[ Transcriber's Notes:
Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully
as possible, including inconsistencies in spelling and hyphenation.
Some corrections of spelling and punctuation have been made. They
are listed at the end of the text.
Italic text has been marked with _underscores_.
]
MEARING STONES
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
THE RUSHLIGHT.
THE GARDEN OF THE BEES.
THE GILLY OF CHRIST.
THE MOUNTAINY SINGER.
[Illustration: THE WALL OF SLIEVE LEAGUE.]
MEARING STONES
Leaves from my Note-Book on Tramp
in Donegal, by JOSEPH CAMPBELL
(Seosamh Mac Cathmhaoil), with Sixteen
Pencil Drawings by the Author.
MAUNSEL & COMPANY, LTD.,
96 MIDDLE ABBEY ST., DUBLIN.
1911.
Printed by Maunsel & Co., Ltd., Dublin.
CONTENTS
Page
In the Mountains 1
The Wander-Lust 2
The Dark Woman 2
By Lochros Beag 3
Coaching by the Stars 3
A Rainbow 3
Change 4
Prophet's Food 4
The Transient 5
Women and Hares 5
The Smell of the Town 5
Glengesh 5
Clog-Seed 6
Herbs and Flowers 6
A Young Girl 7
The General Light and Dark 7
Soul and Body 8
A Man on Shelty-Back 9
The Fairies 9
Stranorlar Station 9
Stones 10
The Strand-Bird 10
Space 10
Rabbits and Cats 11
The Glas Gaibhlinn 11
A House in the Road's Mouth 11
The Quest 12
Muckish 12
The May-Fire 12
Bloody Foreland 13
Twilight and Silence 13
The Poor Herd 14
A Mountain Tramp 14
The Festival of Death 19
In Glen-Columcille 19
The Brink of Water 20
A Dark Morning 21
The Swallow-Mark 21
Women Beetling Clothes 21
The Sea 22
A Ballad-Singer 22
Sunlight 24
Turf-Cutting 24
His Old Mother 25
A Day of Wind and Light, Blown Rain 25
Lying and Walking 26
Glen-Columcille to Carrick 26
Ora et Labora 29
Two Things that won't go Grey 29
Rundal 29
Púca-Piles 30
The Rosses 30
A Country Funeral 30
Youth and Age 31
Summer Dusk 32
A Note 32
The Peasant in Literature 32
An Insleep 33
Water and Slán-Lus 33
By Lochros Mór 33
Rival Fiddlers 34
Nature 35
Sunday under Slieve League 35
The Night he was Born 36
The Lusmór 37
Derry People 37
A Clock 38
Carrick Glen 38
A Shuiler 39
Turkeys in the Trees 39
A Party of Tinkers 39
Teelin, Bunglass, and Slieve League 40
The Shooting Star 45
Sunday on the Road between Carrick and Glengesh 45
A Roany Bush 46
August Evening 46
Near Inver 47
All Subtle, Secret Things 47
A Madman 47
Laguna 48
Near Letterkenny 48
Shan Mac Ananty 48
A Poor Cabin 51
The Flax-Stone 51
After Sunset 52
The Darkness and the Tide 53
Errigal 54
The Sore Foot 54
Asherancally 54
Orange Gallases 55
The Human Voice 55
Loch Aluinn 56
The Open Road 56
DRAWINGS
The Wall of Slieve League Frontispiece
Clady River, near Gweedore Facing Page 2
Pass of Glengesh " 6
Lochros Beag " 8
Muckish, with a 'Cap' on " 12
On the Road to Doon Well " 16
Near Alton Loch " 20
A Street in Ardara " 22
Falling Water " 26
Bog and Sky " 30
Mountainy Folk " 34
A Wayfarer " 38
The Horn " 42
A Clachan of Houses " 48
A Gap between the Hills " 50
Loch Nacung--Moonrise " 54
MEARING STONES
IN THE MOUNTAINS
"In the mountains," says Nietzsche, "the shortest way is from summit to
summit." That is the way I covered Donegal. Instead of descending into
the valleys (a tedious and destroying process at all times), I crossed,
like the king of the fairies, on a bridge of wonder:
With a bridge of white mist
Columcille he crosses,
On his stately journeys
From Slieve League to Rosses.
What seems in places in this book a fathomless _madhm_ is in reality
bridged over with wonder--dark to the senses here and there, I grant
you, but steady and treadable in proportion to the amount of vision
one brings to the passage of it. All, I know, will not follow me (the
fairies withhold knowledge from the many and bestow it on the few),
but if blame is to be given let the fairies get it, and not me. And
I may as well warn the reader here that it is unlucky to curse the
fairies. Rosses is but a storm's cry, and--the curse always comes home
to roost!
With regard to the pictures illustrating the book, several people
who have seen them in the original have criticised their darkness,
as if they were all drawn "in twilight and eclipse." But the darkness
of Donegal was the first thing that struck me when I crossed the
frontier at Lifford, and the forty miles' journey through the hills
to Ardara bit the impression still more deeply into me. And if I were
asked now after a year's exile what I remember most vividly of the
county, I should say its gloom. I can see nothing now but a wilderness
of black hills, with black shadows chasing one another over them,
a gleam of water here and there, and just the tiniest little patch
of sunlight--extraordinarily brilliant by contrast with the general
darkness--on half a field, say, with its mearing-stones, to relieve the
sense of tragedy that one feels on looking at the landscape.
THE WANDER-LUST
Sea-ribbons have I cut, and gathered ling; talked with fairies; heard
Lia Fail moaning in the centre, and seen Tonn Tuaidh white in the
north; slept on hearth-flags odd times, and under bushes other times;
passed the mill with the scoop-wheels and the house with the golden
door; following the roads--the heart always hot in me, the lights on
the hills always beckoning me on!
