IRELAND
HISTORIC AND PICTURESQUE
BY
CHARLES JOHNSTON
ILLUSTRATED
1902
CONTENTS.
I. VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE.
II. THE GREAT STONE MONUMENTS.
III. THE CROMLECH BUILDERS.
IV. THE DE DANAANS.
V. EMAIN OF MACA.
VI. CUCULAIN THE HERO.
VII. FIND AND OSSIN.
VIII. THE MESSENGER OF THE NEW WAY.
IX. THE SAINTS AND SCHOLARS.
X. THE RAIDS OF THE NORTHMEN.
XI. THE PASSING OF THE NORSEMEN.
XII. THE NORMANS.
XIII. THE TRIUMPH OF FEUDALISM.
XIV. THE JACOBITE WARS.
XV. CONCLUSION.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
Photogravures made by A.W. ELSON & Co.
PEEP HOLE, BLARNEY CASTLE
IN THE DARGLE, CO. WICKLOW
MUCKROSS ABBEY, KILLARNEY
BRANDY ISLAND, GLENGARRIFF
SUGAR LOAF MOUNTAIN, GLENGARRIFF
RIVER ERNE, BELLEEK
WHITE ROCKS, PORTRUSH
POWERSCOURT WATERFALL, CO. WICKLOW
HONEYCOMB, GIANT'S CAUSEWAY
GRAY MAN'S PATH, FAIR HEAD
COLLEEN BAWN CAVES, KILLARNEY
RUINS ON SCATTERY ISLAND
VALLEY OF GLENDALOUGH AND RUINS OF THE SEVEN
CHURCHES
ANCIENT CROSS, GLENDALOUGH
ROUND TOWER, ANTRIM
GIANT'S HEAD AND DUNLUCE CASTLE, CO. ANTRIM
ROCK CASHEL, RUINS OF OLD CATHEDRAL, KING CORMAC'S
CHAPEL AND ROUND TOWER
DUNLUCE CASTLE
MELLIFONT ABBEY, CO. LOUTH
HOLY CROSS ABBEY, CO. TIPPERARY
DONEGAL CASTLE
TULLYMORE PARK, CO. DOWN
THOMOND BRIDGE, LIMERICK
SALMON FISHERY, GALWAY
O'CONNELL'S STATUE, DUBLIN
IRELAND.
I.
VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE.
Here is an image by which you may call up and remember the natural form
and appearance of Ireland:
Think of the sea gradually rising around her coasts, until the waters,
deepened everywhere by a hundred fathoms, close in upon the land. Of all
Ireland there will now remain visible above the waves only two great
armies of islands, facing each other obliquely across a channel of open
sea. These two armies of islands will lie in ordered ranks, their lines
stretching from northeast to southwest; they will be equal in size, each
two hundred miles along the front, and seventy miles from front to rear.
And the open sea between, which divides the two armies, will measure
seventy miles across.
Not an island of these two armies, as they lie thus obliquely facing
each other, will rise as high as three thousand feet; only the captains
among them will exceed a thousand; nor will there be great variety in
their forms. All the islands, whether north or south, will have gently
rounded backs, clothed in pastures nearly to the crest, with garments of
purple heather lying under the sky upon their ridges. Yet for all this
roundness of outline there will be, towards the Atlantic end of either
army, a growing sternness of aspect, a more sombre ruggedness in the
outline of the hills, with cliffs and steep ravines setting their brows
frowning against the deep.
Hold in mind the image of these two obliquely ranged archipelagoes,
their length thrice their breadth, seaming the blue of the sea, and
garmented in dark green and purple under the sunshine; and, thinking of
them thus, picture to yourself a new rising of the land, a new
withdrawal of the waters, the waves falling and ever falling, till all
the hills come forth again, and the salt tides roll and ripple away from
the valleys, leaving their faces for the winds to dry; let this go on
till the land once more takes its familiar form, and you will easily
call up the visible image of the whole.
As you stand in the midst of the land, where first lay the channel of
open sea, you will have, on your northern horizon, the beginning of a
world of purple-outlined hills, outliers of the northern mountain
region, which covers the upper third of the island. On all sides about
you, from the eastern sea to the western ocean, you will have the great
central plain, dappled with lakes and ribbed with silver rivers, another
third of the island. Then once more, to the south, you will have a
region of hills, the last third of Ireland, in size just equal to the
northern mountains or the central plain.
The lines of the northern hills begin with the basalt buttresses of
Antrim and the granite ribs of Down, and pass through northern Ulster
and Connacht to the headlands of Mayo and Galway. Their rear is held by
the Donegal ranges, keeping guard against the blackness of the
northern seas.
The plain opens from the verge of these hills; the waters that gather on
its pleasant pastures and fat fields, or among the green moss tracts of
its lowlands, flow eastward by the Boyne or southwestward by the Shannon
to the sea.
Then with the granite mountains of Dublin and Wicklow begin the southern
hills, stretching through south Leinster and Munster to the red
sandstone ridges of Cork and Kerry, our last vantage-ground against
the Atlantic.
Finally, encircling all, is the perpetual presence of the sea, with its
foaming, thunderous life or its days of dreamy peace; around the silver
sands or furrowed cliffs that gird the island our white waves rush
forever, murmuring the music of eternity.
