miserable line of hovels, with only two decent buildings, the
agent's house and the always imposing police barrack. To-day it has
an excellent hotel, and every look of prosperity. I remember when
every soul in it and for ten miles round was in the grip of a really
tyrannical landlord, whose murder, when it ultimately came, was indeed
an act of what Bacon calls "wild justice". Much of the improvement
visible here is due to the able and courageous man who succeeded the
"old lord". But, good landlord or bad landlord, no man can ever again
hold that countryside at his pleasure, cowering under the threat of
eviction. Rent is fixed by a court, and while a man pays his rent he
is irremovable. And within a short period every man will be paying,
not rent, but instalments of purchase for the land which he and his
predecessors have worked--which in nine cases out of ten they have
reclaimed from bog and barren moor. With the ownership of the land the
game rights must ultimately go, and in many cases already they have
gone. The hotel proprietor at Milford, an enterprising man, had, I
found, bargained with not a few tenant purchasers for the exclusive
fishing of little lakes in their property and for the shooting over
their moors and bogs. That is the attraction which he has to offer to
visitors, who, now that the country is opened up, come in shoals. On
Lough Fern, the big lake adjoining, it was unusual to see two boats
fishing, three made a rarity. Now, in summer, there will be fifteen or
sixteen out. And not only that, but boats have been put on seven or
eight of the numberless smaller lakes and bogholes which nobody ever
fished at all, except once in a blue moon, when a curragh would be
carted over. Some of them breed good trout, and now these are being
stocked with a new strain of fish. All this means the circulation
of money in the country where poverty before was universal, where
famine even was not unknown. A failure of the potato crop to-day is a
grievous loss: thirty years ago it meant something like starvation.
What took me to Milford the other day was significant of the new
order. I was with a departmental committee appointed to consider how
the fisheries of Ireland would be affected by the substitution of
peasant proprietary for landlord ownership; and our main purpose was
to emphasize the value of the interests involved, the possibility
of increasing that value, and the necessity for combination unless
the whole were to be destroyed. And here was no question merely of
providing an attraction for the summer visitor: it meant conserving a
mainstay of livelihood for hundreds of labouring men.
When I was a boy a regular feature in that countryside was the fish
pedlar--some old man or old woman with a donkey and two creels,
hawking round fish that had been carted up from the coast by
Sheephaven. Along the prosperous settled shores of Lough Swilly, by
Ramelton and Letterkenny, these poor folk found a market at the end
of a day's journey. It was a poor market and a small one. But since
the railroad was instituted, the fish pedlar takes a back place. Fish
goes straight to the great towns, and it has been worth men's while to
organize for catching the summer run of salmon which skirt the coast
in June and July. From Malin Head to Arranmore, and from Arranmore
into Donegal Bay, scores of thousands of pounds must have been earned
in this way during the past seven or eight years by the coast-dwelling
folk, half-farmers, half-fishermen, working through the short nights
in their four-oared yawls. A lucky crew will earn ten pounds a man in
two months' fishing--in a country from which each year thousands go
across to Scotland or Lancashire for field labour and are content if
they bring home ten pounds for their season's toil. It is easy to see
how great an added source of prosperity this fishing means. Yet if
the fish are killed out in the breeding streams, it ends the fishing;
and when a river is divided into a hundred interests instead of one,
no individual has a sufficient inducement to preserve the stock of
salmon. A lesson in citizenship has to be learnt; public opinion
has to be created. Donegal is leading in the attempt to develop
co-operative preservation of game and fish, and whoever helps that
endeavour is doing a good turn, not only to the interests of sport,
but to the interests of Ireland.
[Illustration: TORY ISLAND FROM FALCARRAGH HILL, DONEGAL]
Golf, which for the present is even a greater attraction than
sport, does not extend into the wilder parts of the country; though,
indeed, twenty years ago Port Salon and Rosapenna, where the most
famous links are, were outlandish enough: it is golf that has brought
them well into the pale of civilization--over-civilization, some of us
grumble, when we see smart frocks among the sandhills by Downings Bay.
Yet anyone who goes to Rosapenna, and has curiosity enough to enquire,
can learn the whole history of a great industry's development within
a score of years--for Downings is the centre of a most prosperous
herring fishery, and the girls and boys from that outlying region are
fetched at high wages to do skilled work in curing herring wherever
herring are being caught, as far south as Dublin Bay, and very likely
beyond.