THE DARK WOMAN
We were talking together the other morning--the publican and
myself--outside the inn door at Barra, when a dark woman passed. "God
look to that poor creature," says he; "she hasn't as much on her as
would stuff a crutch." "Stuff a what?" says I, for I didn't quite
understand him. "The bolster of a crutch," says he. "And she knows
nobody. Her eye-strings is broke."
[Illustration: CLADY RIVER, NEAR GWEEDORE.]
BY LOCHROS BEAG
A waste of blown sand. The Atlantic breakers white upon its
extremest verge. A patch of sea-bog before, exhaling its own peculiar
fragrance--part fibre, part earth, part salt. Ricks of black turf
stacked over it here and there, ready to be creeled inland against
the winter firing. The dark green bulk of Slieve a-Tooey rising
like a wall behind, a wisp of cloud lying lightly upon its carn. The
village of Maghery, a mere clachan of unmortared stone and rain-beaten
straw, huddling at its foot. A shepherd's whistle, a cry in torrential
Gaelic, or the bleat of a sheep coming from it now and again, only to
accentuate the elemental quiet and wonder of the place. The defile of
Maum opening beyond, scarped and precipitous, barely wide enough to
hold the road and bog-stream that tumble through it to the sea. The
rainbow air of our western seaboard enfolding all, heavy with rain and
the fragrance of salt and peat fires.
COACHING BY THE STARS
Coaching by the stars, night-walking--all my best thoughts, I find,
come to me that way. Poetry, like devilry, loves darkness.
A RAINBOW
I was watching a rainbow this afternoon--a shimmering ring in the
sky between the fort at the mouth of the Owentocker river and Slieve
a-Tooey beyond. "That's a beautiful sight, now," said a beggar,
stopping on the road to have a word with me--the sort of person one
meets everywhere in Ireland, friendly, garrulous, inquisitive, very
proud of his knowledge of half-secret or hidden things, and anxious
at all times to air it before strangers. "We do have a power of them
this speckled weather." He looked into the sky with a queer look, then
started humming over the names of the colours to himself in Irish. "And
they say, sir, it's unlucky to pass through a rainbow. Did you ever
hear that?"
CHANGE
My heart goes out to the playing and singing folk, the folk who are
forever on the roads. Life is change; and to be seeing new wonders
every day--the thrown sea, the silver rush of the meadow, the lights
in distant towns--is to be living, and not merely existing. I pity the
man who is content to stay always in the place where his mother dropped
him; that is, unless his thoughts wander. For one might sit on a midden
and dream stars!
PROPHET'S FOOD
A man hailed me on the road, and we were talking. . . . "If
one had nothing but fraochans to eat and water to drink, sure one
would have to be satisfied. And remember," says he, "that a prophet
lived on as little." "Who was that?" says I. "John the Baptist," says
he. "You'll read that in the books."
THE TRANSIENT
Only the transient is beautiful, said Schiller; and Nature, in the
incessant play of her rising, vanishing forms, is not averse to
beauty. Beauty, said Turgenev, needs not to live for ever to be
eternal--one instant is enough for her.
WOMEN AND HARES
It's curious in Donegal sometimes, when going along the road, or
crossing a footpath through the fields, to see a shawled woman, a
perch or so off, dropping over the edge of a hill, and then when you
get up to the edge there is no sign of her at all. And, maybe, a pace
further on you will start a hare out of the hollow where you think the
woman should have been, and you begin to wonder is there any truth in
the story about women--that have to do with magic and charms and old
freets, and the like--changing into hares, after all! I have had many
experiences like that in my travels through the county, and in not a
few instances have I been puzzled how a figure--silhouetted sharply
against the skyline, and only a few yards off--could disappear so
quickly out of view.
THE SMELL OF THE TOWN
A woman said to me to-day: "You'll get the smell o' the town blowed off
you in the Donegal hills!"
GLENGESH
Darkness and austerity--those are the notes I carry away from this
wild glen. Its lines have something of the splendid bareness of early
architecture; its colour suggests time-stained walls, with quiet
aisles and mouldering altars where one might kneel and dream away an
existence. When you meet a stranger going the road that winds through
it, like a coil of incense suspended in mid-air, you expect him to look
at you out of eyes full of wonder, and to speak to you in half-chanted
and serious words, stopping not, turning neither to left nor to right,
but faring on, a symbol of pilgrimage:
_Le solus a chroidhe,_
_Fann agus tuirseach_
_Go deireadh a shlighe._
CLOG-SEED
"What are you sowing?" "Oh, clog-seed, clog-seed. The childer about
here is all running barefoot, and I thought I might help them against
the winter day!"
HERBS AND FLOWERS
_Lusmór_, _lus-na-méarachán_, _sian sléibhe_, foxglove, or
fairy-thimble--whatever you like best to call it--it, I think, is the
commonest herb of all. One sees it everywhere with its tall carmine
spray, growing on ditches in the sun, in dark, shady places by the side
of rivers, and under arches. Then the king-fern, the splendid _osmunda
regalis_; the delicate maidenhair and hart's-tongue, rooted in the
crannies of walls; bog-mint and bog-myrtle, deliciously fragrant after
rain, and the white tossing _ceanabhán_; brier-roses and woodbine; the
drooping convolvulus; blue-bough; Fairies' cabbage, or London Pride;
pignuts and anemones; amber water-lilies, curiously scented; orchises,
purple and white; wild daffodils and marigolds, gilding the wet meadows
between hills; crotal, a moss rather than a herb, but beautiful to
look at and most serviceable to the dyer; eyebright and purple mountain
saxifrage; crested ling; tufts of sea-holly, with their green, fleshy,
spiked leaves; and lake-sedge and sand-grass, blown through by soft
winds and murmurous with the hum of bees. Donegal, wild though it be in
other respects, is surely a paradise of herbs and flowers.
