a high bluff overlooking the valley of the
Quoile, and it was to it I made my way from the station, up a very steep
street, for Downpatrick, following the fashion of Irish towns, is built
on the side of a hill--and also follows the fashion in having an Irish
Street and an English Street and even a Scotch Street, the surviving
names, I suppose, of the quarters where the people of those various
nations once lived close together for mutual protection.
The cathedral was locked, as Protestant churches have a way of being;
but the caretaker lives near by and came running when his wife told him
that there was a strange gentleman wished to see the church. He was a
very Scotch Irishman, and as he took me around the bare, white interior,
he said proudly: "There's not much high church about this. Not a bit of
flummery will we have here--no candles or vestments or anything of that
sort. Our people wouldn't stand it--it savours too much of Romanism."
"And yet," I said, "it was Saint Patrick who founded this very church,
and you have him and Saint Brigid and Saint Columba buried in your
churchyard."
"Yes, and we're proud to have them," he retorted quickly, "for they
weren't Romanists--they were just Christians, and good ones, too. The
Protestants of Ireland can honour Patrick and Brigid just as much as the
Catholics do. It wasn't till long after their day that the Irish church
made submission to Rome."
There is a modicum of truth in this, for, though it is probable that St.
Patrick was regularly ordained a bishop and is even sometimes asserted
to have been sent on his mission by Pope Celestine himself, the ties
which bound Irish Catholics to Rome were for many centuries very slight
indeed, and it was not until after the Norman conquest that the
authority of Rome was fully acknowledged; and this independence has
persisted, in a way, even to the present day; for while Irish Catholics,
of course, acknowledge absolutely the supremacy of the Holy See in all
spiritual affairs, they have always been quick to resent its
interference in things temporal, and their tolerance toward other
religions than their own stands almost unique in history. It is,
perhaps, a racial characteristic, for the Pagan Irish, during all the
years of Patrick's mission among them, never seriously persecuted him
and never slew a Christian.
Here at the spot where that mission began it is fitting that I should
say a word of it. Of Saint Patrick himself very little is certainly
known, for he was a man of deeds and not of words, and left no record of
his life; but there seems no valid reason to doubt the traditional
account of him; that he was born at Kilpatrick, in Scotland, somewhere
about 390; that his father was a Roman citizen and a Christian; that,
when about sixteen years of age, he was captured by a band of raiding
Irish, carried back to Ireland as a slave, sold to an Ulster chief named
Milcho, and for six years tended his master's flocks on the slopes of
Slemish, one of the Antrim hills. In the end he escaped and made his way
back to his home in Britain; but once there his thoughts turned back to
Erin, and in his dreams he heard the cries of the Pagan Irish imploring
him to return, bearing the torch of Christianity.
The voices grew too strong to be resisted, and in 432 he was back on the
Irish coast again, having in the meantime been ordained a bishop of the
Catholic Church; and he sailed along the coast until he came to
Strangford Lough, where he turned in and landed. His purpose was to go
back to Slemish and ransom himself from the master from whom he had
escaped, but he paused at a large sabhall, or barn, and said his first
Mass on Irish soil. It was to that spot he afterwards returned, when the
hand of death was upon him, to end his days; and the little village
that stands there is Sabhall, or Saul, to this day. He went on, after
that, to the great dun, or fort, of the kings of Ulster, which we
ourselves shall visit presently, and from which Downpatrick takes its
name. Then, finding his old master dead, he began his life-work. His
success was so extraordinary that at the end of thirty years, the
conversion of the Irish was complete.
[Illustration: THE GRAVE OF PATRICK, BRIGID AND COLUMBA]
[Illustration: THE OLD CROSS AT DOWNPATRICK]
At last, feeling his end near, he made his way back to the sanctuary at
Saul, died there, and was brought for burial to this bluff overlooking
the great rath below. Legend has it that Saint Brigid wove his
winding-sheet. She herself, when she died, was buried before the high
altar of her church at Kildare; and there are two stories of why her
body was removed to St. Patrick's grave. One is that, in 878, her
followers, fearing that her grave would be desecrated by the Danes,
removed her body to Downpatrick and buried it in the grave with the
great apostle, where the remains of St. Columba had been brought from
Iona and placed nearly two centuries before for the same reason. The
other story is that the bones of St. Brigid and St. Columba both were
brought here in 1185 by John de Courcy, to whom Ulster had been granted
by the English king,--and who had surprised and captured Downpatrick
eight years previously,--in the hope of conciliating the people he had
conquered. Either story may be true; but all that need concern us now is
that there seems to be no question that the three great apostles of
Ireland really do lie at rest within this grave.