And if I had any choice of all the fine places in Ireland to spend
a holiday in, I would choose the one which makes the centre of Mr.
Williams's sketch from Rosapenna--the low headland of Ards, jutting
into Sheephaven, with wood of oak, and fir, and beech, and ash, so
exquisitely blended, spread for a covering over ground so beautifully
diversified; with little bays and creeks of blue water over the
cleanest and tawniest sand running up into the heart of wooded or
heathery slopes. Nowhere else is the scent of the brine so clean and
strong across the other pungencies of heath, and bog-myrtle, of oak,
and of bracken; nowhere else that I know does a perfect day give such
fulfilment of desire.
Rosapenna shore and the village of Carrigart are too much dominated
by the hotel and by foreign ways for my liking; but on the opposite
shore, where Portnablah gives a harbour (not safe, alas!) to the boats
of my friends, is the place of all my affections. This rocky little
townland is set thick with whitewashed cottages, and here it has been
an old custom for Irish folk from Derry and Letterkenny to come to
the salt water and find homely quarters. The "bathers", as they are
called, have of late years grown to be a multitude: if you want rooms
in a farmhouse there you must bespeak them far in advance, and no
wonder. If my ghost haunts any place it will be there, where the white
road to Dunfanaghy (white, for this is a limestone tract), leaving the
wall of Ards demesne, rises to a crest with a few houses (filled with
bathers) on the right; and on your left is Sessiagh Lake, prosperously
stocked with trout, and watched over by an old herring fisher, still
able to pull a stout oar when the strong gale catches that high-lying
water, but for the most part happy to drift contentedly and spin yarns
about the men and the things and the fish that he has known. Quick
with his tongue, too, in a leisurely way. "I suppose people very
seldom die here," said a stranger, commenting on the healthiness of
the situation. "Never more nor once," said old Tom.
Beyond the houses and the limekiln and the glimpse of Sessiagh's
delusive waters (Heaven knows how many blank days I fished there!)
is a line of grassy hillocks--the mass of Horn Head blocks the view
beyond them to the west, but full north, suddenly, held in the curve
between two of these little summits, you catch sight of the Atlantic
blue. Blue, it may be, or purple, or greyish green, or black almost,
with white spray flying; but there it is, held as if in a cup--the
very quintessence of the saltness, the strength, and the freedom of
the sea. When the herring are in, you shall see it dotted over with
smacks and yawls, and here and there a curragh crawling slowly on the
water like some black insect; or at night all a-twinkle with lights,
till you rub your eyes and wonder if a town has not suddenly sprung
into being. And all about, the steep shores of the bay are patched
and striped with careful tillage, crops, well-tended, nestling in for
shelter under every rocky hummock; and nestled, too, into the folds of
the ground, are the white-fronted houses, with stone pegs across their
eaves for cording to lash the roof secure against their terrible gales.
It is worth while being there in bad weather, to watch the run of
sea on those cliffs; sometimes, in a sinister calm, rolling in
mountain-high, tearing itself to whiteness on the long black spines of
rock; and then, after this forerunner, comes the storm itself. It is
then, when you see the smacks running in for shelter, or when, after a
night of this, you see them put out to pick up costly nets that have
been cut adrift to save men's lives, and that still must be recovered
even at grave peril--it is then you will realize how these people take
a grip of their country and cling to the foothold for which all life
is a struggle.
Yet life goes merrily there. In the winter through some parishes there
will be dancing almost every night in one cottage or another, and the
crowd is thick on the floor and about the big turf fire.
[Illustration: MUCKISH AND ARDS FROM ROSAPENNA, SHEEPHAVEN, DONEGAL]
These people are for the most part pure Irish, and west of Dunfanaghy
all are Irish speakers. Under Irish rule it was the territory of the
M'Swineys, chief urraghts of the O'Donnell, and Doe Castle, at the
outfall of the Lackagh, was the fortress of the chief of the name.
Owen Roe O'Neill made his landing here, Cromwell's most formidable
opponent in Ireland--removed at last either by sickness or poison.