[Illustration: PASS OF GLENGESH.]
A YOUNG GIRL
A young girl, in the purr and swell of youth. Her shawl is thrown
loosely back, showing a neck and breast beautifully modelled. She is
barefooted, and jumps from point to point on the wet road. At a stream
which crosses the road near the _gallán_ she lifts her dress to her
knees and leaps over. She does not see me where I am perched sunning
myself, so I can watch her to my heart's content.
THE GENERAL LIGHT AND DARK
"The words of the maker of poems are the general light and dark." One
feels the truth of this saying of Walt Whitman's in a place like the
Pass of Glengesh, or the White Strand outside Maghery. Chanting a
fragment of the "Leaves" one night in the Pass, when everything was
quiet and the smells were beginning to rise out of the wet meadows
below, I felt how supremely true it was, and how much it belonged to
the time and place--the darkness, the silence, the vibrant stars, the
earth smells, the bat that came out of the shadow of a fuchsia-bush and
fluttered across a white streak in the sky beyond. And I have tried
Wordsworth's sonnet beginning, "The world is too much with us," by a
criterion no less than that of the Atlantic itself, tumbling in foam
on the foreshore of Maghery when daylight was deepening into twilight,
and the moon was low over the hills, touching the rock-pools and the
sand-pools with flakes of carmine light. When I said the sonnet aloud
to myself it seemed to rise out of the landscape and to incorporate
itself with it again as my voice rose and fell in the wandering
cadences of the verse. Nature, after all, is the final touchstone
of art. Tried by it, the counterfeit fails and the unmixed gold is
justified.
SOUL AND BODY
"It's a strange world," said a tramp to me to-day. I agreed. "And would
you answer me this, gaffer?" said he. "Why is it when a man's soul is
in his body, and he lusty and well, you think nothing of kicking him
about as you would an old cast shoe? And the minute the soul goes,
and the body is stiffening in death, you draw back from him, hardly
daring to touch him for the dread that is on you. Would you answer
me that, gaffer?" I was silent. "It's a strange world, sure enough,"
said the tramp. He rose from the gripe where he lay making rings in
the grass with his stick. "Good-day, gaffer," said he. "God speed your
journey." And he took the road, laughing.
[Illustration: LOCHROS BEAG.]
A MAN ON SHELTY-BACK
A man on shelty-back. He has come in from the mountains to the cloth
fair at Ardara. He is about sixty-five, black on the turn, clean
shaven, but for side whiskers. He wears the soft wide-awake favoured by
the older generation of peasants, open shirt, and stock rolled several
times round his throat and knotted loosely in front. His legs dangle
down on either side of his mount, tied at the knees with sugans. His
brogues are brown with bog mud, very thick in the sole, and laced only
half-way up. He has a bundle of homespun stuff under his left arm. A
pipe is in his teeth, and as I approach he withdraws it to bid me the
time of day. "_Lá maith_," he says in a strong, hearty voice. I return
the greeting, and pass on.
THE FAIRIES
I was in a house one night late up in the Gap of Maum, a very
lonely place, yarning with two brothers--shepherds--who live there
by themselves. I had sat a long time over the _griosach_, and was
preparing to go, when the elder of them said to me: "Don't stir yet a
bit. Sit the fire out. A body's loath to leave such a purty wee fire to
the fairies."
STRANORLAR STATION
In a quiet corner, seated, I see a woman come in from the mountainy
country beyond Convoy. She is waiting for the up-train. She is
dark. Her hair and eyes are _very_ dark. Her lips are threads of
scarlet. Her skin is colourless, except for a slight tanning due
to exposure to sun and weather. She has a black shawl about her
shoulders, and a smaller one of lighter colour over her head. She
moves seldom. Her hands are folded on her knees. She looks into space
with an air of quiet ecstasy, like a Madonna in an old picture. Her
beauty is the beauty of one apart from the ruck and commonness of
things. . . . . She spits out now and again. I cannot help
watching her.
STONES
"Donegal is a terrible place for stones." "Heth, is it, sir--boulders
as big as a house. And skipping-stones? Man dear, I could give you a
field full, myself!"
THE STRAND-BIRD
I could sit for hours listening to the "bubbling" of the strand-bird;
but that's because I am melancholy. If I weren't melancholy I'd hardly
like it, I think. The tide's at ebb and the bollans and rock-pools
are full of water. Beyond is space--the yellow of the sand and the
grey of the sky--and the pipe-note "bubbling" between. A strange,
yearning sound, like nothing one hears in towns; bringing one into
touch with the Infinite, and deep with the melancholy that is Ireland's
. . . and mine.
SPACE
In towns the furthest we see is the other side of the street; but
here there is no limit to one's prospect--Perseus is as visible as
Boötes--and one's thought grows as space increases.
RABBITS AND CATS
Donegal is over-run with rabbits; and sometimes on your journeys
you will see a common house-cat--miles from anywhere--stalking them
up the side of a mountain, creeping stealthily through the heather
and pouncing on them with the savagery of a wild thing. The cats,
a stonebreaker told me, come from the neighbouring farm-houses and
cabins, "but they are devils for strolling," says he, and in addition
to what food they get from their owners "they prog a bit on their own!"
THE GLAS GAIBHLINN
"That's a very green field," I said to a man to-day, pointing to a
field, about two furrow-lengths away, on which the sun seemed to pour
all its light at once. "Is there water near it?" "There's a stream,"
says he. "And the Glas Gaibhlinn sleeps there, anyway." "And what's
that?" "It's a magic cow the old people'll tell you of," says he, "that
could never be milked at one milking, or at seven milkings, for that,"
says he. "Any field that's greener than another field, or any bit of
land that's richer than another bit, they say the Glas Gaibhlinn sleeps
in it," says he. "It's a freet, but it's true!"