Such is this land of Eiré, very old, yet full of perpetual youth; a
thousand times darkened by sorrow, yet with a heart of living gladness;
too often visited by evil and pale death, yet welling ever up in
unconquerable life,--the youth and life and gladness that thrill through
earth and air and sky, when the whole world grows beautiful in the front
of Spring.
For with us Spring is like the making of a new world in the dawn of
time. Under the warm wind's caressing breath the grass comes forth upon
the meadows and the hills, chasing dun Winter away. Every field is newly
vestured in young corn or the olive greenness of wheat; the smell of the
earth is full of sweetness. White daisies and yellow dandelions star all
our pastures; and on the green ruggedness of every hillside, or along
the shadowed banks of every river and every silver stream, amid velvet
mosses and fringes of new-born ferns, in a million nooks and crannies
throughout all the land, are strewn dark violets; and wreaths of yellow
primroses with crimped green leaves pour forth a remote and divine
fragrance; above them, the larches are dainty with new greenery and rosy
tassels, and the young leaves of beech and oak quiver with fresh life.
Still the benignance of Spring pours down upon us from the sky, till the
darkening fields are hemmed in between barriers of white hawthorn, heavy
with nectar, and twined with creamy honeysuckle, the finger-tips of
every blossom coral-red. The living blue above throbs with the tremulous
song of innumerable larks; the measured chant of cuckoos awakens the
woods; and through the thickets a whole world's gladness sings itself
forth from the throat of thrush and blackbird. Through the whole land
between the four seas benediction is everywhere; blue-bells and the rosy
fingers of heath deck the mountain-tops, where the grouse are crooning
to each other among the whins; down the hillsides into every valley pour
gladness and greenness and song; there are flowers everywhere, even to
the very verge of the whispering sea. There, among the gray bent-spikes
and brackens on the sandhills, primroses weave their yellow wreaths; and
little pansies, golden and blue and purple, marshal their weird eyes
against the spears of dark blue hyacinths, till the rich tribute of
wild thyme makes peace between them.
The blue sky overhead, with its flocks of sunlit clouds, softly bends
over the gentle bosom of the earth. A living spirit throbs everywhere,
palpable, audible, full of sweetness and sadness immeasurable--sadness
that is only a more secret joy.
Then the day grows weary, making way for the magic of evening and the
oncoming dark with its mystery. The tree-stems redden with the sunset;
there is a chill sigh in the wind; the leaves turn before it, burnished
against the purple sky. As the gloom rises up out of the earth, bands of
dark red gather on the horizon, seaming the clear bronze of the sky,
that passes upward into olive-color, merging in dark blue overhead. The
sun swings down behind the hills, and purple darkness comes down out of
the sky; the red fades from the tree-stems, the cloud-colors die away;
the whole world glimmers with the fading whiteness of twilight. Silence
gathers itself together out of the dark, deepened, not broken, by the
hushing of the wind among the beech-leaves, or the startled cluck of a
blackbird, or a wood-pigeon's soft murmur, as it dreams in the
silver fir.
Under the brown wings of the dark, the night throbs with mystic
presences; the hills glimmer with an inward life; whispering voices
hurry through the air. Another and magical land awakes in the dark, full
of a living restlessness; sleepless as the ever-moving sea. Everywhere
through the night-shrouded woods, the shadowy trees seem to interrupt
their secret whispers till you are gone past. There is no sense of
loneliness anywhere, but rather a host of teeming lives on every hand,
palpable though hidden, remote from us though touching our lives,
calling to us through the gloom with wordless voices, inviting us to
enter and share with them the mystical life of this miraculous earth,
great mother of us all, The dark is full of watching eyes.
Summer with us is but a brighter Spring, as our Winter only prolongs the
sadness of Autumn. So our year has but two moods, a gay one and a sad
one. Yet each tinges the other--the mists of Autumn veiling the gleam of
Spring--Spring smiling through the grief of Autumn. When the sad mood
comes, stripping the trees of their leaves, and the fields of their
greenness, white mists veil the hills and brood among the fading
valleys. A shiver runs through the air, and the cold branches are
starred with tears. A poignant grief is over the land, an almost
desolation,--full of unspoken sorrow, tongue-tied with unuttered
complaint. All the world is lost and forlorn, without hope or respite.
Everything is given up to the dirges of the moaning seas, the white
shrouds of weeping mist. Wander forth upon the uplands and among the
lonely hills and rock-seamed sides of the mountains, and you will find
the same sadness everywhere: a grieving world under a grieving sky.
Quiet desolation hides among the hills, tears tremble on every brown
grass-blade, white mists of melancholy shut out the lower world.
Whoever has not felt the poignant sadness of the leafless days has never
known the real Ireland; the sadness that is present, though veiled, in
the green bravery of Spring, and under the songs of Summer. Nor have
they ever known the real Ireland who have not divined beneath that
poignant sadness a heart of joy, deep and perpetual, made only keener by
that sad outward show.
Here in our visible life is a whisper and hint of our life invisible; of
the secret that runs through and interprets so much of our history. For
very much of our nation's life has been like the sadness of those autumn
days,--a tale of torn leaves, of broken branches, of tears everywhere.
