[Illustration: MUCKROSS BAY, KILLYBEGS, DONEGAL]
ULSTER
Described by Stephen Gwynn
Pictured by Alexander Williams
[Illustration]
BLACKIE AND SON LIMITED
LONDON GLASGOW AND BOMBAY
1911
Beautiful Ireland
LEINSTER
ULSTER
MUNSTER
CONNAUGHT
_Uniform with this Series_
Beautiful England
OXFORD
THE ENGLISH LAKES
CANTERBURY
SHAKESPEARE-LAND
THE THAMES
WINDSOR CASTLE
CAMBRIDGE
NORWICH AND THE BROADS
THE HEART OF WESSEX
THE PEAK DISTRICT
THE CORNISH RIVIERA
DICKENS-LAND
WINCHESTER
THE ISLE OF WIGHT
CHESTER AND THE DEE
YORK
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
AT THE GAP OF THE NORTH 5
"THE BLACK NORTH" 13
THE MAIDEN CITY 28
TIRCONNELL 37
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Page
Muckross Bay, Killybegs, Donegal _Frontispiece_
Narrow Water Castle, Carlingford Lough 8
Cave Hill, Belfast 14
Carrickfergus Castle, Belfast Lough 20
The Giants' Causeway 26
Fair Head, Co. Antrim 32
Londonderry from the Waterside 36
Tory Island from Falcarragh Hill, Donegal 42
Muckish and Ards from Rosapenna, Sheephaven, Donegal 46
Mount Errigal from the Gweedore River, Donegal 50
Glenveagh, Donegal 54
The Entrance to Mulroy Bay, Donegal 58
[Illustration: ULSTER]
AT THE GAP OF THE NORTH
Ulster is a province much talked of and little understood--a name
about which controversy rages. But to those who know it and who love
it, one thing is clear--Ulster is no less Ireland than Connaught
itself. No better song has been written in our days than that which
tells of an Irishman's longing in London to be back "where the
mountains of Mourne sweep down to the sea"; nor indeed is the whole
frame of mind which that song dramatises, with so pleasant a blending
of humour and pathos, better expressed in any single way than in the
phrase "thinking long"--an idiom common to all Ulster talk, whether
in Down or Donegal. And when I who write these lines "think long"
for Ireland, it is to Ulster that my thought goes back, back to the
homely ways and the quaint speech of northern folk, hard yet kindly,
with the genial welcome readier even in their rough accent than in
smoothest Munster: for these things there rises in my mind the vague
aching, half-remembrance, half-desire, which we call "thinking long".
It is a far cry from Belfast, with its clang of riveters, to the vast
loneliness of Slieve League or Dunlewy; and yet the great captain
of industry, nurtured and proven in the keenest commerce, has upon
his tongue, in his features, in the whole cast of his nature, these
very traits which endear themselves to me in some Irish-speaking
schoolmaster of western Donegal. Soil, climate, and common
memories--these are what identify and what bind. No man gets his
living too easily in Ulster, and need makes neighbourly. Protestant
and Catholic have to fight the same battle with hard weather--of which
perhaps even the summer traveller may form some judgment; they are
rewarded by the same loveliness which makes a fine day in Ulster the
most enchanting upon earth; and they fend against the stress of storm
by the same warm shelter, the same glow of the turf-piled hearth.
The Ulster of which I shall write in these few pages is the Ulster of
four sea-bordering counties only, Donegal, Derry, Antrim, and Down,
since beyond doubt these exceed the other five in attractions. Only
let a word be said of two great lakes. Lough Erne, which belongs
mainly to Fermanagh, though bordering Donegal in part, is to its
champions the Cinderella of Irish waters, and some day it will come
into its inheritance of fame. Lough Neagh, with its eighty miles of
shore, divided among five counties, has never been seen by me but in
tranquil loveliness, one vast sheet of shimmering blue; and whether at
Antrim, where many memories have their monuments, or at Toomebridge,
where the Bann flows out majestically, has seemed well worth a day's
journey--the more because its beauty is set among lands not fertile,
yet prosperously tilled and inhabited by people, not rich indeed, yet
safely removed from the stress of poverty. Not far from it is Armagh,
a cathedral city, richer in associations than any in Ireland. If I do
not write of Armagh, it is because the oldest of these associations
has its monument also at the southern gate of Ulster, where the
division of the province is best marked.
Carlingford Lough, according to modern geography, marks that division,
but in truth the lough's southern shore, the rocky promontory of
Cooley, belongs to Ulster by all titles, though it be included in
the modern county of Louth. A steamer will carry you from Holyhead
to Greenore (where is a hotel with the inevitable golf links) and
land you nominally in Leinster. But all that mountainous headland is
inhabited by folk who still keep the Gaelic speech alive among them,
and whose remote forbears owned in far distant times the overlordship
of Ireland's most famous champion, when Ulster had a pagan chivalry,
the Red Branch Circle, which is to Irish legend what the story
of Arthur's knighthood is to British romance, or the tale of the
Nibelungs to Germany. Cooley (in Irish, _Cuailgne_) was the fief of
Cuchulain; and the Brown Bull of Cooley was the object of that great
foray made by the rest of Ireland upon Ulster, which is related in the
oldest and finest of all Celtic hero tales.
