O, where, Kincora, is Brian the Great?And where is the beauty that once was thine?O, where are the princes and nobles that sateAt the feast in thy halls, and drank the red wine?Where, O, Kincora?
It was by no mere chance that Kincora, the seat of the Kings of Thomond, was situated just here, for it was this point which controlled the valley of the lower Shannon. Limerick marks the head of the tideway navigable from the sea, then come fifteen miles of rushing torrent, of fall and rapid, which no boat can pass; and then comes the long stretch of placid lake and riverover which boats may go as far as the ford of Athlone, and farther. Between Athlone and the sea, there was just one ford—a treacherous and hidden one, it is true, possible only to those who knew every step of it, but still a ford—and it was here, a little above the present town of Killaloe, where Lough Derg begins to narrow between the hills.
Brian was born here in 941. Twenty years before, the Danes had sailed in force up the Shannon and fortified the island at the head of the tideway which is now the oldest part of Limerick. They set themselves to ravage the wide and fertile valley, to sack the shrines of the churches, to exact tribute from every chieftain—nay, from every family. MacLiag, Brian's bard, author of that old epic, "The Wars of the Gael with the Gall," another Homer almost, who told the story of Danish oppression down to their final defeat at Clontarf, thus described the burden under which, in those days, the people of Ireland groaned:
"Such was the oppressiveness of the tribute and the rent of the foreigners over all Erin, that there was a king from them over every territory, a chief over every chieftaincy, an abbot over every church, a steward over every village, and a soldier in every house, so that no man of Erin had power to give even the milk of his cow, nor as much as the clutch of eggs of one hen, in succour or in kindness to an aged man, or to a friend, but was forced to keep them for the foreign steward or bailiff or soldier. And though there were but one milk-giving cow in the house, she durst not be milked for an infant of one night, nor for a sick person, but must be kept for the foreigner; and however long he might be absent from the house, his share or his supply durst not be lessened."
"Such was the oppressiveness of the tribute and the rent of the foreigners over all Erin, that there was a king from them over every territory, a chief over every chieftaincy, an abbot over every church, a steward over every village, and a soldier in every house, so that no man of Erin had power to give even the milk of his cow, nor as much as the clutch of eggs of one hen, in succour or in kindness to an aged man, or to a friend, but was forced to keep them for the foreign steward or bailiff or soldier. And though there were but one milk-giving cow in the house, she durst not be milked for an infant of one night, nor for a sick person, but must be kept for the foreigner; and however long he might be absent from the house, his share or his supply durst not be lessened."
Brian had an elder brother, Mahon, who was king of South Munster, and dwelt at Cashel, and the two did what they could against the invaders, killing them off "in twos and in threes, in fives and in scores"; but always fresh hordes poured in, and at last Mahon grew disheartened at the seemingly endless struggle against these stark, mail-clad warriors; while as for Brian, his force was reduced to a mere tattered handful, hiding in the hills. Then it was that he and Mahon met to discuss the future.
"But where hast thou left thy followers?" Mahon asked, looking at the men, only a score in number, standing behind their chief.
"I have left them," answered Brian, "on the field of battle."
"Ah," said Mahon, sadly. "Is it so? You see how little we can do against these foreigners."
"Little as it is," said Brian, "it is better than peace."
"But it is folly to keep on fighting," said Mahon. "We can not conquer these shining warriors, clad in their polished corselets. The part of wisdom is to make terms with them, and leave no more of our men dead upon the field."
"It is natural for men to die," answered Brian calmly; "but it is neither the nature nor the inheritance of the Dalcassians to submit to injury and outrage. And yet I have no wish to lead any unwilling man to battle. Let the question of war or peace be left to the whole clan."
So it was done, and "the voice of hundreds as of one man answered for war."