Tragedy upon tragedy has filled our land with woe and sorrow, and, as
men count success, we have failed of it, and received only misery and
deprivation. He has never known the true Ireland who does not feel that
woe. Yet, more, he knows not the real Ireland who cannot feel within
that woe the heart of power and joy,--the strong life outlasting darkest
night,--the soul that throbs incessantly under all the calamities of the
visible world, throughout the long tragedy of our history.
This is our secret: the life that is in sorrow as in joy; the power that
is not more in success than in failure--the one soul whose moods these
are, who uses equally life and death.
For the tale of our life is mainly tragedy. And we may outline now the
manner in which that tale will be told. We shall have, first, a long,
dim dawn,--mysterious peoples of the hidden past coming together to our
land from the outlying darkness. A first period, which has left abundant
and imperishable traces everywhere among our hills and valleys, writing
a large history in massive stone, yet a history which, even now, is dim
as the dawn it belongs to. What can be called forth from that Archaic
Darkness, in the backward and abysm of Time, we shall try to evoke;
drawing the outlines of a people who, with large energies in our visible
world, toiled yet more for the world invisible; a people uniform through
the whole land and beyond it, along many neighboring shores; a people
everywhere building; looking back into a long past; looking forward
through the mists of the future. A people commemorating the past in a
form that should outlast the future. A people undertaking great
enterprises for mysterious ends; whose works are everywhere among us, to
this day, imperishable in giant stone; yet a people whose purposes are
mysterious to us, whose very name and tongue are quite unknown. Their
works still live all around us in Ireland, spread evenly through the
four provinces, a world of the vanished past enduring among us into the
present; and, so mightily did these old builders work, and with such
large simplicity, that what they built will surely outlast every
handiwork of our own day, and endure through numberless to-morrows,
bridging the morning and evening twilight of our race.
After this Archaic Dawn we shall find a mingling of four races in
Ireland, coming together from widely separated homes, unless one of the
four be the descendant of the archaic race, as well it may be. From the
surging together of these four races we shall see, in almost
pre-historic times, the growth of a well-knit polity; firm
principalities founded, strong battles fought, a lasting foundation of
law. In this Second Epoch, every thing that in the first was dim and
vague grows firm in outline and defined. Names, places, persons,--we
know them all as if they were of to-day. This is the age which flowered
in the heroic days of Emain of Maca, Emain 'neath the beech-trees, the
citadel of northeastern Ireland. Here we shall find the court of Fergus
mac Roeg, a man too valiant, too passionate, too generous to rule
altogether wisely; his star darkened by the gloomy genius of Concobar
his stepson, the evil lover of ill-fated Deirdré. Cuculain, too, the
war-loving son of Sualtam, shall rise again,--in whom one part of our
national genius finds its perfect flower. We shall hear the thunder of
his chariot, at the Battle of the Headland of the Kings, when Meave the
winsome and crafty queen of Connacht comes against him, holding in
silken chains of her tresses the valiant spirit of Fergus. The whole
life of that heroic epoch, still writ large upon the face of the land,
shall come forth clear and definite; we shall stand by the threshold of
Cuculain's dwelling, and move among the banquet-halls of Emain of Maca.
We shall look upon the hills and valleys that Meave and Deirdré looked
on, and hear the clash of spear and shield at the Ford of the
river,--and this even though we must go back two thousand years.
To this will follow a Third Epoch, where another side of Ireland's
genius will write itself in epic all across the land, with songs for
every hillside, and stories for every vale and grove. Here our more
passionate and poetic force will break forth in the lives of Find, son
of Cumal, the lord of warriors; in his son Ossin, most famous bard of
the western lands, and Ossin's son Oscar, before whose might even the
fiends and sprites cowered back dismayed. As the epoch of Cuculain shows
us our valor finding its apotheosis, so shall we find in Find and Ossin
and Oscar the perfect flower of our genius for story and song; for
romantic life and fine insight into nature; for keen wit and gentler
humor. The love of nature, the passion for visible beauty, and chiefly
the visible beauty of our land, will here show itself clearly,--a sense
of nature not merely sensuous, but thrilling with hidden and mystic
life. We shall find such perfection in this more emotional and poetic
side of Irish character as will leave little for coming ages to add. In
these two early epochs we shall see the perfecting of the natural man;
the moulding of rounded, gracious and harmonious lives, inspired with
valor and the love of beauty and song.
Did our human destiny stop there, with the perfect life of individual
men and women, we might well say that these two epochs of Ireland
contain it all; that our whole race could go no further. For no man
lived more valiant than Cuculain, more generous than Fergus, more full
of the fire of song than Ossin, son of Find. Nor amongst women were any
sadder than Deirdré and Grania; craftier than Meave, more winsome than
Nessa the mother of Concobar. Perfected flowers of human life all of
them,--if that be all of human life. So, were this all, we might well
consent that with the death of Oscar our roll of history might close;
there is nothing to add that the natural man could add.
But where the perfecting of the natural man ends, our truer human life
begins--the life of our ever-living soul. The natural man seeks victory;
he seeks wealth and possessions and happiness; the love of women, and
the loyalty of followers. But the natural man trembles in the face of
defeat, of sorrow, of subjection; the natural man cannot raise the
black veil of death.