Cuchulain's dwelling was outside Cooley, outside Ulster proper; his
stronghold was Dundealgan, the "Thorn Fort" which gives its name to
Dundalk. It was an outpost guarding that pass in the hills, the gap of
the north, through which the railway, leaving the plains of Leinster,
winds into the mountainous and threatening regions of Armagh and Down.
[Illustration: NARROW WATER CASTLE, CARLINGFORD LOUGH]
All the story of Cuchulain's hero-feats can be read in Lady Gregory's
admirable version, _Cuchulain of Muirthemne_; but Cuchulain's fort you
can see for yourself. It stands close to the town of Dundalk, visible
from the railway, a flat-topped mount, surrounded by a trench some
thirty feet deep, with a steep outer rampart surrounding this in its
turn. The whole is now tree-covered. Mr. Tempest, an antiquary of
Dundalk, whose exertions have saved this monument from the spade and
plough, thinks that he has identified, a couple of miles south of
Dundalk, the place where Cuchulain died. Cloghafarmore, the "Big Man's
Stone", at Ratheddy is one of the "standing stones" found through
Ireland, as through other Celtic countries, and tradition identifies
it with the pillar to which Cuchulain made his way from his last
fight. For ninety days, he and his charioteer Laeg, and his pair of
horses, Black Sanglain and the Grey of Macha, had harassed and held
back the host of Ireland, destroying champion after champion, singly
or by groups, in fights at each ford, and raining missiles upon the
main body with marvellous sling-throwing; but at last, encompassed and
at bay, he had got his death-wound with his own charmed spear, which
passed through the bodies of nine men in its last flight from his
hand. When, flung back at him by Lugaidh, last survivor of the sons
whose father Cuchulain had slain, it had ripped his body open, the
wounded warrior, holding his bowels together with one hand, staggered
to this pillar stone, and bound himself to it by his scarf, so that
even in death and defeat he might still stand upright. So he stood
propped, while the Grey of Macha, loosed from its harness, defended
him with teeth and hoof, letting none approach, till men saw that on
the hero's shoulder a raven had lighted. "It is not on that pillar
birds were used to settle", said one of his foemen. Then the grey
horse knew that life had ebbed away, and she left the body to its
despoilers. But the man who struck off Cuchulain's head, and took it
with him, had his own head struck off by a comrade of the Red Branch
before he reached the plains of Liffey.
Such is the fierce temper of that old hero-cycle; but if its heroes
are not to be outdone in fierceness neither are they in generosity.
How much is legend, sheer invention, none can say: the great
earthworks at Armagh, Cuchulain's fort at Dundealgan, and a hundred
other things testify to a truth behind the tale. And it is fairly
well established that the race which had its centre at Armagh was
not the race which governed from Tara: the Red Branch was Pictish,
Tara was Milesian. How distinct the racial types show where they have
survived tolerably pure is hardly realized, save by some such chance
as befell me, when, at an exhibition in Limerick, I was summoned to
look at a strange foreign folk from the north. They were girls from
an Irish-speaking district in Donegal--not far from Rosapenna--pretty
girls, too, but among the big, buxom, oval-faced, soft-bodied
Southerners their short profiles, their high cheek bones, and hard,
bright colour showed as strange as if they had been from another
quarter of the world.
All the subsequent stages in Irish history meet you about the shores
of Carlingford--Carline-fiord; its name tells of Danish settlements.
The old castle in Carlingford town was erected by de Courcy at King
John's bidding; the monastery was Norman built too, by Richard de
Burgo, Earl of Ulster, but the Norman rule in Ulster was closely
limited to a few strongholds on the coast. The Narrow Water Castle,
which Mr. Williams has drawn against its background of the steep
richly wooded slopes which make the chief beauty of this beautiful
lough, is on the site of a thirteenth-century fortress, but that was
destroyed in the Great War of 1641, and this building dates from
Charles II's reign. At Warrenpoint a tall obelisk records the name of
Ross of Bladensburg, one of the many brilliant officers whom Ireland
gave to Wellington's armies--with how many thousands of the unnamed
peasants to fill the ranks that they led! All those wooded hills
behind Rostrevor, the little watering-place that nestles snug among
them, looking south to the sun and the hills of Cooley, speak of
comfortable days and territorial dominion. Behind those same wooded
hills lies the southernmost point of industrial Ulster, Newry town,
with its whirring looms.
These are some of the stepping-stones to guide one through Irish
history; yet how many more might be added! Where the road and rail
strike north from Dundalk, as they rise to that pass which is the
famous Gap, you reach Faughart, scene of the battle where Edward Bruce
ended his disastrous adventure of conquest in Ireland. And on the
plain below, William and Schomberg had their camp and mustered their
army before it set out to march upon the Boyne.
Memories of war--Pict and Connachtman contending for Cuchulain's head;
the Dane plundering and trading; the Norman building his strongholds;
the Scot heading Ireland's endeavour to shake off the Norman yoke;
that other convulsion in 1641, and then new castles built; the
Dutchman landing, and his triumphant march; and from the subdued
Ireland, thousands, tens of thousands, of soldiers, gentle and simple,
issuing forth to uphold the English name. Yes, but other memories are
there too. Some maintain that here Patrick landed on his mission. But
at all events at Faughart, in the fifth century, Brigid was born, the
"Mary of the Gael", "mother of all the saints of Ireland". Her work
was done in Leinster, but surely her birthplace here on the threshold
of Ulster should not be overlooked.