De Courcy enlarged the cathedral, which, before that, had been a poor
affair, dedicated it to Saint Patrick, and caused effigies of the
three saints to be placed above the east window with a Latin couplet
over them:
Hi tres in duno, tumulo tumulantur in uno
Brigida, Patritius, atque Columba pius.
The stone which marks the grave is in the yard just outside the
church--a great, irregular monolith of Mourne granite, weatherworn and
untouched by human hand, except for an incised Celtic cross and the word
"Patric" in rude Celtic letters--one monument, at least, in Ireland
which is wholly dignified and worthy.
One other thing of antiquarian interest there is near by, and that is an
ancient cross, said to have stood originally on the fort of the King of
Ulster, but removed by De Courcy and set up in front of his castle in
the centre of the town, as a sign of his sovereignty, where it was
knocked to pieces when the castle was. The fragments have been put
together, and battered and worn as it is, the carvings can still be
dimly seen--the crucifixion in the centre, with stiff representations of
Bible scenes below. It is ruder than most, as may be seen from the
photograph opposite page 522, for the circle which surrounds the cross
is merely indicated and not cut through. There has been much controversy
as to the origin of this circle, which is the distinctive feature of the
Celtic cross; but I have never yet seen any theory which seemed anything
more than a guess--and not a particularly good guess, either.
Of the first church which was built here not a trace remains, and even
of the structure of 1137 there is little left. For Downpatrick, with the
priories and monasteries and hospitals and convents and other religious
establishments which had grown up around the sacred grave of the saints,
was one of the first objects of attack when Henry VIII began his
suppression of the religious houses. Lord Grey marched hither at the
head of a regiment of soldiers and plundered the place and set fire to
it, so that only an empty shell was left. The crumbling and blackened
ruin stood undisturbed for more than two hundred years, and when its
restoration was finally undertaken, it was found that only five arches
of the nave were solid enough to be retained. So the present structure
is only about a century old, except for that one stretch of wall and a
recessed doorway under the east window. The old effigies of Brigid and
Patrick and Columba, which Grey pulled down and knocked to pieces, have
been replaced in the niches above the window, but they are sadly
mutilated. In the vestry is a portrait of Jeremy Taylor, who was Bishop
of Down for nearly seventy years, but there is little else of interest
in the church. The most imposing thing about it is its position at the
edge of the high bluff, looking out across the valley of the Quoire to
the Mourne mountains.
Just to the north of this bluff and almost in its shadow, close to the
bank of a little stream, still stands the enormous rath built two
thousand years ago by Celtchair, one of the heroes of the Red Branch of
Ulster, and here he and the chiefs who came after him had their
stronghold. So great was its fame that Ptolemy, in far off Egypt, heard
of it, and it was gradually enlarged and strengthened until there were
few in Ireland to equal it. The sea helped to guard it, for at high tide
the water flowed up over the flats along the Quoile and lapped against
it; but the erection of sluice-gates farther down the stream has shut
away the tide, and it stands now in the midst of a marsh.
To get to it, one passes along the wall of the jail--one of the largest
I had seen anywhere in Ireland, and which Murray proudly says cost
$315,000--and scrambles down into the marsh, and there before one is the
rath. My picture of it, the top one opposite the next page, was taken
from close beside the jail, many hundreds of yards away, and gives no
idea of its size, except for the thread-like path which you may perceive
running up one end, which is two or three feet wide, and fully seventy
feet long.
The rath is an immense circular rampart of earth, nearly three quarters
of a mile in circumference, fifty feet high, and so steep that I had
great difficulty in getting up it, even by the path. Around it runs a
fosse or ditch some forty feet wide and nine or ten feet deep. This, of
course, was deeper in the old days, and would remain filled with water
even when the tide was out. Inside the circular rampart, the ground
drops some twenty feet into a large enclosure, near the centre of which
a great mound, surrounded by a ditch ten feet deep, towers sixty feet
into the air.
The central mound corresponds to the keep or donjon tower of more modern
forts, the last place of refuge and defence when the outer ramparts had
been forced; and it was on this mound that the dwellings of the chiefs
stood, rude enough, no doubt, though they were the palaces of kings. The
tribal huts clustered in the enclosure about the foot of the mound; and
so perfectly is the whole place preserved--though of course there is
now no trace of hut or palace--that one has little difficulty in
picturing the busy life which went on there--the throngs of men and
women and children, the tribal council gathered on the summit of the
great mound to listen to the chief, the departure of expeditions for war
or for the chase, the arrival of envoys from some other chieftain or
perhaps of some minstrel, his harp slung across his shoulder. . . .