Therefore for the whole world and for our land there was needed another
epoch, a far more difficult lesson,--one so remote from what had been of
old, that even now we only begin to understand it. To the Ireland that
had seen the valor of Cuculain, that had watched the wars of Fergus,--to
the Ireland that listened to the deeds of Find and the songs of
Ossin,--came the Evangel of Galilee, the darkest yet brightest message
ever brought to the children of earth. If we rightly read that Evangel,
it brought the doom of the natural man, and his supersession by the man
immortal; it brought the death of our personal perfecting and pride, and
the rising from the dead of the common soul, whereby a man sees another
self in his neighbor; sees all alike in the one Divine.
Of this one Divine, wherein we all live and live forever, pain is no
less the minister than pleasure; nay, pain is more its minister, since
pleasure has already given its message to the natural man. Of that one
Divine, sorrow and desolation are the messengers, alike with joy and
gladness; even more than joy and gladness, for the natural man has
tasted these. Of that one Divine, black and mysterious death is the
servant, not less than bright life; and life we had learned of old in
the sunshine.
[Illustration: In the Dargle, Co. Wicklow]
There came, therefore, to Ireland, as to a land cherished for enduring
purposes, first the gentler side, and then the sterner, of the Galilean
message. First, the epoch almost idyllic which followed after the
mission of Patrick; the epoch of learning and teaching the simpler
phrases of the Word. Churches and schools rose everywhere, taking the
place of fort and embattled camp. Chants went up at morning and at
evening, with the incense of prayer, and heaven seemed descended upon
earth. Our land, which had stood so high in the ranks of valor and
romance, now rose not less eminent for piety and fervid zeal, sending
forth messengers and ministers of the glad news to the heathen lands of
northern and central Europe, and planting refuges of religion within
their savage bounds. Beauty came forth in stone and missal, answering to
the beauty of life it was inspired by; and here, if anywhere upon earth
through a score of centuries, was realized the ideal of that prayer for
the kingdom, as in heaven, so on earth. Here, again, we have most ample
memorials scattered all abroad throughout the land; we can call up the
whole epoch, and make it stand visible before us, visiting every shrine
and sacred place of that saintly time, seeing, with inner eyes, the
footsteps of those who followed that path, first traced out by the
shores of Gennesaret.
Once more, if the kingdom come upon earth were all of the message, we
might halt here; for here forgiveness and gentle charity performed their
perfect work, and learning was present with wise counsel to guide
willing feet in the way. Yet this is not all; nor, if we rightly
understand that darkest yet brightest message, are we or is mankind
destined for such an earthly paradise; our kingdom is not of this world.
Here was another happiness, another success; yet not in that happiness
nor in that success was hid the secret; it lay far deeper. Therefore we
find that morning with its sunshine rudely clouded over, its promise
swept away in the black darkness of storms. Something more than holy
living remained to be learned; there remained the mystery of failure and
death--that death which is the doorway to our real life. Therefore upon
our shores broke wave after wave of invasion, storm after storm of
cruelest oppression and degradation. In the very dust was our race
ground down, destitute, afflicted, tormented, according to prophecy and
promise. Nor was that the end. Every bitterness that the heart of man
can conceive, that the heart of man can inflict, that the heart of man
can endure, was poured into our cup, and we drained it to the dregs. Of
that saddest yet most potent time we shall record enough to show not
only what befell through our age of darkness, but also, so far as may
be, what miraculous intent underlay it, what promise the darkness
covered, of our future light; what golden rays of dawn were hidden in
our gloom.
Finally, from all our fiery trials we shall see the genius of our land
emerge, tried indeed by fire, yet having gained fire's purity; we shall
see that genius beginning, as yet with halting speech, to utter its most
marvelous secret of the soul of man. We shall try at least to gain clear
sight of our great destiny, and thereby of the like destiny of
universal man.
For we cannot doubt that what we have passed through, all men and all
nations either have passed through already, or are to pass through in
the time to come. There is but one divine law, one everlasting purpose
and destiny for us all. And if we see other nations now entering that
time of triumph which passed for us so long ago, that perfecting of the
natural man, with his valor and his song, we shall with fear and
reverence remember that before them also lie the dark centuries of fiery
trial; the long night of affliction, the vigils of humiliation and
suffering. The one Divine has not yet laid aside the cup that holds the
bitter draught,--the drinking of which comes ever before the final gift
of the waters of life. What we passed through, they shall pass through
also; what we suffered, they too shall suffer. Well will it be with them
if, like us, they survive the fierce trial, and rise from the fire
immortal, born again through sacrifice.
Therefore I see in Ireland a miraculous and divine history, a life and
destiny invisible, lying hid within her visible life. Like that
throbbing presence of the night which whispers along the hills, this
diviner whisper, this more miraculous and occult power, lurks in our
apparent life. From the very gray of her morning, the children of
Ireland were preoccupied with the invisible world; it was so in the
darkest hours of our oppression and desolation; driven from this world,
we took refuge in that; it was not the kingdom of heaven upon earth, but
the children of earth seeking a refuge in heaven. So the same note rings
and echoes through all our history; we live in the invisible world. If
I rightly understand our mission and our destiny, it is this: To restore
to other men the sense of that invisible; that world of our immortality;
as of old our race went forth carrying the Galilean Evangel. We shall
first learn, and then teach, that not with wealth can the soul of man be
satisfied; that our enduring interest is not here but there, in the
unseen, the hidden, the immortal, for whose purposes exist all the
visible beauties of the world. If this be our mission and our purpose,
well may our fair mysterious land deserve her name: Inis Fail, the Isle
of Destiny.