"THE BLACK NORTH"
I shall assume that from Dundalk and its neighbouring beauty, that
narrow lough winding among the hills, you go straight to Belfast,
with the glorious range of Mourne Mountains on your right hand to
make the journey attractive. At "Portadown upon the Bann", where the
Pope has a bad name, you are not far from the focus of the industrial
north--at all events of the great linen industry. From the train you
will see fields white as snow with bleaching webs; and it is said
that one cause of this trade's localization is a special suitability
of climate, like that which makes Lancashire head of the world for
cotton-spinning. Belgium can beat Ireland in producing flax--can get
50 per cent more for the same weight of finished fibre--but in the
spinning and weaving Ulster is unapproachable. Unhappily, as in all
textile trades, the individual withers and the machine grows more
and more: hand-loom damask weavers, who can still make a product
marvellous for craftsmanship, find their occupation gone--the machine
runs them too close.
What the linen trade has been worth to Ulster can never be counted.
It was the one industry which England's jealousy spared, and even
(after long refusal) grudgingly fostered, in those very decades when
her manufacturers were urging Parliament to stamp out and destroy the
woollen trade. Its existence preserved in this corner of the country
that industrial habit which means not only an inherited skill but the
transmitted aptitude for factory work, with its regular hours and
mechanical routine, so unlike the conditions of labour on the land, in
which all the rest of Ireland has found--since 1800--its only resource.
Even agriculture has been helped by the proximity of towns where
all, down to the labouring classes, have money to buy with. The
district which centres about Portadown is to-day foremost of all
Ireland for the culture of fruit and flowers, though neither climate
nor soil specially favours it. One beauty that Ulster has far more
generally than any other province is the flower-bordered cottage. They
grow orange lilies in fine profusion, but they grow other and less
emblematic blossoms as well.
[Illustration: CAVE HILL, BELFAST]
Belfast--when you reach it--is not calculated to charm the eye. It has
the features of any English manufacturing town so far as its buildings
are concerned, and the finest structures it can show (without
disparaging its handsome Town Hall) are the vast fabrics which rise
in the dockyards, such ships as have never been built in the world
before--marvels of symmetry and strength. To see them in the building
up is to watch, perhaps, the most impressive exhibition of human
skill and energy. Ireland, for all its defective development, can
boast of heading the world in certain enterprises: Guinness's brewery,
Harland and Wolff's engineering works, and Barbour's great net and
rope factory at Lisburn are, each in its kind, the biggest and best in
Europe, or out of it.
Once you get down to the water in Belfast, beauty is abundant, and
for my part I like best the view from the docks. But Mr. Williams has
chosen a distant indication of the town under the bold headland, at
whose foot it lies so well. This aspect of Cave Hill does not show
its strange feature--the vast Napoleonic profile flung up against
an eastern sky. Time was when Belfast must have been curiously
divided about that portent; for in the Revolution period northern
Ireland was fiercely republican. It was on Cave Hill that Wolfe Tone,
most formidable of all Irish rebels, with a group of young Ulster
democrats, founded the Society of United Irishmen.
Belfast does not dwell much on these memories to-day, nor indeed on
any memories; her interest is in the prosperous present, the growing
future. And although it has its absurdities, notably in the claim to
be more populous than Dublin (a result achieved by omitting Rathmines
and Pembroke, townships separately governed, but as much part of
Dublin as Kensington and Chelsea are of London), the strong pride
of Belfast is amply justified. It is not its proximity to Scotch
coalfields nor its moist climate (dear to spinners) which really makes
its fortune, it is the hard-bitten, restless, courageous spirit of its
people.
Like Dublin, it has close access to places of great natural
charm. Just beyond Cave Hill, on the north shore of the lough, is
Carrickfergus Castle, whose grim strength Mr. Williams has excellently
suggested. It was built within six years of the Norman invasion, by
de Courcy, first grantee of Ulster; and here, as at Carlingford, the
invaders managed to retain their grip. The Bruces wrested it, after a
fierce siege, from de Lacy, who then held it, Robert Bruce aiding his
brother; but on Edward Brace's defeat it fell back to the English. In
the ultimate conquest of Ireland it marked a great moment, for here
William of Orange landed, and pious care has recorded the flagstone on
which he first set his foot.
At Carrickfergus you are already well advanced on the prettiest road
in all Ireland--that which skirts the northern shore of Belfast
Lough, then, crossing the neck of Island Magee peninsula, carries
you past Larne's inland water, and from Larne follows the cliffy
shoreline up to where Fair Head marks the northern limit of Antrim's
eastward-looking coast. Then, cutting in behind the Head, it emerges
on the pleasant town of Ballycastle, sheltered in its bay, and so
follows the coast again past the castles of Dunseverick and Dunluce,
famous ruins, and past the Giant's Causeway, that still more famous
piece of an older and more majestic architecture. Portrush ends
your journey if you be a golfer; but dearer to me than the links at
Portrush are the sandhills beyond Portstewart and the long strand at
the entrance to Lough Foyle--ten miles of a stretch, but the Bann's
outflow divides it. No other beach that I have known is rich in such
a variety of shells; on no other sandhills do the little delicate
sandflowers, ladies'-slipper, thyme, ladies'-bedstraw, and the rest,
grow so charmingly.