Here Red Hugh O'Donnell was fostered by Owen M'Swiney of the Battle
Axes before the treacherous kidnapping at Rathmullen. There were three
M'Swiney clans--M'Swiney Doe, M'Swiney Banaght in the west of the
county, and M'Swiney Fanad in the peninsula that divides Mulroy
from Swilly. Each had its own war tune, and a schoolmaster friend of
mine--himself a Sweeny--who collected native airs, had got two of the
three, but not the third; until at last he heard of an old bedridden
man in Fanad who might have it. He rode the twenty miles from his home
at Gartan, with fiddle on his back, and found the old peasant wavering
on the brink of death, yet still able to frame feebly the whistle or
lilt, which my friend picked up on the strings of the fiddle bit by
bit, till gradually he had it all, and, there and then, by the dying
man's bedside, set the cabin ringing with the oldtime war march of his
clan.
Another M'Sweeny that I have known was Turlough, the famous piper of
Gweedore, whose repute has travelled far overseas. Aristocrat he is to
the finger tips--saddened indeed because those fine finger tips have
been coarsened by spade labour. "Look," he said to me; "can there be
any music in these hands?" He told me his own generations, connecting
him back with the hereditary bards of the M'Swineys, and I said that
he must know the history of the county better than most. "No," he
answered; "I was never curious of these things, except just as they
concerned myself and my own people."
Mr. Williams's picture shows Errigal where it rises by Gweedore over
Dunlewy Lake--one of the grandest among Ireland's mountains. But the
most striking view of it is east of Gweedore, where the little river
flows out by Gortahork; and here is a thing of much interest, the
Cloghaneely College, where folk go to study Ulster Irish amongst those
who have it for their native speech. Still farther east is Falcarragh,
and the view which Mr. Williams has given adds less than due emphasis
to the astonishing castellated outline of Tory where it rises out of a
tremendous depth of water. I never landed there, though I often talked
with the Tory fishers, including one who had made his fortune at the
goldfields and come back to the place of his birth among the rocks
and the fish heads. There is one sheltered spot, one growing bush,
and one only, on Tory. There, of course, Irish is the language, and
they maintain the practice of verse, chiefly for purposes of satire;
quarrels are revenged in rhyme. I talked to a red-bearded mountainy
man near Gortahork about this, but he said it was a peevish thing to
do; he would rather have a skelp at a man. In truth there is an old
feud between Tory and the shore, and fierce battles have been waged.
I do not know why so few people stop at Falcarragh: there is a good
little hotel, the views are beautiful, there are three little rivers,
all holding salmon, and, at the point where the longest of them flows
out across the long range of sand beach west of Horn Head, there is
a view of Tory and of Horn Head that passes all I know. Running water
across sand, clean sand dunes and grey bent, pure illimitable sea and
high cliffs, sunsmitten or in shadow--there is landscape reduced to
the simplest terms of a broad elemental beauty.
Also at Falcarragh there must be the makings of a links equal to any
in Ireland. The line of dunes runs for several miles along the sea,
ending in one of the strangest natural features I know, the huge
mountain of clean sand which centuries of westerly gales have piled up
against the rocky mass of Horn Head. That famous head is in truth an
island, the counterpart of Tory on its seaward face, yet in the gap
between it and Dunfanaghy such a deposit of sand has accumulated that
only a small causeway has been needed to give access from the mainland
to the tiny farms and the one demesne.
If in Donegal you want to buy Donegal homespun, Falcarragh is a good
market for the product, since some weaving is done about there with
an eye to local wear; and what the Donegal man means to wear, the
Donegal housewife "tramps" in soapsuds and water till the web thickens
into a fabric fit to turn weather. On the western shore, by Carrick
and Ardara, where is now the headquarters of this industry, cloth is
produced solely for export, and the English ladies and gentlemen for
whom it is designed seek softness and fineness rather than solidity.
Indeed the countryfolk themselves treat this merchandise with frank
scorn: they fancy something far less flimsy for their own use, and in
old days, when nothing but homespun was worn, it used to be sent to a
tacking mill and battered till the cloth had the thickness of felt.
But the tacking mill at Bunlin, whose big wooden mallets rising and
falling used to interest us children, is a ruin now; and the homespun
of to-day, with its multitude of pleasant colours, is very different
from the massive greys or heavy indigo-dyed frieze which used to come
from that mill.