A HOUSE IN THE ROAD'S MOUTH
A house in the road's mouth--it is no roundabout to visit, but a short
cut. Often I go up there of an evening, when my day's wandering is
done, to meet the people and to hear the old Fenian stories told--or,
maybe, a tune played on the fiddle, if Donal O'Gallagher, the dark
man from Falcarragh, should happen to be present. It is as good as
the sight of day to see the dancers, the boys and the girls out on
the floor, the old people looking on from the shadow of the walls, and
Donal himself, for all his blindness, shaking his head and beating time
with his foot, as proud as a quilt of nine hundred threads!
THE QUEST
Where am I going? Looking for the dew-snail? No, but going till I find
the verge of the sky.
MUCKISH
"When you see Muckish with a cap on," said a man to me one day, "you
may lay your hand on your heart and say: 'We'll have a wet spell before
long.'" This mountain, like Errigal, has a knack of drawing a hood of
grey vapour round its head when the rest of the landscape is perfectly
cloudless--like the peaks of the Kaatskills in _Rip Van Winkle_.
THE MAY-FIRE
The May-Fire is still kindled in some parts of Donegal. It is a
survival of a pagan rite of our forefathers.
"And at it (the great national convention at Uisneach in Meath)
they were wont to make a sacrifice to the arch-god, whom they adored,
whose name was Bél. It was likewise their usage to light two fires to
Bél in every district in Ireland at this season, and to drive a pair
of each herd of cattle that the district contained between these two
fires, as a preservative, to guard them against all the diseases of
that year. It is from that fire thus made that the day on which the
noble feast of the apostles Peter and James is held has been called
Bealteine (in Scotch Beltane), _i.e._, Bél's fire."
[Illustration: MUCKISH, WITH A 'CAP' ON.]
The boys and girls of a whole countryside repair to these fires,
which are usually lit upon a high, commanding hill, and they spend
the night out telling stories, reciting poems, singing, and dancing to
the accompaniment of pipes and fiddles. The May-Fire is not quite so
generally observed as the John's-Fire, which is kindled on the night of
the 23rd of June, St. John's Eve.
BLOODY FORELAND
Bloody Foreland. An old woman comes out of the ditch to talk to
me. . . . "It's a wild place, sir, God help us! none wilder. And
myself, sir----sure I've nothing in the world but the bones of one
cow!"
TWILIGHT AND SILENCE
Some places in Donegal seem to me to brood under a perpetual twilight
and silence--Glen-Columcille, for instance, and the valley running into
it. And mixed up with the twilight and silence is a profound melancholy
that rises out of the landscape itself, or is read into it by the
greyness of one's own experience. Those dark hills with the rack over
them and the sun looking through on one little patch of tilled land,
and the stone mearings about it, figure forth the sorrow that is the
heritage of every Irishman; the darkness the sorrow, the sunshine
the hope, iridescent and beautiful, but a thing of moments only and
soon to fade away. I stand on the bridge here where the road forks,
Slieve League to the left of me, a dim lowering bulk, and the road to
Glen reaching away into the skyline beyond. The water of a hillstream
murmurs continually at my feet. A duck splashes, and flaps dripping
into the greyness overhead. Not a soul is in sight--only a blue
feather of turf-smoke here and there to show that human hearts _do_
beat in this wilderness; that there are feet to follow the plough-tail
and hands to tend the hearth. The sense of wonder over-masters me--the
wonder that comes of silence and closeness to the elemental forces of
nature. Then the mood changes, and I feel rising up in me the sorrow
that is the dominating passion of my life. Do many people go mad
here? I have heard tell that they do, and no wonder, for one would
need to be a saint or a philosopher to resist the awful austerity of
the place.
THE POOR HERD
There is a poor herd at Maghery--a half-witted character--who lives
all his days in the open, with nothing between him and the sky. He
was herding his cows one evening in a quiet place by the caves when I
happened on him. "What time o' day is it?" says he. "Just gone four,"
says I, looking at my watch. "What time is that?" says he, in a dull
sort of way. "Is it near dark?"
A MOUNTAIN TRAMP
Bearing south by the Owenwee river from Maghery, we strike up through
Maum gorge. Outside Maghery we come on two men--one of them a thin,
wizened old fellow with no teeth; the other a youngish man, very
raggedly dressed, with dark hair and features like an Italian. The old
man tells us in Irish (which we don't follow very clearly) to keep up
by the river-bed, and we can't possibly lose our direction. A quarter
of a mile further on we meet another man. He bids us the time of day
in passably good English. I answer in Irish, telling him that we are
on the road for Glen-Columcille, and asking him the easiest way over
the hills. He repeats what the old man told us, viz., to keep to the
river-bottom, and to cut up then by the fall at the head of Maum to
Laguna, a cluster of poor houses in the mountain under Crockuna. "When
you get there," he says, "you cannot lose your road." He comes a bit
of the way with us, and then we leave him at a point where the track
ends in the heather, and where a squad of navvies is engaged laying
down a foundation of brushwood and stones to carry it further into
the hills. It gives us a shock, in a way, to come on this squad of
wild-looking men in so lonely and desolate a place.