[Illustration: THE GREAT RATH AT DOWNPATRICK]
[Illustration: THE INNER AND OUTER CIRCLES]
[Illustration: THE CENTRAL MOUND]
I tore myself away, at last, for there was another place I wished to
visit, and it was three miles distant--the Holy Wells of Struell. The
caretaker at the cathedral had pointed out the route, so I climbed back
past the prison, and went down through the town and up Irish Street
beyond, and over Gallows Hill, where some unfortunate Irishmen were
hanged during the rebellion of '98. The road beyond ran between high
hedge-rows and under arching trees, whose shade was very grateful, for
the day was the hottest I had experienced in Ireland; and then it
crossed the white high-road and ran close under a long stretch of wall
which surrounded an enormous and ornate building. I asked a passer-by
what it was, and he answered that it was a madhouse, and big as it was,
was none too big. Murray supplies the information that it cost half a
million.
There is a workhouse in the town which, from the look of it, must have
cost $300,000--or say a million dollars for the three together, the
jail, the workhouse and the asylum, every cent of it, of course, raised
by taxation from the poorest people in the world! Sadly pondering this,
I went on along the lane, and the heat made the way seem very long. But
a girl I met assured me that I had not much farther to go--only past
the farm at the foot of the hill; and presently I came to the farm, a
handsome one, with the dwelling-house surrounded by well-built barns and
stables, and a man there directed me to the wells, down a little
by-road. Five minutes later, I had reached the rude stone huts which
cover the Holy Wells of Struell.
Down the middle of a pretty valley, a small stream leaps from rock to
rock, pausing here and there in little pools, and these pools are the
"wells." Each of them is protected by a stone-walled, stone-roofed cell,
built in the old days when the wells were in their glory, and now
falling to decay. Just beyond the wells is a group of thatched cottages,
and a girl of eight or nine, seeing my approach, hurried out from one of
them and volunteered to act as guide, scenting, of course, the chance to
earn a penny. And she took me first to what she said was the
drinking-well, a little grass-grown pool in a fence-corner, and though
she seemed to expect me to drink, I didn't, for the water looked stale
and scummy.
Then we climbed a wall, and walked over to a stone cubicle, which stood
in the middle of a potato patch. This is the eye-well, and the cell over
it is just large enough to permit a person to enter and kneel down above
the water and bathe the affected parts. I took a picture of it which you
will find opposite the next page. Then she led me to the largest well of
all, the body well, or well of sins, where it is necessary to undress
and immerse the whole body.
The stone building over the body well is divided into two parts by a
solid wall, and one part is for men and the other for women. The
disrobing is done in the outer chamber, which has a low stone bench
running around three sides, and then the penitent enters a small inner
chamber, descends some six or seven steps into the pool of water, and, I
suppose, places himself below the stream which falls into the pool from
the end of a pipe. As its name indicates, this well was supposed to have
the power of washing away all disease, both physical and moral, and time
was when it was very popular. The effect of the cold bath was so
exhilarating, and the sudden sense of freedom from sin and disease so
uplifting, that the penitents would sometimes rush forth to proclaim
their blessed state without pausing to resume their garments. Naturally
a lot of impious Orangemen would gather to see the fun; and finally both
the secular authorities and the Catholic clergy set their faces against
the practices, with the result that they gradually fell into disuse.
Only single pilgrims, or small companies, at most, come now to bathe in
the magic waters, and their behaviour is most circumspect. The cells,
themselves, are well-nigh in ruins. A chapel to Saint Patrick, from whom
these waters derive their efficacy, was begun during the day of their
popularity, but was never finished, and now only a fragment of it
remains.
[Illustration: THE EYE WELL AT STRUELL]
[Illustration: THE WELL OF SINS AT STRUELL]
While I was manoeuvring for a photograph of the well of sins, a
middle-aged woman came out of a near-by cottage to advise me where to
stand. She had seen many pictures taken of the well, she said, and the
place that made the best picture was on top of the wall around her
garden, and I climbed up on it, and found that she was right.
"'Tis a warm day," she went on, when I descended, "and your honour must
be tired with the long walk. Will you not come in and sit a spell?"
"Thank you," I said; "I'll be glad to--it _is_ hot," and I followed her
into a lovely old kitchen, with floor of flags, and whitewashed walls
gleaming with pots and pans, and with a tall dresser in one corner
glittering with a brave array of china. In here it was quite cool, so
that after the first moment, the open grate of glowing coals, with the
usual bubbling pot above it and the usual kettle on the hob, felt very
pleasant.