The industry has been a godsend to that country, and one wet day in
the little village of Carrick was redeemed to me by the chance of
seeing all these folk, men and women, come marching over the hills
with the baled cloth on their backs, and then watching the bargaining
that proceeded among the various buyers. I bought, too, but I believe
the merchants will not allow the people to sell to tourists any more.
[Illustration: MOUNT ERRIGAL FROM THE GWEEDORE RIVER, DONEGAL]
I have not written yet of that western shore which stretches southward
from Dungloe (much haunted by sea-trout fishers) to Glenties, Ardara,
Carrick, and Killybegs. The most beautiful place that I know on it
is at the mouth of the Gweebarra River where it flows out due west
between a line of sandhills which shine dazzling white in the sun
against the immensity of blue. No place is less known; but you can
reach it easily from Portnoo, where is a hotel. And off Portnoo is an
island where on certain days in summer a pilgrimage takes place, at
spring tides, for it is essential to walk barefoot to the island. The
ceremonies performed with certain stones are Christianized in form,
but evidently had an origin long before Christianity. Glenties, some
eight or ten miles farther south, is at a point where several glens
converge (_na Gleantai_, the Glens) in the valley of the Ownea River,
famous for its salmon fishing, which is now vested in purchasing
tenants who have attempted to introduce co-operative preservation.
If the experiment succeeds it will mean better preservation than has
ever been known before; if it fail, I fear that one great source of
the salmon supply will be wiped out, with loss to sport, and with loss
much graver to all the labouring fishers who live by that industry.
But, as things stand, the man who wants good fishing is more likely to
get it cheap at Glenties or Ardara than any other place known to me.
In both towns there is a decent hotel. Ardara stands near the outfall
of the Ownea but actually on a smaller river, the Owentogher, which
is not only very picturesque, but a good stream for salmon and sea
trout, if only it could be preserved. And one of the most pleasant
bits of fishing I ever had was on a tiny stream, the Brocky, which
comes down a mile farther on and was fishable before the tearing flood
had subsided in the bigger rivers.
Glenties and Ardara are places where you go for sport, though the
beauty of mountain and river is all about you. But for scenery Carrick
and Killybegs are your destination. Killybegs is the terminus of that
light railway which runs from Donegal town along the north shore
of Donegal bay, past the Marquis of Cunningham's wooded demesne at
first, but gradually getting into wilder country, till at last it
reaches this trim little town on its magnificent harbour. Warships use
that harbour, and there is nowadays a good fishing fleet operating
from it for the herring and mackerel; but of other commerce it knows
little. Yet for the lover of boating and bathing it would be hard to
discover a more attractive spot. There, too, you can see the parent
factory of the Donegal carpet trade; and pretty it is to see the big
looms, with a row of six or seven little girls bareheaded (and often
barefooted) in front of each, with nimble fingers knotting on the
tufts of richly coloured wool, or driving them down into their place
in the solid fabric, while the pattern grows slowly before you on
the wide warp. It is odd that so rare a merchandise should come out
of these impoverished regions, for no costlier carpets are made; but
labour is cheap, and willing, and skilful, and nowhere else is factory
work done under more wholesome or happy conditions. All the big room
seemed to be a-ripple and a-play with the young faces and the swift,
graceful movements of these children, for most of them are no more
than children; and small though the wage they earn, it is a big thing
in that countryside, where the old-age pensioner with five shillings
a week seemed at first to himself or herself rich beyond imagination.
There is another of the factories at Kilcar, halfway to Carrick, built
in a sheltered nook almost by the sea; and another in the wild tract
between Gweedore and Falcarragh.
To the west of Killybegs begins that wonderful line of cliff
stretching away past Carrick and Glen Columbkille, and girdling all
the projecting headland till it runs back to Loughros Bay, near
Ardara. For wildness and for majesty this region has no equal, except
in Achill; and it has what Achill lacks, the charm of rivers. Mr.