II.
THE GREAT STONE MONUMENTS.
Westward from Sligo--Town of the River of Shells--a tongue of land runs
toward the sea between two long bays. Where the two bays join their
waters, a mountain rises precipitous, its gray limestone rocks soaring
sheer upwards, rugged and formidable. Within the shadow of the mountain
is hidden a wonderful glen--a long tunnel between cliffs, densely arched
over with trees and fringed with ferns; even at midday full of a green
gloom. It is a fitting gateway to the beauty and mystery of
the mountain.
Slowly climbing by stony ways, the path reaches the summit, a rock table
crowned with a pyramid of loose boulders, heaped up in olden days as a
memorial of golden-haired Maeve. From the dead queen's pyramid a view of
surpassing grandeur and beauty opens over sea and land, mingled valley
and hill. The Atlantic stretches in illimitable blue, curved round the
rim of the sky, a darker mirror of the blue above. It is full of
throbbing silence and peace. Across blue fields of ocean, and facing
the noonday brightness of the sun, rise the tremendous cliffs of Slieve
League, gleaming with splendid colors through the shimmering air; broad
bands of amber and orange barred with deeper red; the blue weaves
beneath them and the green of the uplands above.
The vast amber wall rises out of the ocean, and passes eastward in a
golden band till it merges in the Donegal highlands with their
immeasurable blue. Sweeping round a wide bay, the land drawls nearer
again, the far-away blue darkening to purple, and then to green and
brown. The sky is cut by the outlines of the Leitrim and Sligo hills, a
row of rounded peaks against the blue, growing paler and more
translucent in the southern distance.
Under the sun, there is a white glinting of lakes away across the plain,
where brown and purple are blended with green in broad spaces of
mingling color. To the west the ground rises again into hills crowded
behind each other, sombre masses, for ages called the Mountains of
Storms. Far beyond them, vague as blue cloud-wreaths in the blue, are
the hills that guard our western ocean. From their sunset-verges the
land draws near again, in the long range of the Mayo cliffs,--fierce
walls of rock that bar the fiercer ocean from a wild world of
storm-swept uplands. The cliffs gradually lessen, and their colors grow
clearer, till they sink at last toward the sand-banks of Ballysadare,
divided from us only by a channel of shallow sea.
The whole colored circle of sea and land, of moor and mountain, is full
of the silence of intense and mighty power. The ocean is tremulous with
the breath of life. The mountains, in their stately beauty, rise like
immortals in the clear azure. The signs of our present works are dwarfed
to insignificance.
Everywhere within that wide world of hill and plain, and hardly less
ancient than the hills themselves, are strewn memorials of another world
that has vanished, sole survivors of a long-hidden past. A wordless
history is written there, in giant circles of stone and cromlechs of
piled blocks, so old that in a land of most venerable tradition their
very legend has vanished away.
Close under us lies Carrowmore, with its labyrinth of cromlechs and
stone circles, a very city of dead years. There is something
awe-inspiring in the mere massiveness of these piled and ordered stones,
the visible boundaries of invisible thoughts; that awe is deepened by
the feeling of the tremendous power lavished in bringing them here,
setting them up in their ordered groups, and piling the crowns of the
cromlechs on other only less gigantic stones; awe gives place to
overwhelming mystery when we can find no kinship to our own thoughts and
aims in their stately grouping. We are in presence of archaic purposes
recorded in a massive labyrinth, purposes darkly hidden from us in
the unknown.
There are circles of huge boulders ranged at equal distances, firmly set
upright in the earth. They loom vast, like beads of a giant necklace on
the velvet grass. There are cromlechs set alone--a single huge boulder
borne aloft in the air on three others of hardly less weight. There are
cromlechs set in the midst of titanic circles of stone, with lesser
boulders guarding the cromlechs closer at hand. There are circles beside
circles rising in their grayness, with the grass and heather carpeting
their aisles. There they rest in silence, with the mountain as their
companion, and, beyond the mountain, the ever-murmuring sea.
Thus they have kept their watch through long dark ages. When sunrise
reddens them, their shadows stretch westward in bars of darkness over
the burnished grass. From morning to midday the shadows shrink, ever
hiding from the sun; an army of wraiths, sprite-like able to grow
gigantic or draw together into mere blots of darkness. When day
declines, the shadows come forth again, joining ghostly hands from stone
to stone, from circle to circle, under the sunset sky, and merging at
last into the universal realm of night. Thus they weave their web,
inexorable as tireless Time.
There are more than threescore of these circles at Carrowmore, under
Knocknarea. Yet Carrowmore is only one among many memorials of dead
years within our horizon. At Abbey-quarter, within the town-limits of
Sligo itself, there is another great ring of boulders, the past and the
present mingling together. On the northern coast, across the Bay of
Sligo, where the headland of Streedagh juts forth into the sea, there is
another giant necklace of gray blocks ranged upon the moor. Farther
along the shore, where Bundoran marks the boundary of Donegal, a
cromlech and a stone circle rise among the sand-banks. All have the same
rugged and enduring massiveness, all are wrapped in the same mystery.