Mahon abode loyally by this decision, and therewas a great muster, and a fierce battle near the spot where Limerick Junction now stands, and the Danes were routed, "and fled to the ditches, and to the valleys, and to the solitudes of that great sweet-flowery plain," and the Irish pursued them all through the night, and with the morning, came to Limerick, and stormed and took the island fortress; plundered it, and reduced it "to a cloud of smoke and red fire afterwards."
Then Mahon was murdered by some such treachery as stains so many pages of Irish history, and Brian became king of all Munster. His first work was to punish his brother's murderers, which he did with grim celerity, so that, as the chronicler puts it, they soon found that he "was not a stone in place of an egg, nor a wisp in place of a club, but a hero in place of a hero, and valour in place of valour." After that, with new energy, he turned against the Danes, and harried them and was himself harried, defeated them and was himself defeated, but fought on undaunted year after year, until the final great victory at Clontarf, where he himself was slain. And during all the years that he was king of Munster, he ruled it, not from Cashel, but from Kincora, his well-beloved castle here at the ford of the Shannon.
The ford is no longer there, for an elaborate system of sluice-gates and weirs has been constructed to hold the water back and regulate the supply to the lower reaches of the river, and one crosses to the town upon a beautiful stone bridge of thirteen arches, between which the water swirls and eddies, forming deep pools, where great salmon love to lurk. At its other end isthe town, with its houses mounting the steep slope from the river, and dominated by the square tower of its old cathedral.
It was to the cathedral we went first, and a venerable pile we found it, dating from the twelfth century, and attributed to that same Donall O'Brien, King of Munster, who built the one at Limerick. But, alas, it is venerable only from without; as one steps through the doorway, all illusion of age vanishes, for the interior has been "improved" to suit the needs of a small Church of Ireland congregation.
The Protestants in this parish are so few that the choir of the cathedral is more than ample for them; so it has been closed off from the rest of the church by a glass screen with hideous wooden "tracery"—there is a rose window (think of it!) sawed out of boards; and beyond this screen an ugly pavement of black and yellow tiles has been laid over the beautiful grey flags of the old pavement, and pews have been installed. One of the transepts is used as a robing-room; in the other an elaborate combination of steam-engine, dynamo and storage-batteries has been placed to furnish heat and light—and this, mind you, in the church which was once the royal burying-place of the Kings of Munster!
It seems foolish to maintain a great church like this for the use of so small a congregation as worships here, and yet the same thing is done all over Ireland, though it would seem to be only common sense to give the big churches to the big congregations, and to provide small churches for the small ones. But I suppose no one in Ireland would dare make such a suggestion.
I am surprised that the energetic vicar of this parish has not decided that the church is too dark and hired some workmen to knock out the lancet windows. These windows are one of its chief beauties, they are so tall, so narrow, so deeply splayed—the very earliest form, before the builders gathered courage to cut any but the smallest openings in their walls. And in the wall of the nave, blocked up and with use unexplained, is a magnificent Irish-Romanesque doorway. Tradition has it that it was the entrance to the tomb of King Murtough O'Brien, and its date is placed at the beginning of the twelfth century. The man who built it was an artist, for nothing could be more graceful than its four semi-circular arches, rising one beyond the other and covered with ornamentation—spiral and leaf work, grotesque animals with tails twined into the hair of human heads, flowers and lozenges, and the familiar dog-tooth pattern, of which the Irish were so fond.
Interesting as the church is, or would be but for the "improvements," it is far outranked by a tiny stone structure just outside—the parish church of Brian Boru himself. It is less than thirty feet long, and the walls are nearly four feet thick, and the two narrow windows which light it, one on either side, are loopholes rather than windows; and the doorway by which it is entered, narrower at the top than at the bottom, is a veritable gem; and the high-pitched roof of fitted blocks of stone is twice as high as the walls;—and on the stone slabs of its pavement Brian Boru was wont to kneel in prayer, five centuries before Columbus sailed out of Palos!