We are now well into the gorge, and a wild place it is! Half-way up
we come on a house--if one could call it such--with a reek of blue
smoke threading out of a hole in the thatch. No other sign of life
is visible. The walls of the gorge close in darkly on every side
except the north. On that side is the sea, white on Maghery strand,
and stretching away, a dull copper-green colour, into the sailless
horizon beyond. Hearing the voices, a young man comes out from between
two boulders serving as a sort of gateway to the house. His face is
tanned with sun and exposure, and he is in his bare feet. We greet him
in Irish and he answers--a little surprised, no doubt, at hearing the
language from strangers. Then another man comes forward--a brother,
if his looks don't belie him. He is in his bare feet also, and hatless,
with a great glibbe of black hair falling over his eyes. "You have the
Irish?" he says. "It's newance to hear it from townsfolk." We talk for
a while, enquiring further as to our direction over the hill, and then
we push on. Near the head of the gorge we sit down to have a rest,
sitting on a rock over the stream, and bathing our hands and faces
in the brown, flooded water. All the rivers of Donegal are brownish
in colour, and the Owenwee (_recte Abhainnbhuidhe_, "yellow river")
is no exception. The water stains everything it touches, and I have no
doubt but that the dark colour of the people's skin is due, partly,
to their washing themselves in it. Coming through one's boots, even,
it will stain the soles of the feet.
[Illustration: ON THE ROAD TO DOON WELL.]
We resume our journey, and after some rough and steep climbing reach
the plateau head. Loch Nalughraman, a deep pool of mountain water, lies
to the east of us, shimmering in the grey morning light. All around is
bogland, of a dull red colour, and soaking with rain. We make through
this, jumping from tuft to tuft, and from hummock to hummock, as best
we can, going over the shoe-mouth occasionally in slush. In an hour
or so we come on a bridle-path of white limestones, set on their flat
in the spongy turf. We follow this for a while, and in time reach the
poor village of Laguna. Entering into one of the houses I greet the
bean-a'-tighe in Irish. She rises quickly from her seat by the hearth
where she has been spinning--a crowd of very young children clinging to
her skirts. She is a dark woman, with mellow breasts, and fine eyes and
teeth. She is barefooted, as usual, and wears the coloured head-dress
of her kind, curtseying to me modestly as I approach. She answers me
in Irish--the only language she knows--and bids me come in. "_Beir
isteach_," she says. A young man of five-and-twenty or thereabouts
is weaving in the room beyond. (I recognised the heavy click-clack,
click-clack, click-clack of the loom as I entered.) Hearing my enquiry
he rises up from his seat, drops his setting-stick, and offers to guide
us as far as the southern edge of the hill. "You will see the Glen road
below you," he says, coming out in his bare feet into the open, and
speaking volubly, like one used to good speech. "Look at it beyond," he
says, "winding from the Carrick side. Keep south, and you will strike
it after two miles of a descent." The woman brings a bowl of goat's
milk to my sister. She drinks it readily, for she is thirsty after her
climb. Then, thanking the poor people for their hospitality, we say,
"_Slán agaibh_," and press forward on our journey to Glen-Columcille.
We reach the high-road in about half-an-hour, near a school-house,
shining white in the sun, and busy with the hum of children singing
over their lessons. Things look more familiar now. We pass many houses,
with fleeces of dyed wool--green and blue and madder--drying on bushes
outside the doors, and men busy stacking turf and thatching. Here
and there on the road flocks of geese lie sunning themselves,
head-under-wing. As we draw near they get up and face us with
protruding necks, hissing viciously. Dogs bark at us occasionally,
but not often. (I had heard ill accounts of the Donegal dogs from
travellers, but on the whole, my experience of them has not been
quite so bad as I had been led to expect.) Slieve League rises on
our left, a dark, shadowy bulk of mountain, shutting off the view
to the south. All around is moorland, with a stream in spate foaming
through a depression in it, and little patches of tilled land here and
there, and the inevitable brown-thatched cabin and the peat-reek over
it. After some miles' travelling we come on a little folk-shop by the
road--a shop where one might buy anything from a clay-pipe or a lemon
to Napoleon's Book of Fate. The window looks tempting, so we go in. The
shopkeeper is a quiet-mannered little man, not very old, I would think,
but with greyish hair, and eyes that look as if they were bound round
with red tape--burnt out of his head with snuff and peat-smoke. We ask
him has he any buttermilk to sell. He hasn't any, unfortunately--he
is just run out of it--so we content ourselves with Derry biscuits,
made up in penny cartons, and half a dozen hen-eggs to suck on the
way. Some people may shiver at the idea of it, but raw eggs are as
sustaining a thing as one could take on a journey! We pay our score,
and get under way again. At a bridge where the road forks we sit down
and eat our simple repast. A bridge has always a peculiar fascination
for me--especially in an open country like this where one's horizon
is not limited by trees and hedges--and I could spend hours dawdling
over it, watching the play of sun and shadow on the water as it foams
away under the arches. Here there is a delightful sense of space and
quietness. The heather-ale is in our hearts, the water sings and the
wind blows, and one ceases to trouble about time and the multitude of
petty vexations that worry the townsman out of happiness. Did I say one
ceases to trouble about time? Even here it comes, starting one like
a guilty thing. We reach Meenacross Post-office at four-thirty, and
an hour later see the Atlantic tumbling through rain on the age-worn
strand of Glen-Columcille.
THE FESTIVAL OF DEATH
I met an old man on the road, and his face as yellow as dyer's
rocket. "Walk easy past that little house beyond," says he in
a whisper, turning round and pointing with his staff into the
valley. "There's a young girl in it, and she celebrating the festival
of death."
IN GLEN-COLUMCILLE
Through blown rain and darkness I see the Atlantic tumble in white,
ghost-like masses on the strand. Beevna is a shadow, the crosses
shadows. Only one friendly light burns in the valley. The patter of
rain and the dull boom of the surf ring ceaselessly in my ears. The
hills brood: my thoughts brood with them. I stare into the sunset--a
far-drawn, scarlet trail--with mute, wondering eyes. Remoteness
grips me, and is become a reality in this ultimate mearing of a grey,
ultimate land.