Eastward from Sligo, Lough Gill lies like a mirror framed in hills,
wreathed with dark green woods. On a hill-top north of the lake, in the
Deer-park, is a monument of quite other character--a great oblong
marked by pillared stones, like an open temple. At three points huge
stones are laid across from pillar to pillar. The whole enclosure was
doubtless so barred in days of old, a temple of open arches crowning the
summit of the hill. The great ruin by the lake keeps its secret well.
Another ring of giant stones rests on a hillside across the lake, under
the Cairn hill, with its pyramid crown. All these are within easy view
from our first vantage-point on Knocknarea, yet they are but the
outposts of an army which spreads everywhere throughout the land. They
are as common in wild and inaccessible places as on the open plain. Some
rise in lonely islands off the coast; others on the summits of
mountains; yet others in the midst of tilled fields. They bear no
relation at all to the land as it is to-day. The very dispersion of
these great stone monuments, scattered equally among places familiar or
wild, speaks of a remote past--a past when all places were alike wild,
or all alike familiar.
Where the gale-swept moors of Achill Island rise up toward the slope of
Slievemore Mountain, there are stone circles and cromlechs like the
circles of Carrowmore. The wild storms of the Atlantic rush past them,
and the breakers roar under their cliffs. The moorland round the
towering mountain is stained with ochre and iron under a carpet of
heather rough as the ocean winds.
Away to the south from Slievemore the horizon is broken by an army of
mountains, beginning with the Twelve Peaks of Connemara. Eastward of
these hills are spread the great Galway lakes; eastward of these a wide
expanse of plain. This is the famous Moytura of traditional history,
whose story we shall presently tell. Ages ago a decisive battle was
fought there; but ages before the battle, if we are not greatly misled,
the stone circles of the plain were already there. Tradition says that
these circles numbered seven in the beginning, but only two
remain unbroken.
Between Galway Bay and the wide estuary of the Shannon spread the
moorlands of Clare, bleak under Atlantic gales, with never a tree for
miles inward from the sea. Like a watch-tower above the moorlands stand.
Slieve Callan, the crown of the mountain abruptly shorn. Under the
shoulder of the great hill, with the rolling moorlands all about it,
stands a solitary cromlech; formed of huge flat stones, it was at first
a roomy chamber shut in on all four sides, and roofed by a single
enormous block; the ends have fallen, so that it is now an open tunnel
formed of three huge stones.
The coast runs southward from the Shannon to the strand of Tralee, the
frontier of the southern mountain world, where four ranges of red
sandstone thrust themselves forth towards the ocean, with long fiords
running inland between them. On a summit of the first of these red
ranges, Caherconree above Tralee strand, there is a stone circle,
massive, gigantic, dwelling in utter solitude.
We have recorded a few only out of many of these great stone monuments
strewn along our Atlantic coast, whether on moor or cliff or remote
mountain-top.
There are others as notable everywhere in the central plain, the
limestone world of lakes and rivers. On a green hill-crest overlooking
the network of inlets of Upper Erne there is a circle greater than any
we have recorded. The stones are very massive, some of them twice the
height of a tall man. To one who stands within the ring these huge
blocks of stone shut out the world; they loom large against the sky,
full of unspoken secrets like the Sphinx. Within this mighty ring the
circle of Stonehenge might be set, leaving a broad road all round it on
the grass.
From Fermanagh, where this huge circle is, we gain our best clue to the
age of all these monuments, everywhere so much like each other in their
massive form and dimensions, everywhere so like in their utter mystery.
Round the lakes of Erne there are wide expanses of peat, dug as fuel for
centuries, and in many places as much as twelve feet deep, on a bed of
clay, the waste of old glaciers. Though formed with incredible slowness,
this whole mass of peat has grown since some of the great stone
monuments were built; if we can tell the time thus taken for its growth
we know at least the nearer limit of the time that divides us from
their builders.
Like a tree, the peat has its time of growth and its time of rest.
Spring covers it with green, winter sees it brown and dead. Thus thin
layers are spread over it, a layer for a year, and it steadily gains in
thickness with the passing of the years. The deeper levels are buried
and pressed down, slowly growing firm and rigid, but still keeping the
marks of the layers that make them up. It is like a dry ocean gradually
submerging the land. Gathering round the great stone circles as they
stand on the clay, this black sea has risen slowly but surely, till at
last it has covered them with its dark waves, and they rest in the
quiet depths, with a green foam of spring freshness far above
their heads.
At Killee and Breagho, near Enniskillen, the peat has once more been cut
away, restoring some of these great stones to the light. If we count the
layers and measure the thickness of the peat, we can tell how many years
are represented by its growth. We can, therefore, tell that the great
stone circle, which the first growth of peat found already there, must
be at least as old, and may be indefinitely older. By careful count it
is found that one foot of black peat is made up of eight hundred layers;
eight hundred summers and eight hundred winters went to the building of
it. One foot of black peat, therefore, will measure the time from before
the founding of Rome or the First Olympiad to the beginning of our era.
Another foot will bring us to the crowning of Charlemagne. Yet another,
to the death of Shakespeare and Cervantes. Since then, only a few inches
have been added. Here is a chronometer worthy of our great cromlechs and
stone circles.
Some of these, as we saw, rest on the clay, with a sea of peat twelve
feet deep around and above them. Every foot of the peat stands for eight
centuries. Since the peat began to form, eight or ten thousand years
have passed, and when that vast period began, the great monuments of
stone were already there. How long they had stood in their silence
before our chronometer began to run we cannot even guess.