Of course I wanted a picture of this shrine; but there were difficulties, for it stands in a little depression which conceals part of it, and the high wall around the churchyard prevented my getting far enough away to get all of the high-pitched roof on the film. The caretaker, who was most interested in my manœuvres, brought a ladder at last, and I mounted to the top of the wall, and took the picture opposite the next page; but, even then, I didn't get it all.
The graveyard about these churches is a large one, but it is crowded with tombs; and the north half of it is mown and orderly, and the south half is almost impenetrable because of the rank and matted grass and weeds and nettles. This is the result of an old quarrel, more foolish than most. For, like Ireland itself, this graveyard is divided between Protestants and Catholics, the Protestants to the north and the Catholics to the south of the church; and the Protestants consider their duty done when they have cared for the graves in their own half; while the Catholics hold that, since the Protestants claim the cathedral, they are bound to look after its precincts; and the result is that the visitor to those precincts is half the time floundering knee-deep in weeds.
The most interesting tomb in the place is in the midst of this tangle, therefore a Catholic's. It bears the date 1719, and is most elaborately decorated with carved figures—one kneeling above the legend, "This is the way to Blis"; another, a man with crossed arms, inquiring, "What am I? What is man?"—two questions which have posed the greatest of philosophers. One panel bears this sestet:
How sweetly rest Christ's saints in loveThat in his presence bee.My dearest friends with Christ aboveThim wil I go and seeAnd all my friends in Christ belowWill post soon after me.
THE BRIDGE AT KILLALOETHE BRIDGE AT KILLALOETHE ORATORY AT KILLALOE
We left the place, at last, and walked on along the street, peeping in between the bars of an iron gate at the beautiful grounds of the Bishop's palace; and then up a steep and narrow lane to the little plateau which is now the town's market-place, but where, in the old days, Brian's palace of Kincora stood. Not a stone is left of that palace now, for the wild men of Connaught swept down from the mountains, in the twelfth century, while the English were trying to hold the castle and so control the destinies of Clare, and drove the intruders out, and tore the castle stone from stone, and threw timber and stone alike into the Shannon. Just beyond the square stands the Catholic church—a barn-like modern structure, hastily thrown together to shelter the swarming congregation, for which the cathedral would be none too large.
We went on down the hill, past the canal, with the roaring river beyond, and the purple vistas of Lough Derg opening between the hills in the distance, along an avenue of noble trees, and there before us lay a great double rath, sloping steeply to the river, built here to guard the ford. The ford lies there before it—a ford no longer, since the sluices back up the water; but in the old days this was the key to County Clare, this was the path taken by the men of Connaught in raid and foray; and here it was that Sarsfield, with fourhundred men, followed Hogan the rapparee, on that night expedition which resulted in the destruction of the English ammunition-train. Aubrey de Vere has told the story in a spirited little poem, beginning,
Sarsfield went out the Dutch to rout,And to take and break their cannon;To Mass went he at half past three,And at four he crossed the Shannon.
We had hoped to go to Athlone by way of Lough Derg, but we had already learned that that was not to be, for we had been told, back at the bridge, that the passenger service across the lake would not start until the sixteenth of June. And we were sorry, for, from the summit of this old rath, the lake, stretching away into the misty distance, looked very beautiful and inviting.
We made our way back to the village and stopped in at a nice little hotel just below the bridge, and had tea, served most appetizingly by a clean, bright-eyed maid; and then, while Betty sat down to rest, I sallied forth to see, if possible, the greatest curiosity of all about Killaloe—the original church or oratory of St. Molua, on an island near the left bank of the Shannon, about half a mile downstream.
Now to get back to St. Molua, one has to go a long way indeed, for he died three hundred years before Brian Boru was born. He was the first bishop of Killaloe, which is named after him, "cill" meaning church, and Killaloe being merely a contraction of Cill Molua, the church of Molua. The little oratory on the island, to which he retired for contemplation, afterthe manner of Irish saints, was built not later than the year 600.