Now, in all that long coastline what to write about? First, perhaps,
its geography. A line of high hills, or low mountains, runs north from
Belfast, and beyond Larne they approach close to the sea. Westward
of them is prosperous industrial country, draining into Lough Neagh
or the Bann--a country of thriving towns, Ballymena and Ballymoney,
with many factories. But east of this is the marginal land, running
steeply down with short watercourses to the sea, and this is the
country of the Glens of Antrim; lordship of the MacDonnells, who were
also Lords of the Isles. The sea here--_Sruth na Maoile_, the Stream
of the Moyle, is a link rather than a barrier; you could row across
with no great danger in a skin-covered boat; and at this point the
Gael of Alba and the Gael of Eire have been always one race. The
Irish that I heard spoken by old men whom a Feis of the Glens had
gathered together in Glen Ariff was few removes in sound and even in
idiom from the Highland speech; and all tradition, whether Ossianic,
in the stories of Finn and his companions, or that older cycle of the
Red Branch, brings the Scotch islands and west coast into full touch
with Irish legend. It was to the Isle of Skye that Cuchulain went for
his training, to be taught by a woman warrior--whose name that island
keeps as the Coolin Hills preserve his name; it was from the Scottish
shore that Cuchulain's son by the daughter of this warrior-queen came
over to contend with the Red Branch heroes, refusing his name in
order--so the deserted witch designed it--that his father, the one man
able to master him, might unknowingly slay his own son. I took down
from the lips of an Ulster peasant, not able to read or write, and
perhaps with ten generations behind him of folk who never used the
pen, the carefully guarded text of a poem framed not later (from its
language) than the fifteenth century, which told the tragedy of that
slaying. There is a touch in that ballad fine as any I know, when the
dying lad says to his vanquisher:
"Cuchulain, beloved father,
How is it you did not know me
When I flung my spear so sluggishly
Against your bristling blade?"
That was the only sign he could give. Knowing himself, knowing his
antagonist, yet sworn not to reveal the secret, he could only make
a cast so half-hearted that surely Cuchulain might pause to wonder
whether it was indeed an enemy who threw the spear.
These legends linking the coasts together suggest the charm of that
eastern shore; not the magic of infinite distance, not the Atlantic's
illimitable blue, but a continual tempting of the eye with that
shore beyond the sea, sometimes not visible at all, often faint, an
exquisite mirage, yet sometimes so vivid and distinct that you can
discern even the whitewashed cabins on the farther side.
The mountains of the glens have no marvel of beauty. Slemish, lying
back from the rest, is best marked, with its flat top, which is
indeed evidently the crater of some volcano, forced up in the wild
convulsion that has left its other traces in the basalt of Fair Head
and the Causeway. Marked, too, it is in history; for on its slopes
Patrick in captivity herded his master Dichu's swine. Yet this was on
the landward of the hills, in the valley of the Braid, which drains
west into Lough Neagh, and stands outside the grouping of the glens.
Tibullia, another peak easily discerned, is distinguished by having
on its summit a formation of flints where man of the Stone Age had a
regular factory; chipped and flaked implements, marred in the making,
can be found there (by the knowing) in basketfuls.
But the true distinction of these hills is that they have found their
poet. Samuel Ferguson first in his ballad of "Willy Gilliland" (which
has its climax by the walls of Carrickfergus) celebrated the stretch
of green "from Slemish foot to Collon top". But it is a later singer,
the poetess, "Moira O'Neill", who in her _Songs of the Glens of
Antrim_, has made all their names resound: from "Slemish and Trostan,
dark with heather", to "ould Lurgethan" where it "rises green by the
sea". And not the hills only but the glens--Glenann, for which the
emigrant "does be thinking long"; "lone Glen Dun and the wild glen
flowers", with the little town at the outflow of its river, Cushendun,
_Cois-an-duin_, Dun-foot. Her volume should be in the hands of every
traveller in the glens, unless its verses are already written in his
memory.
[Illustration: CARRICKFERGUS CASTLE, BELFAST LOUGH]
This Antrim coast has one charm distinguishing it above the rest of
Ireland--its variety of geological formation. At the foot of Glen
Ariff, Red Bay is called after the sandstone cliffs past which the
road is cut, and in one place the rock makes an arch near an old
castle. There is a cave, too, at various times inhabited. At Fair
Head one reaches the basalt, and this huge promontory faces the sea
with cliffs whose columnar formation gives that odd suggestion of
human workmanship which reaches its climax at the Causeway. This black
basalt with the numberless fissures is a good rock for birds to build
in, but a very bad and treacherous dependence for those who climb to
pry after their nests. Beyond the Causeway comes a line of white chalk
cliff, such as is familiar to all in the south of England, but very
strange to us in Ireland; though the sea off the Antrim coast is too
deep to have that opaline appearance--as though milk were spilt into
it--which the Margate tripper knows.