At Cavancarragh, on the shoulder of Toppid Mountain, some four miles
from Enniskillen, there is one of these circles; a ring of huge stone
boulders with equal spaces between stone and stone. A four-fold avenue
of great blocks stretches away from it along the shoulder of the hill,
ending quite abruptly at the edge of a ravine, the steep channel of a
torrent. It looks as if the river, gradually undermining the hillside,
had cut the avenue in halves, so that the ravine seems later in date
than the stones. But that we cannot be quite sure of. This, however, we
do certainly know: that since the avenue of boulders and the circle of
huge red stones were ranged in order, a covering of peat in some parts
twelve feet thick has grown around and above them, hiding them at last
altogether from the day. In places the peat has been cut away again,
leaving the stones once more open to the light, standing, as they always
stood, on the surface of the clay.
Here again we get the same measurement. At eight hundred annual layers
to the foot, and with twelve feet of peat, we have nine thousand six
hundred years,--not for the age of the stone circles, but for that part
of their age which we are able to measure. For we know not how long they
were there before the peat began to grow. It may have been a few years;
it may have been a period as great or even greater than the ten thousand
years we are able to measure.
The peat gradually displaced an early forest of giant oaks. Their stems
are still there, standing rooted in the older clay. Where they once
stood no trees now grow. The whole face of the land has changed. Some
great change of climate must lie behind this vanishing of vast forests,
this gradual growth of peat-covered moors. A dry climate must have
changed to one much damper; heat must have changed to cold, warm winds
to chilly storms. In the southern promontories, among red sandstone
hills, still linger survivors of that more genial clime--groves of
arbutus that speak of Greece or Sicily; ferns, as at Killarney, found
elsewhere only in the south, in Portugal, or the Canary Islands.
[Illustration: Muckross Abbey, Killarney.]
On the southwestern horizon from Toppid Mountain, when the sky is clear
after rain, you can trace the outline of the Curlew hills, our
southern limit of view from Knocknarea. Up to the foot of the hills
spreads a level country of pastures dappled with lakes, broken into a
thousand fantastic inlets by the wasting of the limestone rock. The
daisies are the stars in that green sky. Just beyond the young stream of
the Shannon, where it links Lough Garra to Lough Key, there is a lonely
cromlech, whose tremendous crown was once upheld by five massive
pillars. There is a kindred wildness and mystery in the cromlech and the
lonely hills.
Southward again of this, where the town of Lough Rea takes its name from
the Gray Lake, stands a high hill crowned by a cromlech, with an
encircling earthwork. It marks a green ring of sacred ground alone upon
the hill-top, shut off from all the world, and with the mysterious
monument of piled stones in its centre; here, as always, one huge block
upheld in the air by only lesser blocks. The Gray Lake itself, under
this strange sentry on the hill, was in long-passed ages a little
Venice; houses built on piles lined its shores, set far enough out into
the lake for safety, ever ready to ward off attack from the land. This
miniature Venice of Lough Rea is the type of a whole epoch of turbulent
tribal war, when homes were everywhere clustered within the defence of
the waters, with stores laid up to last the rigors of a siege.
The contrast between the insecurity and peril of the old lake dwellings
and the present safety of the town, open on all sides, unguarded and
free from fear, is very marked. But not less complete is the contrast
between the ancient hamlet, thus hidden for security amid the waters,
and the great cromlech, looming black against the sky on the hill's
summit, exposed to the wildness of the winds, utterly unguarded, yet
resting there in lonely serenity.
A little farther south, Lough Gur lies like a white mirror among the
rolling pasture-lands of Limerick, set amongst low hills. On the lake's
shore is another metropolis of the dead, worthy to compare with
Carrowmore on the Sligo headland. Some of the circles here are not
formed of single stones set at some distance from each other, but of a
continuous wall of great blocks crowded edge to edge. They are like
round temples open to the sky, and within one of these unbroken rings is
a lesser ring like an inner shrine. All round the lake there are like
memorials--if we can call memorials these mighty groups of stone, which
only remind us how much we have forgotten. There are huge circles of
blocks either set close together or with an equal space dividing boulder
from boulder; some of the giant circles are grouped together in twos and
threes, others are isolated; one has its centre marked by a single
enormous block, while another like block stands farther off in lonely
vastness. Here also stands a chambered cromlech of four huge flat blocks
roofed over like the cromlech under Slieve Callan across the
Shannon mouth.
The southern horizon from Lough Gur is broken by the hills of red
sandstone rising around Glanworth. Beside the stream, a tributary of the
Blackwater, a huge red cromlech rises over the greenness of the meadows
like a belated mammoth in its uncouth might. To the southwest, under the
red hills that guard Killarney on the south, the Sullane River flows
towards the Lee. On its bank is another cromlech of red sandstone
blocks, twin-brother to the Glanworth pile. Beyond it the road passes
towards the sunset through mountain-shadowed glens, coming out at last
where Kenmare River opens into a splendid fiord towards the Atlantic
Ocean. At Kenmare, in a vale of perfect beauty green with groves of
arbutus and fringed with thickets of fuchsia, stands a great stone
circle, the last we shall record to the south. Like all the rest, it
speaks of tremendous power, of unworldly and mysterious ends.