You will understand, therefore, why I was so eager to see it, and I went into the bar to consult with the barmaid as to the best manner of getting to it. I had been told that it was possible to reach it from the left bank of the river without the aid of a boat, but the maid assured me this could be done only when the river was low, and was out of the question in the present stage of the water. So she went to the door and called to a passing boatman, and explained my wishes, and he at once volunteered to ferry me over to the island. His house, he said, was just opposite the island, and his boat was tied up at the landing there; so we walked down to it, along the bank of the canal which parallels the river.
A little way down the canal was a mill, and a boat was tied up in front of it unloading some grain, and when I looked into the boat, I saw that the grain was shelled Indian corn! It was not from America, however, but from Russia, and my companion told me that quite a demand for cornmeal was growing up in the neighbourhood, and that it was used mixed with flour. And then he listened, his eyes round with wonder, while I told him how corn grows. He had never seen it on the ear, and did not know the meaning of the word "cob," except as applied to a horse.
"And of course you have seen bananas growing!" he said, when I had finished, and I think he scarcely believed me when I tried to explain that a country warm enough for corn might still be too cold for bananas.
We finally reached his house—a little hovel built ona bluff overhanging the river—and went down some rude stone steps to the water's edge; and he unchained his boat, and whistled to his dog, and pushed off. It was quite an exciting paddle, for the current was very swift; but we got across to the island at last, after some hair-raising scrapings against rocks and over submerged reefs. We found the island a tangle of weeds and briars, but we broke our way through, and after some searching, found the tiny church, almost hidden by the bushes about it. They were so thick that I found it quite impossible to get a picture of the whole church, but by breaking down some of them, I finally managed to get a picture of the narrow inclined doorway, with my guide's dog posing on the threshold.
The oratory is built solidly of stone, with walls three feet thick, and a steep stone roof. Its inside measurements are ten feet by six! There is a single window, with a round head cut out of a block of stone, and in the wall on either side just below it is a shallow recess. The ceiling has fallen in, but one can still see the holes in the walls where the supporting beams rested. Above it, under the steep roof, was a croft, where perhaps the saint slept.
Consider, for a moment, what was going on in the world when this little church was built. It takes us back to the age of legend—the age of King Arthur and his knights—to that dim period when the Saxons were conquering England, and the Frankish kingdom was falling to pieces, and Mohammed was preaching his gospel in Arabia. A century and a half would elapse before Charlemagne was born, and two centuries beforethe first Norse boat, driving westward before the tempest, touched the New England coast!
ENTRANCE TO ST. MOLUA'S ORATORYENTRANCE TO ST. MOLUA'S ORATORYA FISHERMAN'S HOME
There is, of course, a holy well on the island—the one at which St. Molua drank; and we found it after a long search, but the river was so high that it was under two or three feet of water. There were some rags and other tokens hanging on the neighbouring bushes, but not many, and I judge that few people ever come to this historic spot.
At last I was ready to go, and we climbed into the boat and started for the mainland; and once I thought we were surely going to capsize, for the boat got out of control and banged into a rock; but we finally stemmed the current, and the boatman dropped his paddle and snatched up a pole, and pushed along so close to the shore that the overhanging branches slapped us in the face, and the dog, thinking we were going to land, made a wild leap for the bank, fell short, and nearly drowned.
When we were safe again at the landing-place, and the boat tied up, I asked my companion how much I owed him for his trouble.
"Not a penny, sir," he said, warmly. "It's glad I am to oblige a pleasant gentleman like yourself."
"Oh, but look here," I protested, "that won't do," and I fished through my pockets and was appalled to find that I had only nine-pence in change. "Wait till we get back to the hotel," I said, "and I'll get some money."
"What is that you have in your hand, sir?"
"Oh, that's only nine-pence."
"That would be far too much, sir," he said; and whenI hesitatingly gave it to him, he as hesitatingly took it, and I really believe he was in earnest in thinking it too much.