I expressed surprise that she was burning coal, and she said the
landlords of the neighbourhood had shut up the peat-bogs, in order to
make every one buy English coal; and it was very hard indeed on the poor
people, who had always been used to getting their fuel for the labour of
cutting it, besides shutting them off from earning a little money by
selling the turf to the people in the town, who would rather have it
than coal. But the landlords were always doing things like that, and it
did no good to complain. She had two brothers in America, she said, and
lived here at Struell and kept house for a third. She and her brother
were both unmarried, and would probably always remain so. Then, of
course, she wanted to know about my condition in life, and I described
it as freely as she had described her own. And then she asked me if I
wouldn't like a glass of milk, and when I said I would, she hastened to
get it from the milk-house, through which a clear little stream
trickled, and very sweet and cool it was.
And then we got to talking about Ulster's attitude toward Home Rule.
County Down, you should remember, is one of the nine counties which form
the Province of Ulster, and is the most strongly Protestant of all of
them outside of Belfast and Antrim, for only about one third of its
200,000 people are Catholic.
"God knows what will happen," said my hostess, very seriously. "I have
been hearing a lot of wild talk, but paid no heed to it, for these
Orangemen are always talkin' about this or that, and their talk means
nothing. But I've come to think it may be more than just talk this time.
I heard a few days since that all the Orangemen hereabouts have been
getting together three evenings every week in a meadow over beyont, and
an officer of the army comes there and drills them till it is too dark
to see. And they say, too, that there is a gun ready for each of them,
with plenty of powder and lead to put into it; and they've sleuthered a
lot of poor boys into joinin' with them who have not the courage to say
no. But I'm hoping it will pass by, and that no trouble will come of it.
I am a Catholic myself, but we have never had any trouble with the
Protestants. We get along very well together, and why shouldn't we? Some
of my best friends are Protestants, and I know they wish us no harm. No,
no, we are well-placed here, though them ones in the south do be calling
us the black north."
I told her something of the destitution and misery I had seen in the
south and west; but she showed no great sympathy--rather a contempt, I
fancied, for people who could be so easy-going and unambitious. She
herself seemed of a very different breed; and the shining kitchen, as
clean as a new pin, proved what a delight and pride she took in her
home and how energetic a housewife she was. Personally she was just as
clean and tidy as her kitchen, with hair neatly brushed and a bit of
white about her throat; and the apron she had on was a fresh one,
newly-ironed--something I never saw upon any peasant woman of the south.
She brought out an album of photographs, presently--photographs of
herself and of her brother, and various photographs of the wells, and I
promised to send her a print of mine, if it proved to be a good one. And
then I bade her good-bye and started back the way I came; but I can
still see her shrewd and kindly face, with the little wrinkles at the
corners of the eyes, and the cool, sweet-smelling kitchen where I spent
that pleasant hour.
I walked about the steep streets of Downpatrick quite a while, after I
reached the town, and found them unusually quaint. Like so many other
towns in Ireland, this one is all too evidently on the down grade. The
tall houses, which were once the residences of the well-to-do, have been
turned into tenements, and while they are not so dirty and repulsive as
those of Dublin and Limerick, they are still bad enough. Others of the
houses are empty and falling into ruin. One curious thing about the
place is that from any quarter of it the town-hall is visible, standing
in the hollow at the bottom of the hill, for the five principal streets
start from it--Irish Street and English Street and Scotch Street and two
others whose names I have forgotten, but which were, perhaps, the
neutral ground of trade.
I made my way down to the station, at last, and as the train started, a
young fellow in the same compartment with me bade a tearful farewell to
the relatives and friends who had gathered to see him off, and sat for
some time thereafter weeping unaffectedly into his handkerchief. When he
was a little calmer, I asked him if he was going to America. He said no;
he was going only to Belfast, but that was a long way!
It is really only about thirty miles; but thirty miles is a great
journey to the average Irishman. For the Irishman is no traveller; he is
quite content to spend his life within the circle of one small horizon,
and never so happy as when sitting at his own fireside. Indeed, he is
apt to regard with suspicion those who have nothing better to do than
wander about the world. Mayo tinkers have always had a bad name in
Ireland, not because they do anything especially to deserve it, but
merely because they make their living in an unnatural fashion by roaming
from place to place. Surely there must be something wrong with a man who
does that!
* * * * *
That night, at Belfast, we went to a variety show. The Wild West film
seems as popular here as in the rest of Ireland, for a particularly
sensational one, where the heroine escaped from the Indians by going
hand over hand along a rope above a deep ravine, into which the Indians
were precipitated by the hero, who cut the rope when they started to
cross by it, was received with great enthusiasm. There were also some
scattered cheers when a conjuror, with carefully calculated effect,
produced portraits of the King and Queen from somewhere and waved them
before the audience. But the cheers were thin and forced, and by far the
most of those present sat grimly silent and stared at the pictures with
set faces.