I have never yet been able to bring myself to write about the
Causeway, which is a geological freak very curious to look at, and
quite worth the sixpence you have to pay for admission, since a
company enclosed it some years ago. But in Ireland we expect to have
our cliff scenery free. The guides there will tell visitors plenty of
comic stories about Finn MacCool. But Finn, in authentic Irish legend,
is not a comic figure: he is the centre of the Ossianic tales.
That country north of the glens--which stop at Ballycastle, where
Glen Shesk and Glen Tow have their meeting--is called the Route, and
so keeps alive a memory of a period older than the Ossianic legends.
Dal Riada, or Dal Reuda, that is, the "Portion of Reuda", was the
name given to a principality established by one Reuda, who about the
second century broke off with a body of followers from the kingdom of
Ulster, and established rule on both sides of the narrow seas. Reuda
was of the Pictish race, probably; and here in the north the Picts
held out longest against the invading Milesians, who came (according
to modern theories) drilled foot soldiers, to defeat the earlier
chariot-fighting warriors. But the Milesians pushed their conquest
here also in about the sixth century, and Fergus, an offshoot of the
northern Hy-Neill (Sons of Niall), the dominant Milesian house, made
a petty kingdom for himself on both shores; and from him the kings of
Scotland traced their descent. This prince, Fergus Mac Erc, has left
his name on the Irish coast, for Carrickfergus is shown as the rock
on which he came to wreck, when sent adrift by tempest in one of his
crossings between the two portions of his kingdom.
Shortly after its establishment, this kingship, or chieftainship,
lost its Irish character and centred in Scotland. But relations were
constant--though by no means constantly friendly--and the Lords of the
Isles held Rathlin Island for many centuries. However near the Irish
coast this island lies--only divided by some five miles from the base
of Fair Head--the sound between it and the mainland is so dangerous,
with its racing tides, as to be an effectual barrier; and very often
passage may be easier made from the Scotch coast than from the bay of
Ballycastle. At all events, the Mac Donnells owned Rathlin when Robert
Bruce needed a refuge, and the castle is still there in which the
Bruce sheltered for seven years--and in which it was that he watched
the spider's patience and drew the moral for his own far-off designs.
The Mac Donnells were one of three great clans who divided a disputed
lordship in Ulster before Ulster (last of the provinces) was finally
subdued. The Mac Donnell lordship was the least authoritative and
(although it traced descent to the sixth century) the latest in date.
O'Neill and O'Donnell, the true Gaelic overlords of Ulster, sprang
from two sons of Niall of the Nine Hostages, High King of Ireland
from 379 to 405. Of their sons, Conall settled himself on Donegal
Bay, and Eoghan (or Owen) on the Inishowen hills. Tyrconnell--_Tir
Chonaill_--takes its name from the one son; Tyrone--_Tir
Eoghain_--from the other. About these centres power grouped itself,
each chief having sub-chiefs or _urraghts_ under him, each with his
own sept. It was only in the tenth century when Brian Boru was High
King that the hereditary surnames came to be adopted--O'Neill for the
lord of Tyrone, O'Donnell for the princes of Tyrconnell.
Their country was remote of access, difficult of passage for troops;
their people were hardy; and so it happened that in the reign of Henry
VIII, and even of Elizabeth, when all else in Ireland had been fairly
brought within British sovereignty (even the O'Briens of Thomond
submitting) O'Neill and O'Donnell could still hold their own. But
mutual jealousies and border feuds weakened the Gael; the O'Neills
were the strongest people, yet the O'Donnells on one flank and the
Mac Donnells on the other often sought advantage by English alliance.
Shane O'Neill, perhaps the most dangerous foe that Elizabeth had to
meet in Ireland, of whom Sir Henry Sidney wrote that "this man could
burn, if he liked, up to the gates of Dublin, and go away unfought",
met his crushing defeat at the hand of Irish enemies, the O'Donnells,
who routed him on the Swilly river near Letterkenny; and in his
trouble he fled to unfriends on the other side, the Mac Donnells, in
whose camp at Cushendun he was poniarded, and his head sold to the
English.
Yet after his day another O'Neill, Hugh the great Earl of Tyrone,
levied desperate war on the English, in close league with a successor
of the O'Donnell who defeated Shane; and though the Mac Donnells gave
them no direct assistance, they also made an effort at that time to
throw off the invader's yoke. The history of Ireland under Elizabeth
is largely the history of war with these three clans--and a shameful
history it is, full of horrible records of treachery and cruelty.
Each of the three peoples threw up remarkable leaders in the
final struggles under the Tudors, and no figure of those days is
more notable than the MacDonnell chief, Somhairle Buidhe, "Yellow
Charles", Sorley Boy, as the English wrote him: and often the State
Papers had occasion to write his name between 1558, when he came to
lordship of the North, and 1590, when he died (singularly enough)
a natural death in his own castle of Duneynie and was buried among
all the Mac Donnells in the Abbey at Bonamargy near Ballycastle. Two
sayings of his are memorable. They showed him the head of his son
impaled above the gate of Dublin Castle. "My son," he retorted, "has
many heads." And in truth that stock sprung up like nettles after
cutting.--Elizabeth, in one of the phases of her diplomacy, sought to
enlist this warrior on her side, and sent him a patent for his estates
and chieftaincy as Lord of the Pale, engrossed on parchment. They
brought him the writing to his castle of Dunluce, and he hacked the
scroll to shreds. "With the sword I won it," he said; "I will never
keep it with the sheepskin."