On our way back to the town, he expounded to me his theory of life, which was to give faithful service to one's employer, and help one's fellow-men when possible, and never bother unduly about the future, which was never as black as it looked. And I agreed with him that trouble always came butt-end first, and that, after it had passed, it frequently dwindled to a pinpoint—the which has been said in verse somewhere, by Sam Walter Foss I think, but I can't put my hand on it.
We got back to Castleconnell just as the fishermen were coming in, and it was far from empty-handed they were this time. The array of salmon stretched out on the floor of the bar, when they had all arrived, was a very noble one. And everybody stood around and looked at them proudly, and told of the enormous flies that had been used, and how one monster had whipped the boat around and towed it right down through the rapids, and lucky it was that the water was high or it would infallibly have been ripped to pieces, but the boatmen kept their heads and managed to get it through, and when the salmon came out in the quiet river below and found itself still fast, it gave up and let itself be gaffed without any further fuss.
And again after dinner, we saw the familiar sight of the catch being wrapped in straw to be sent by parcel post back to England, as proof of the anglers'prowess; and I can guess how those battles on Shannon water were fought over again when the angler got back to the bosom of his family. As for me, I have only to close my eyes to see again that noble stream sweeping along between its green, flower-sprinkled banks, foaming over the weirs, brawling past the rapids, hurrying between the quays of Limerick, and widening into the great estuary where it meets the sea.
Into the West, where, o'er the wide Atlantic,The lights of sunset gleam,From its high sources in the heart of ErinFlows the great stream.Yet back in stormy cloud or viewless vapourThe wandering waters come,And faithfully across the trackless heavenFind their old home.
LISSOY AND CLONMACNOISE
Sincewe could not get to Athlone by water, we must needs get there by rail; so, most regretfully, next morning, we bade good-bye to Castleconnell and took train for Limerick. Half an hour later, we pulled out of the Limerick terminus, circled about the town, crossed the Shannon by a long, low bridge, and were in County Clare.
Ruins are more numerous here than almost anywhere else in Ireland, for this western slope of the Shannon valley, so fertile and coveted, was famous fighting-ground. There are one or two in sight all the time, across the beautiful rolling meadows. Near Cratloe there are three, their great square keeps looming above the trees, and looking out across the wide Shannon estuary. A little farther on is the famous seat of the Earls of Thomond, Bunratty Castle, a fine old fortress, with all the approved mediæval trimmings of moat, guard-room, banqueting-hall, dungeons and torture-chamber, and I am sorry we did not get to visit it. Indeed, there are many places in the neighbourhood worth a visit—but if one is going to visit every Irish ruin, he will need ten years for the task. Only it does cause a pang of the heart to pass any of them by.
We must have passed at least fifty by, that day; but I found that the train stopped for a while at Ennis, the chief town of Clare, and I hurried out to see whatI could of it. It is certainly a picturesque place, with narrow winding streets, and queer little courts, and houses painted pink or washed with yellow ochre. I glanced in at the new Catholic cathedral, whose most impressive feature is a rather good picture of the ascension over the high altar; and then spent a few minutes among the ruins of the Franciscan friary, a queer jumble of buildings which I did not have time to untangle.
As usual, the two biggest buildings in the town are the jail and the lunatic asylum, and I passed them both on my way back to the station. Some of the lunatics were languidly hoeing a big potato patch that day, with five or six guards looking on. I have never looked up the statistics of lunacy in Ireland, but if all the asylums are full, the rate must be very high.
About half a mile beyond Ennis, the train passes a most imposing ruin, very close to the railway. It is the ruin of Clare Abbey, and is dominated by a great square tower, which must be visible for many miles around. There is still another ruin, that of Killone Abbey, only a few miles away, and for a connoisseur in ruins, Ennis would be an excellent place to spend a few days.