THE BRINK OF WATER
I have often heard it said that what passes for folk-lore is in reality
book-lore, or what began as book-lore got into the oral tradition
and handed down through the generations by word of mouth. A young
Ardara man, a poet and dreamer in his way, told me that poetry most
frequently came to him when he was near water; wandering, say, by the
edge of Lochros, or looking down from Bracky Bridge at the stream as
it forced its way through impeding boulders to the sea. I asked him
had he ever read "The Colloquy of the Two Sages(1)"? He said that
he had not. I told him that in that MS. occurred the passage: _ar bá
baile fallsigthe éicsi dogrés lasna filedu for brú uisci_, _i.e._,
"for the poets thought that the place where poetry was revealed always
was upon the brink of water." Nettled somewhat, he confessed that he
got the idea from his father, a _seanchaidhe_, since dead, who knew
something of Irish MSS., and who perhaps had read the "Colloquy," or
at all events, had heard of it. But apart from the fact of the thing
having been given him by his father, he felt that it was true in his
own experience--that poetry always came to him more readily when he was
near water.
(1) Book of Leinster.
[Illustration: NEAR ALTON LOCH.]
A DARK MORNING
A dark, wet morning, with the mist driving in swaths over the hills. I
met an old man on the road. "There's somebody a-hanging this morning,"
says he. "It's fearful dark!"
THE SWALLOW-MARK
There is a lot of the wanderer in me, and no wonder, I suppose;
for I have the swallow-mark--a wise man once showed it to me on my
hand--and that means that I must always be going journeys, whether
in the flesh or in the spirit, or both. "The swallow-mark is on you,"
says he. "You will go wandering with the airs of the world. You will
cheat the Adversary himself, even that he drops his corroding-drop on
you!" And as I am a wanderer, so the heart in me opens to its kind. I
love a brown face, a clear eye, and an honest walk more than anything;
if in a man, good; if in a woman, better. And why people look for the
cover of a roof, and the sun shining, I never can make out. Sunshine
and the open, the wind blowing, travelling betimes and resting betimes,
with my back to the field and my knees to the sky, a copy of Raftery
or Borrow in my pocket to dip into when the mood is on me--and I am
supremely happy!
WOMEN BEETLING CLOTHES
I see three women by a river: they are so close to me that I can hear
them talking and laughing. One of them is an oldish creature, the other
two are young and dark. They are on their knees on the bank, beetling
clothes. One of them gets up--a fine, white-skinned girl--and tucking
her petticoats about her thighs, goes into the stream and swishes the
clothes several times to and fro in the brown-clear water. Then she
throws them out to her companions on the bank, and the beetling process
is repeated--each garment being laid on a flat stone and pounded
vigorously until clean. The women do not see me (I am standing on a
bridge, with a rowan-bush partly between them and me), so I can watch
them to my heart's content.
THE SEA
The sea is one of those things you cannot argue with. You must accept
it on its own terms, or leave it alone. And I like a man to be that
way: calm at times, rough at times, kind at times, treacherous
at times, but at heart unchanging: _not to be argued with, but
accepted_. Is not the comparison apter than one thinks? Is not a man
and his passions as divine and turbulent as anything under the sun?
A BALLAD-SINGER
A ballad-singer has come into Ardara. It is late afternoon. He stands
in the middle of the Diamond--a sunburnt, dusty figure, a typical
Ishmael and stroller of the roads. The women have come to their doors
to hear him, and a benchful of police, for lack of something better
to do, are laughing at him from the barrack front. The ballad he is
singing is about Bonaparte and the Poor Old Woman. Then he changes his
tune to "The Spanish Lady"--a Dublin street-song:
As I walked down thro' Dublin city
At the hour of twelve in the night,
Who should I spy but a Spanish lady,
Washing her feet by candlelight.
First she washed them, and then she dried them
Over a fire of amber coal:
Never in all my life did I see
A maid so neat about the sole!
[Illustration: A STREET IN ARDARA.]
Finally he gives "I'm a Good Old Rebel," a ballad of the type that
became so popular in the Southern States of America after the Civil
war:
I'm a good old rebel--that's what I am,
And for this fair land of freedom I don't care a damn;
I'm glad I fought agin it, I only wish we'd won,
And I don't want no one-horse pardon for anything I done.
I followed old Marse Robert for four years nigh about,
Got wounded in three places and starved at Point Look-Out:
I cotched the rheumatism a-campin' in the snow,
But I killed a chance of Yankees, and I'd like to kill some moe.
Two hundred thousand Yankees is stiff in Southern dust,
We got two hundred thousand before they conquered us:
They died of Southern fever and Southern steel and shot--
I wish it was two millions instead of what we got!
And now the war is over and I can't fight them any more,
But I ain't a-goin' to love them--that's sartin shor';
And I don't want no one-horse pardon for what I was and am,
And I won't be reconstructed, and I don't care a damn!
He howls out the verses in disjointed, unmusical bursts. He acts with
head and arms, and at places where he is worked up to a particular
frenzy he takes a run and gives a buck-jump in the air, blissfully
unconscious, I suppose, that he is imitating the manner in which the
_ballistea_, or ancient dancing-songs, were sung by the Romans. At
the end of each verse he breaks into a curious chanted refrain like:
"Yum tilly-yum-yum-yum-yum-yum"--and then there are more sidlings and
buck-jumps. Some of the women throw him money, which he acknowledges
by lifting his hat grandiosely. Others of them pass remarks, quite the
reverse of complimentary, about his voice and ragged appearance. "Isn't
it terrible he is!" says one woman. "Look at him with the seat out
of his trousers, and he lepping like a good one. I could choke him,
I could!" Another woman comes out of a shop with a crying child in
her arms, and shouts at him: "Will you go away, then? You're wakening
the childer." "Well, ma'am," says he, stopping in the middle of a
verse, "you may thank the Lord for His mercy that you have childer to
waken!" The ducks quack, the dogs howl, the poor ballad-singer roars
louder than ever. I listen for a while, amused and interested. Then I
get tired of it, and pass on towards Bracky Bridge.