Nevertheless, time brought him counsel, and when Sir John Perrot,
Henry VIII's bastard, came and battered Dunluce with cannon, Sorley,
now eighty years of age, made his submission and travelled to Dublin,
to pay his homage to the Queen's picture, going on his knees to kiss
the embroidered pantoufle on the royal foot. After his death, his son
Randal joined the rising of Hugh O'Neill and Hugh O'Donnell; but when
that last great effort to throw off England's power was foiled by the
defeat at Kinsale, the Mac Donnell made submission, and Elizabeth's
successor, James, who after all had a natural kindness for the Mac
Donnells (seeing that they were to the last Scotch rather than Irish)
accepted his submission and endowed him with the whole territory from
the Cutts of Coleraine to the Curran of Larne.
Dunluce, which stands on a projecting rock, approached only by a
narrow footway over a very deep natural trench, has to stand a battery
more continuous than Perrot's cannon could bring to bear. The sea is
under it, for a cave pierces the rock, and wind and wave are for ever
straining at the old fortress. Part of it fell in 1639, and to-day
they say the whole ruin is menaced with collapse; and, since it stands
in private grounds, no public authority can intervene to save it.
[Illustration: THE GIANTS' CAUSEWAY]
For some heads the crossing of that wall into Dunluce has a danger;
and a fall would be serious. But the real test of resistance to
giddiness can be made at the famous hanging bridge which joins the
mainland with the island rock of Carrickarede, near Port Ballintoy.
The bridge consists of planks laid two abreast, and lashed to ropes;
a single rope is the only handrail. The people use it to get out to
their nets and boats for the salmon fishing, which are kept out here,
and also, since there is grass on the island, for carrying sheep
across on their backs. For my own part I stepped on to it readily
enough; but when it bent down steeply under me, and inclined to swing,
the surprise was not pleasant. And though I forced myself to cross it
a second time, back and forward, to convince myself that there was no
necessity for qualms, I cannot say that the qualms wholly disappeared.
As for carrying a sheep over, or a bale of nets, heaven defend me! But
I never heard that anyone, native or tourist, drunk or sober, came to
grief there! The drop is about eighty feet into deep water between
cliffs.
THE MAIDEN CITY
Adjoining the Route, and divided from it by the River Bann, is
County Derry, which was once the territory of the O'Cahans, chief
_urraghts_ or sub-chiefs of the O'Neills. When the O'Neill was by
adoption of the clans installed after the Irish usage at Tullaghogue
in County Tyrone, it was the O'Cahan who performed the ceremony of
inauguration. With these facts two memories connect themselves for
me. The first is that when the Gaelic League was established, to save
the language of Ireland from oblivion and decay, amongst those who
joined it was the Reverend Dr. Kane, a mighty orator on every Twelfth
of July, when the anniversary of the Boyne is celebrated. "I may be
an Orangeman," he wrote, "but I do not forget that I am an O'Cahan."
Many of us who did not share his politics cherish his memory for that
saying. The other associated idea for me is that, once setting out
with other nationalist speakers, I was followed by a strong body of
police. Asking why, I was told they were to prevent an attack on us in
Tullaghogue, which is now a strong Orange centre!
Coleraine is where you join the train to get to Derry, and the rail
skirts the shore of Lough Foyle--easternmost of the great succession
of sea loughs which make the distinctive beauty of Donegal.
Inishowen, its western shore, is included in that county by English
geography, though this peninsula never formed part of Tyrconnell.
Its lordship was always disputed between O'Neill and O'Donnell, and
the best evidence of its separateness is given by the ecclesiastical
boundary, which here, as always, follows the old tribal demarcation.
All the rest of Donegal is comprised in the diocese of Raphoe, but
Inishowen falls under the see of Derry. One result of that was
traceable in the fact that _poteen_ (illicit whisky) was freely
procurable in Inishowen long after its manufacture had ceased in
any other part of Donegal; for the austere decree which the present
bishop of Raphoe--an O'Donnell and a ruler of men--proclaimed against
this "smuggling" had no effect east of the Swilly, though throughout
Tyrconnel it was heard and obeyed, to the great advantage of his
people, whom the old traffic (which I remember flourishing in spite
of law and police, fines, seizures, and imprisonments) had seriously
demoralized.
Derry and Raphoe have for a century been in the Protestant Church one
united see, and in the days before disestablishments, made a princely
preferment. You can see the proof of it at Castlerock, where the line
from Coleraine strikes out on the shore of Lough Foyle by the long
Magilligan strand. Here is Downhill, the seat built in the eighteenth
century by that amazing prelate Lord Augustus Adolphus Hervey, Earl of
Bristol and Bishop of Derry, who took a leading and not a very pacific
part in organizing the volunteers and in winning Ireland's legislative
independence.
"He appeared always", says Sir Jonah Barrington, "dressed with
peculiar care and neatness, generally entirely in purple, and he wore
diamond knee and shoe buckles; but what I most observed was that he
wore white gloves with gold fringe round the wrists and large gold
tassels hanging from them." A troop of horse headed by his nephew
used to escort him everywhere and to mount guard at his door. Later,
growing tired of Ireland, he migrated to Italy on the plea of ill
health; and though many of his costly purchases were sent home to
Downhill, where unhappily a fire destroyed the most valuable, he
never came back, but remained abroad (says the austere Lecky, himself
born on the shore of Lough Foyle), "adopting the lax moral habits of
Neapolitan society", and in extreme old age writing letters to Emma,
Lady Hamilton, "in a strain of most unepiscopal fervour".