The very antiquity of these huge stone circles suggests an affinity with
the revolving years. And here, perhaps, we may find a clue to their
building. They may have been destined to record great Time itself, great
Time that circles forever through the circling years. There is first the
year to be recorded, with its revolving days; white winter gleaming into
spring; summer reddening and fading to autumn. Returning winter tells
that the year has gone full circle; the sun among the stars gives the
definite measure of the days. A ring of thirty-six great boulders, set
ten paces apart, would give the measure of the year in days; and of
circles like this there are more than one.
In this endless ring of days the moon is the measurer, marking the hours
and weeks upon the blue belt of night studded with golden stars. Moving
stealthily among the stars, the moon presently changes her place by a
distance equal to her own breadth; we call the time this takes an hour.
From her rising to her setting, she gains her own breadth twelve times;
therefore, the night and the day are divided each into twelve hours.
Meanwhile she grows from crescent to full disk, to wane again to a
sickle of light, and presently to lose herself in darkness at new moon.
From full moon to full moon, or from one new moon to another, the
nearest even measure is thirty days; a circle of thirty stones would
record this, as the larger circle of thirty-six recorded the solar year.
In three years there are thrice twelve full moons, with one added; a
ring of thirty-seven stones representing this would show the simplest
relation between sun and moon.
The moon, as we saw, stealthily glides among the fixed stars, gaining
her own width every hour. Passing thus along the mid belt of the sphere,
she makes the complete circuit in twenty-seven days, returning to the
same point among the stars, or, if it should so happen, to the same
star, within that time. Because the earth has meanwhile moved forward,
the moon needs three days more to overtake it and gain the same relative
position towards earth and sun, thus growing full again, not after
twenty-seven, but after thirty days. Circles of twenty-seven and thirty
days would stand for these lunar epochs, and would, for those who
understood them, further bear testimony to the earth's movement in its
own great path around the sun. Thus would rings of varying numbers mark
the measures of time; and not these only, but the great sweep of orbs
engendering them, the triumphal march of the spheres through pathless
ether. The life of our own world would thus be shown bound up with the
lives of others in ceaseless, ever-widening circles, that lead us to the
Infinite, the Eternal.
All the cromlechs and circles we have thus far recorded are in the
western half of our land; there are as many, as worthy of note, in the
eastern half. But as before we can only pick out a few. One of these
crowns the volcanic peak of Brandon Hill, in Kilkenny, dividing the
valleys of the Barrow and Nore. From the mountain-top you can trace the
silver lines of the rivers coming together to the south, and flowing
onward to the widening inlet of Wexford harbor, where they mingle with
the waters of the River Suir. On the summit of Brandon Hill stands a
great stone circle, a ring of huge basalt blocks dominating the rich
valleys and the surrounding plain.
In Glen Druid of the Dublin hills is a cromlech whose granite crown
weighs seventy tons. Not far off is the Mount Venus cromlech, the
covering block of which is even more titanic; it is a single stone
eighty tons in weight. Near Killternan village, a short distance off, is
yet another cromlech whose top-most boulder exceeds both of these,
weighing not less than ninety tons. Yet vast as all these are, they are
outstripped by the cromlech of Howth, whose upper block is twenty feet
square and eight feet thick, a single enormous boulder one hundred tons
in weight. This huge stone was borne in the air upon twelve massive
pillars of quartz, seven feet above the ground, so that a man of average
height standing on the ground and reaching upward could just touch the
under surface of the block with his finger-tips. Even a tall man
standing on the shoulders of another as tall would quite fail to touch
the upper edge of the stone. If we give this marvelous monument the same
age as the Fermanagh circles, as we well may, this raising of a single
boulder of one hundred tons, and balancing it in the air on the crest of
massive pillars may give us some insight into the engineering skill of
the men of ten thousand years ago.
Across the central plain from Howth Head the first break is the range of
Loughcrew hills. Here are great stone circles in numbers, not standing
alone like so many others, but encompassing still stranger monuments;
chambered pyramids of boulders, to which we shall later return. They
are lesser models of the three great pyramids of Brugh on the Boyne,
where the river sweeps southward in a long curve, half-encircling a
headland of holy ground.
From near Howth to the Boyne and north of it, the coast is low and flat;
sandhills matted with bent-grass and starred with red thyme and tiny
pansies, yellow and purple and blue. Low tide carries the sea almost to
the horizon, across a vast wilderness of dripping sand where the gulls
chatter as they wade among the pools. Where the shore rises again
towards the Carlingford Mountains, another cromlech stands under the
shadow of granite hills.
A long fiord with wooded walls divides the Carlingford range from the
mountains of Mourne. The great dark range thrusts itself forth against
the sea in somber beauty, overhanging the wide strand of Dundrum Bay.
The lesser bay, across whose bar the sea moans under the storm-winds, is
dominated by the hill of Rudraige, named in honor of a hero of old days;
but under the shadow of the hill stands a more ancient monument, that
was gray with age before the race of Rudraige was born. On five pillars
of massive stone is upreared a sixth, of huge and formidable bulk, and
carrying even to us in our day a sense of mystery and might. The potent
atmosphere of a hidden past still breathes from it, whispering of
vanished years, vanished races, vanished secrets of the prime.