SUNLIGHT
Unless you have seen the sun you cannot know anything. Sunlight is
better than wisdom, and the red of the fairy-thimble more than painted
fans.
TURF-CUTTING
In the Lochros district, when the weather begins to take up, about the
middle of May, the farmers repair to the moss on the north side of the
Point, and start cutting the banks. The turf is then footed (sometimes
by girls) along the causeway ditches, and when properly seasoned--say
about the middle of July--is piled in stacks on high ground
convenient to the moss, and covered on top with a lot of old mouldering
"winter-stales," to keep the rain off it. "Winter-stales" are sods that
have been left over from the previous season's cutting--the wet setting
in and leaving the bog-roads in such a state that no slipe or wheeled
car could get into them. Of course, most of the carrying in Donegal is
done by creel or ass-cart; but in the Lochros district turf is scarce,
and the farmers on the Point are obliged to keep horses to draw the
turf in from the moss on the north side of the Owenea river, some miles
off, and over roads that are none too good for wheeled traffic. In
some cases I have noticed the "winter-stales" built up in little
beehive-shaped heaps on dry ground, to be carted or creeled away as
soon as the weather begins to mend. But it is only the more provident
farmers who do this.
HIS OLD MOTHER
"My old mother's ailing this twelvemonth back," said a man to me
to-day. "I'm afeard she'll go wi' the leaves."
A DAY OF WIND AND LIGHT, BLOWN RAIN
A day of wind and light, blown rain, with the sun shining through it in
spells. Aighe river below me, brown and clear, foaming through mossed
stones to the sea. Trout rising from it now and again to the gnats that
skim its surface. Glengesh mountain in the middle distance--a black,
splendid bulk--dropping to the Nick of the Bealach on the left. Meadows
in foreground bright with marigolds, with here and there by the
mearings tufts of king-fern, wild iris and fairy-thimble.
LYING AND WALKING
To lie on one's loin in the sun is all very well, but walking is
better. It is over the hill the wonders are.
[Illustration: FALLING WATER.]
GLEN-COLUMCILLE TO CARRICK
Saturday. It is about half-past seven o'clock in the evening. The rain,
which kept at it pitilessly all the afternoon, has cleared off, and we
have left the little whitewashed inn at Glen-Columcille refreshed, and
in high fettle, for the further six miles that has to be done before
we reach Carrick, where we mean to spend the night. We had arrived at
Glen two hours before in a weary enough condition physically after
our tramp over the hills from Ardara, and we had almost resolved on
the advice of the hostess of the inn--a slow, deliberate, slatternly
sort of woman--to put up with her for the night; but it is wonderful
what a rest and a meal and, incidentally, a slatternly hostess does,
and so we finally decided to go on to Carrick. We follow the road up
by the telegraph posts, and after a stiffish climb of half a mile or
more, reach the plateau head. We are now about five hundred feet over
sea level. Turning round to have a last look at the place, we see
the chapel--a plain white cruciform building, with a queer detached
belfry--the little grey, straggling village street (some of the houses
with slate roofs, some with thatch), the crosses standing up like
gallan-stones on every side of it, the deep valley-bottom green as
an emerald, Ballard mountain silhouetted against the sunset, and the
vast Atlantic tumbling through mist on the yellow strand beyond. The
air smells deliciously of peat. In Donegal one notices the smell of
peat everywhere; in fact, if I were asked to give an impression of the
county in half a dozen words I should say: "Black hills, brown rivers,
and peat." The road is fairly level now, and we continue our course
in a south-easterly direction. A wild waste of moorland stretches on
every side of us, brightened here and there by little freshwater lakes,
out of which we see the trout jumping in hundreds--Loch Unshagh,
Loch Unna, Loch Divna, and another quite near the road, where we
got, at the expense of wet feet and knees, some lovely specimens
of the _lilium aureum_, or golden lily, which grows, I think, on
every little shallow and flat and bywater in South Donegal. After
an hour of pleasant walking the road begins to drop and the rain to
fall again. Slieve League is on our right, but we can only see the
lower slopes of it, for the cairn is completely covered with driving
mist. The wind has risen, and the rain beats coolingly on our cheeks,
and exasperatingly, at times, down our necks. We pass a shepherd on
the road making for Malin Mór, a shawled figure with a lantern, and
several groups of boys and asses with creels bringing turf into the
stackers; and farther on a side-car zig-zagging up hill on its way to
the Glen. There are two occupants, a priest--presumably the curate of
Glen parish going over for Sunday's Mass--and the driver. It is quite
dark now, and the rain increases in intensity. Tramping in a mountainy
country is a delightful sport--none better! But it is on such a night
and at the end of such a journey as this that one begins to see that
it has a bad as well as a good side to it. The rain is coming down
in sheets, our clothes are soaked through, the darkness is intense,
the roads are shockingly muddy, we are tired out walking, and still
we have another stiff mile to go before we see the friendly lights of
the inn at Carrick. Two of us--R. M. and myself--stop at a bridge
to have a look at the ordnance sheet which has stood us in such good
stead all through our journey. Torrential rain beating on a map--even a
"cloth-mounted, water-proofed" one like ours--doesn't improve it; but
we have qualms about our direction. We think we should have arrived at
Carrick ere this, and we just want to make sure that our direction is
right, and that we haven't taken a wrong turning in the darkness. After
some trouble we manage to get a match lighted. The first misfires on
the damp emery, the second blows out, the third is swallowed up in
rain pouring like a spout through the branches overhead, the fourth
. . . . "Carrick! Carrick! Carrick!" The frenzied cries of the
advance guard tell us that the town is in view. We put up our map
resignedly, shaking great blabs of water out of it, and push ahead. In
five minutes we have passed the chapel, with its square tower looming
up darkly in the fog, and in another two we are safe in the inn
parlour, enjoying a supper of hot coffee, muffins, and poached eggs.