There are no such bishops nowadays, but my childhood was familiar
with the last of Lord Bristol's successors under the old order--the
late Bishop Alexander, most eloquent of divines, afterwards Primate
of Ireland. His talents brought him to the episcopate, while still
a young man, only a year or two before disestablishment, and the
life-interest in his £12,000 a year came to be compounded, not only
for his own benefit, but for that of the Church. While the financial
negotiation was still in progress, my father, then rector of a parish
in Donegal, and financier-in-chief to the diocese, sent his bishop out
for a day's driving in charge of a young curate, and trysted to meet
them on Mulroy Bay. Arrived there, he saw with dismay the bishop, not
on land but afloat, being sculled by the curate through the numberless
rocks and swirling currents of Mulroy in a battered curragh--a hundred
thousand pounds of ecclesiastical capital divided from submersion by
a piece of tarred calico. And the famous orator, even at that period
of his life, could not have weighed less than eighteen stone. Long
years after, the curate, become venerable in his turn, remembered and
recalled for me the rating which he received when at last he landed
his passenger.
Another memory from the same source may be worth recalling. Downhill
is the house which Charles Lever describes in his novel, _The
Bramleighs of Bishop's Folly_, though the story has no historic
connection with the house or any of its inmates. But Lever knew this
"Bishop's Folly" in the days when he was a dispensary doctor at
Portstewart, and my father remembers well how _Harry Lorrequer_ came
out by instalments in the _Dublin Morning Magazine_, with what delight
he heard them read aloud, and how sudden was the addition of interest
when one day the news came in that the anonymous author was no other
than their own dispensary doctor--the brilliant young collegian for
whom a place had been suddenly created in this outlying village during
one of the visitations of cholera. After that, whenever the doctor
came to call, a shy boy used to creep into the drawing-room and
ensconce himself, apparently with a book, out of sight behind a sofa,
where, undisturbed by apprehensions, he could be all ears for the
rattling talk of that wonderful tale-teller.
Lever learnt a good deal in Portstewart from a neighbour, W. H.
Maxwell, author of _Wild Sport of the West_, who lived in those days
at Portrush. But it was the west and south of Ireland that always
drew Lever--his florid taste in incident and humour found its choice
elsewhere than in the discreet greys and browns of Ulster character.
And east of Lough Foyle he was still in the Ulster which politicians
mean--the country of the plantations. Derry is in reality its frontier
town, though the Scotch strain and the Protestant element ramify out
from Derry a certain distance into Donegal.
[Illustration: FAIR HEAD, CO. ANTRIM]
But the frontier town, like all frontier towns in a country
that has been much fought over, keeps an intense, militant, and
aggressive character. Derry stands for the extreme type of Protestant
assertion--oddly enough, for in the beginning of its history, it
was the monastic seat, Doire Coluimchille, "Columba's Oakgrove", to
which that great apostle of Christianity looked back from his mission
overseas--"thinking long" in Iona for--
"Derry mine, my own oakgrove,
Little cell, my home, my love".
There is no reason to doubt the authenticity of that Irish poem,
transmitted in ancient manuscript, which a scholar has thus
translated--Columba's lyric cry towards the Ireland which he had left.
Yet, after all, the new is more to us than the old, and Derrymen have
good right to be proud of Derry walls. The famous siege was a great
event, the resistance was indeed heroic, though I think that popular
fame has selected the wrong man to be the centre of hero-worship. A
tall column which rises from the walls behind the bishop's palace
is Walker's monument, and Walker was no soldier but an elderly,
loquacious, and somewhat vain, preacher. If contemporary records
are any safe guide, the true organizer and inspirer of that long
resistance was Murray--whose fame, I am glad to say, is kept alive
by a Murray club. Yet the man who best of all, perhaps, deserves
commemoration has no memorial in Derry. The siege had lasted from
April 18, and on June 13 the town was already starving when a fleet
was sighted in Lough Foyle. Kirke, who commanded it, lay outside,
intimidated by the defences of the narrow channel. So it went on for
six weeks; but there was at least one Derry man with the fleet who
could brook the delay no longer. This was Captain Browning, of the
_Mountjoy_, and he insisted that attempts should be made to run the
batteries and to break the boom, whose site is still preserved in the
name "Boom Hall". The _Mountjoy_ was a merchant-man, and another, the
_Phoenix_, of Coleraine, joined the venture, and a frigate was sent
with them to help in drawing the enemy's fire. The _Mountjoy_, with
Browning himself at the helm, headed straight for the boom under full
sail, struck it, and with the impact the boom gave. But the shock
caused a rebound which flung the ship back on a mudbank, and at the
same moment Browning was shot down at his post. The _Phoenix_ had
slipped already through the gap and was away with her full cargo of
meal. Boats were out from the forts to seize the _Mountjoy_; but she
fired a broadside, and the recoil lifted her off the bank, and she too
slipped through, carrying the body of her dying skipper to the wharf
of the city which his courage and determination had rescued from
famine and from enforced surrender. Life stayed in him long enough to
let him hear the cries of welcome, to know that the goal was reached,
the blockade broken, and his city saved, before the rush of blood from
his pierced lungs finally choked him: and surely no man ever died a
more enviable death.