Williams's pictures illustrate well the coastline, which even when
it is low runs out with huge flag stones and giant boulders into
the deep--fit buttress against such waves as roll in there even on
a day of calm. Everything is big there; distances are long, and a
mile never seems to get you far in any direction. It is a country to
walk, the finest of all the countries known to me; but I would gladly
supplement my walking with a bicycle, travelling one of the roads as
far as it will carry me and then leaving it simply by the ditch at
the roadside, among the osmunda fern which grows everywhere free as
the heather. It commits you to return that way; but what you leave
by the roadside is as safe as if Argus watched it--unless, indeed,
some mountainy heifer should pass that way and eat it: they will
chew anything from a fishing rod to a suit of clothes. I have seen
embarrassed bathers pursuing an active cow, who carried essential
garments in her mouth, still masticating them even while she pranced
in her clumsy gallop.--Carrick is the centre for this country and
Slieve League the great excursion; it is a fine walk down by the
little port of Teelin and then up the track which winds along the
cliff edge of the mountain--perhaps the finest view of all is when you
are halfway, with seven or eight hundred feet of sheer cliff below you
and the steep face towering up another thousand above. At the somewhat
overrated hazard of the One Man's Pass you would fall, I dare say,
sixteen hundred feet before you reached the water; but from the top a
pebble may be dropped two thousand feet plumb into the sea.
[Illustration: GLENVEAGH, DONEGAL]
Horn Head is only seven or eight hundred feet; yet because the cliff
face there is undercut, and the Horns themselves project so oddly,
it always seemed to me a dizzier place than the greater cliff. The
really marvellous thing at Slieve League is that view across Donegal
Bay to the mountains of Sligo, Benbulbin of magic fame, and along the
wild Mayo coast that stretches out and out to the west till the long
promontory is finished off by island rocks, the Stags of Broadhaven.
Yet, since I scorn to deceive, what endears Carrick to me is not its
cliff scenery, but its little rivers and its people. I know the rivers
are too small: you cannot seriously hope to kill salmon there except
in a raging flood, and then your flood runs off in a couple of hours:
I hooked four fish there inside the first hour after breakfast, killed
two of them, and never touched another all day. But for sheer beauty;
for infinite variety in the shape and colour of flowing water (the
most beautiful thing to me on God's earth); for pools where the eddy
swirls past clean rock with glossy ferns in every crevice; for banks
where the scent of bog-myrtle is all about as you brush through the
heather; for anything that can entice the eye of an angler, I never
saw the equal of that main stream. The little Owen Buidhe, too, in its
boggy glen, has attractions of its own, deeper pools and seductive
corners; but it is the Glen River, flowing down from Meenaneary, that
haunts my vision when in London I crave for the things that I desired
in boyhood, and love more in middle age.
And of all the human beings whom I have known among the peasant folk
of Ireland, none had ever quite the charm of old Charlie Carr, the
gillie who fished with me at Carrick. By an odd chance, he was no
sportsman. He would want you to be pleased, and to catch fish, if
so you fancied it; but I remember how my vanity was hurt when, on a
difficult day, I had hooked and landed a fine sea trout, the first
that anyone had seen for a long time. "Them O'Hagans was great people
too", he said as he shook the fish out of the net, calmly pursuing his
discourse about the ancient days and the generations of old, and the
lore of those few books which he had, and studied with passion. He
was no true shanachie; what of Irish legend and song his memory kept
had no real value. He was a lover of knowledge, not for vanity, not
for the sense of power, but simply because it added to the richness
of life--one of God's gifts that he welcomed as the sunshine. If
ever I met a happy nature, a soul without spot, it was this Irish
peasant; if ever I have seen letters full of grace and simplicity
they were those that reached me once in a rare while from that lonely
glen, asking, never for himself, but perhaps that I would give a
prize to some school children, or the like, and always full of an
affection that knew no difference between man and man. I can see now
the wonderful blue eyes in that kind face, a handsome peasant face
with its fringe of grey close-cropped whisker. If I remember a word
of complaint from him, it was when he saw his neighbour go by on a
car--a man no soberer, no more industrious, no better educated than
himself, yet one who had had the instinct for buying and selling, for
putting penny to penny and pound to pound. The neighbour was a good
man too, in his way; kindly and friendly, prompt to do a service, yet
not to be reckoned amongst those elect upon earth whom everyone using
discernment will have recognized on his way through life, of whom not
a few that I have known have been Donegal peasants. But none had quite
the grace, the simplicity, and the distinction of this old dreamer and
student who carries net and basket by the Glen River without repute
among men.