ORA ET LABORA
Noon of a summer's day. I see a man in the fields--a wild, solitary
figure--the only living thing in sight for miles. He is thinning
turnips. Slowly a bell rings out from the chapel on the hill beyond. It
is the Angelus. The man stands up, takes off his hat and bows his
head in the ancient prayer of his faith. . . . The bell ceases
tolling, and he bends to labour again.
TWO THINGS THAT WON'T GO GREY
I met a woman up Glengesh going in the direction of the
danger-post. She seemed an old woman by her look, but she more
than beat me at the walking. When we got to the top of the hill I
complimented her on her powers. "'Deed," says she, with a deprecating
little laugh, "and I'm getting old now. I'm fair enough yet at the
walking, but I'm going grey--going fast. A year ago my hair was
as black as that stack there"--pointing to a turf-stack out in the
bog--"but now it's on the turn. And I tell you there's only two things
in the world that won't go grey some time--and that's salt and iron."
RUNDAL
I see a green island. It is hardly an island now, for the tide is
out, and one might walk across to it by the neck of yellow-grey sand
that connects it with the mainland. It is held in rundal by a score
of tenants living in the mountains in-by. Little patches of oats,
potatoes, turnips, and "cow's grass" diversify its otherwise barren
surface. There are no mearings, but each man's patch is marked by a
cairn of loose stones, thrown aside in the process of reclamation. The
stones, I see, are used also as seaweed beds. They are spitted in the
sand about, like a _cheval de frise_, and in the course of time the
seaweed carried in by successive tides gathers on them, and is used by
the tenants for manure.
PÚCA-PILES
"What are these?" I asked an old woman in the fields this morning,
pointing to a cluster of what we in the north-east corner call
paddock-stools, and sometimes fairy-stools. "Well," said she, "they're
not mushrooms, anyway. They're what you call Púca-piles. They say the
Púca lays them!"
THE ROSSES
Bog and sky: a boulder-strewn waste, with salt lochs and freshwater
lochs innumerable, and a trail running up to a huddle of white clouds.
[Illustration: BOG AND SKY.]
A COUNTRY FUNERAL
Death, as they say, has taken somebody away under his oxter! I was
coming into Ardara this morning from the Lochros side, and as I came
up to the chapel on the hill I heard the bell tolling. That, I knew,
was for a burying: it was only about ten o'clock, and the Angelus does
not ring until midday. Farther on I met the funeral procession. It was
just coming out of the village. The coffin, a plain deal one covered
with rugs, was carried over the well of a side-car, and the relatives
and country people walked behind. The road was thick with them--old men
in their Sunday homespuns and wide-awakes, their brogues very dusty,
as if they had come a long way; younger men with bronzed faces, and
ash-plants in their hands; old women in the white frilled caps and
coloured shawls peculiar to western Ireland; young married women, girls
and children. Most of them walked, but several rode in ass-carts, and
three men, I noticed, were on horseback. The tramping of so many feet,
the rattle of the wheels and the talk made a great stir on the road,
and the movement and colour suggested anything but a funeral. Still
one could see that underneath all was a deep and beautiful feeling of
sorrow, so different to the black-coated, slow-footed, solemn-faced
thing of the towns. As the coffin approached I stood into the side
of the road, saluted, and turned back with it the _tri céimeanna na
trocaire_ (three steps of mercy) as far as the chapel yard.
YOUTH AND AGE
An old man came dawdling out of a gap by the road, and he stopped
to have a word with me. We were talking for some time when he said:
"You're a young man, by the looks of you?" I laughed and nodded. "Och,"
says he, "but it's a poor thing to be old, and all your colt-tricks
over," says he, "and you with nothing to do but to be watching the
courses of the wind!"
SUMMER DUSK
Summer dusk. A fiddle is playing in a house by the sea. "Maggie
Pickens" is the tune. The fun and devilment of it sets my heart
dancing. Then the mood changes. It is "The Fanaid Grove" now, full of
melancholy and yearning, full of the spirit of the landscape--the soft
lapping tide, the dove-grey sands, the blue rhythmic line of hill and
sky beyond. The player repeats it. . . . I feel as if I could
listen to that tune forever.
A NOTE
Darkness, freshness, fragrance. Donegal fascinates one like a beautiful
girl.
THE PEASANT IN LITERATURE
It has been said before that there is "too much peasant" in
contemporary Irish literature, especially in the plays. The phenomenon
is easily explained. Ireland is an agricultural country, a country of
small farms, and therefore a nation of peasants; so that a literature
which pretends to reflect the life of Ireland must deal in the main
with peasants and the thoughts that peasants think. And peasants'
thoughts are not such dead and commonplace things that I, who have
learnt practically all I know from them, can afford to ignore them
now. The king himself is served by the field. Where there is contact
with the unseen in this book, with the mysteries which we feel rather
than understand, it is because of some strange thought dropped in
strange words from a peasant's mouth and caught by me here, as in a
snare of leaves, for everyone to ponder. Impressions, with something of
the roughness of peasant speech in them and something of the beauty,
phases of a moment breathless and fluttering, the mystery of the sea,
the thresh of rain, the sun on a bird's wing, a wayfarer passing--those
are the things I sought to capture in this book.
AN INSLEEP