Yet in truth it was the people who had rescued themselves. In the
previous month of December, before hostilities were really declared,
King James had been imbecile enough to withdraw the troops which held
the city. A fresh garrison under Lord Antrim was marching in, and was
seen actually outside the walls. The city fathers deliberated; it was
thirteen prentice boys of the town who armed themselves, rushed to
the Ferryquay gate, seized the keys, and locked it in the teeth of
Antrim's men, when they were within sixty yards of the entrance.
This deed is commemorated annually on December 18th, when Lundy, the
officer who commanded in James's interest, is duly burnt in effigy--or
used to be. Nowadays Catholic and Protestant are so evenly balanced in
the "Maiden City" that such demonstrations risk a formidable riot, and
are accordingly kept in check.
But the embers are always hot, and crave wary walking. Once a concert
was being held, "strictly non-sectarian", and it had been decided
to omit "God save the King", which in Ireland is made into a party
tune. All went off smoothly, and the building was being emptied, when
suddenly war rose. The organist, a stranger, had thought it would be
proper to play the people out with "Auld Lang Syne"--not knowing that
to this tune is sung "Derry Walls", most aggressive of Protestant
melodies.
Derry walls are there, broad and solid--you can drive a coach on them.
But, what is more important, you can there find the best entertainment
that I know in Ireland. A little hotel, whose doorway gives on to the
east wall, is kept by Mrs. MacMahon, and all persons of understanding
go there to get the kind of meal which you may hope for in the
pleasantest north of Ireland country home: the fruits of the earth,
the fowl of the air, the fish of the sea, each according to his kind
(not omitting Lough Swilly oysters), with the home-made bread, which
is one of Ulster's greatest charms. It is not an elaborate modern
hotel. If it were, you would not get the sort of entertainment that
I describe; but to stay there is to get an insight, and a most happy
insight, into the homeliness, the hospitality, the shrewdness, and the
good housewifery of Ulster.
[Illustration: LONDONDERRY FROM THE WATERSIDE]
TIRCONNELL
Donegal has become to-day the best pleasure ground in Ireland. Second
only to Kerry in natural beauty, and superior to it in grandeur,
for Kerry has no cliff scenery to compare with Slieve League and
Horn Head, it has far more variety of resource than the southern
county--or, in two words, it has golf and Kerry has not; and it has
much more free fishing. It is equipped as a playground, and as a
playground I shall write of it--with this preface. When I was a boy,
between thirty and forty years ago, there were only two passable
hotels west of Lough Swilly, Lord George Hill's at Gweedore, and Mr.
Connolly's at Carrick. Both of these were built for men who wanted
to fish and shoot; and to reach them meant in literal truth a day's
journey into the wilderness. There was no railway in the county except
the little line from Derry to Buncrana; and it was the regular usage
for strangers to bring introductions which got them hospitality from
the resident gentry. I remember scores of such casual visitors at the
big, old rectory where I was brought up.
To-day there is hardly any point in the county more than ten miles
distant from a rail--Irish miles of course, and hilly ones. But when
the train takes you from Derry to Burtonport, curving in behind Lough
Swilly, and following all the northern coast to its extreme remotest
corner, you may fume, as I have often fumed, at the vagaries of that
wonderful organization; you may think it amazing to be a matter of
three hours late in a journey of four hours, as has happened to me;
still, it is well to remember how you might have had to drive the
same distance on an outside car in such wind and rain as Donegal can
furnish.
And of course the delays I speak of are probably not so usual as at
the first wild beginnings of that traffic. No longer, probably, will
you see the engine driver getting out to replenish his supply of fuel
from a wayside turf stack; no longer will you need to scour the whole
countryside for a truckload of luggage casually mislaid. It is only
fair to add that where I finally unearthed our possessions was at a
mountain siding near two excellent salmon pools, with which I then
became acquainted and where I subsequently caught fish. If the engine
does break down anywhere on that run there is sure to be a little
river within a mile or so, and it is quite worth putting up your rod
and going out to have a try; at least one man to my knowledge returned
triumphantly with a good salmon--the messenger sent to fetch him
having come in handy to gaff it.
But in all seriousness tourists have got to remember that these
lines are not there for holiday traffic. Goods and passengers travel
together, and the real purpose of the whole is to give a market
to the thousands of cottagers along that wild yet populous shore.
What it means is that the coast fisherman who nets a salmon now can
sell it for perhaps twopence a pound less than it will fetch in
Billingsgate--tenpence, a shilling even, for summer fish. In the old
days there was no one to give him more than perhaps a shilling for
his whole fish. And in truth in the old days a Donegal peasant hardly
conceived that he could be the legitimate possessor of a salmon.
That is the real change. In the days that I remember, the country was
owned by the landlords, was governed by them and by their agents, with
assistance from the Church of Ireland clergy. To-day a great part of
the land is owned by the people who till it; it is all governed by
them. And in increasing measure they own even the game, most jealously
guarded of seigniorial rights.