From Ennis, we turned almost due northward toward Athenry, and the landscape became the rockiest I have ever seen. Every little field was surrounded by a high stone wall, and as these walls did not begin to exhaust the supply, there were great heaps of rocks in every available corner—every one of them dug from the shallow soil with almost incredible labour. The fact that any one would try to reclaim such land speaks volumes for the hard necessities of the people who settledhere. I don't suppose they enjoyed the labour, but they had no choice—at least, their only choice was to wrest a living from these rocky fields or starve. No doubt many of them did starve, but the rest kept labouring on, with insect-like industry, reclaiming this corner and that, adding to the soil of their fields inch by inch.
There is an old saying that in this district, and in others like it in Connaught, the first three crops are stones, and I can well believe it. The green appearance of these hillsides is a delusion and a snare, for it is nothing but a skin of turf over the rocks, and these rocks must be dug away to the depth of two feet, sometimes, before the soil is reached. In any other part of the world, a man who would attempt to convert such a hillside into an arable field would be thought insane; here, in the west of Ireland, it is the usual thing. Most tragic of all, after it was fit for tillage, it did not belong to the man whose labour had made it so, but to his English landlord, who promptly proceeded to raise the rent!
We ran out of this rocky land, at last, and crossed a vast bog, scarred with long, black, water-filled ditches, from which the turf had been taken. There were a few people here and there cutting it, but a woman who had got into the compartment with us said that the continued wet weather had made the work very difficult and dangerous. All the people hereabouts, she added, lived by the turf cutting, at which they could earn, perhaps, ten-pence a day; but in bad seasons they were soon close to starvation. I remarked that, with such wages, they must be close to it all the time, and shesmiled sadly and said that that was true. Only, of course, in the bogs the children can work, as well as the men and women, and that helps. Indeed, we saw them many times—little boys and girls who should have been at school or running free, gaining health and strength for the hard years to come, tugging at the heavy, water-soaked blocks of peat, and laying them out in the sun to dry. It takes a month of sun to dry the peat; in wet weather it won't dry at all, and so isn't salable. Truly, the lives of the poor Irish hang on slender threads!
There are ruins of castles and monasteries and raths and cashels all through this region, and a lot of them cluster about the dirty little town of Athenry, which can boast a castle, two monasteries, city walls and an old gate. Such richness was not to be passed by, and we left the train, checked our luggage at the parcel office, fought off a jarvey who was determined to drive us to the ruins which we could see quite plainly just across the track, crossed the road by the overhead bridge, and came out in the streets of the village.
Athenry is typically Irish, with streets running every way, houses built any way, and their inhabitants leaning over the half-doors, or braced against the walls at the street corners, or going slowly about such business as they have. Life has stood still here for at least a century; and yet Athenry was once a royal town—"The Ford of the Kings" its name signifies—and a royal court was held here in the great castle, and a beautiful monastery was built near by at the express wish of St. Dominick himself, and it became a famousplace of learning, to which scholars flocked from all over Europe. Alas and alack!
Vanished, those high conceits! Desolate and forlorn,We hunger against hope for that lost heritage.
For the red tide of war swept over Athenry more than once, and left it but smoking ruins. Eleven thousand Connaughtmen lay piled about the walls one summer day in 1316, all that was left of the army that tried to make Edward Bruce king of Ireland; two centuries later, when the Earls of Clanricarde swept Connaught with fire and sword, Athenry fell before them, and was left in ashes; and when it struggled to its feet again, it was only to fall before the destroying hand of Red Hugh O'Donnell, who left scarcely one stone upon another, and from that blow it never rallied.
One of the old gates still survives, well preserved in spite of war and weather, and near it is a quaint old market cross, with the Virgin and Child on one side and Christ on the other. All that is left of the thirteenth century castle is the gabled keep, looming high on a rock just back of the town, and some fragments of the battlemented curtains. All the floors have fallen in, and its four massive walls are open to the heavens. Red Hugh, when he destroyed it, did his work well!
The ruins of the abbey nestle in the shadow of the rock on which the castle stands, and we made our way down to them, along disordered streets swarming with geese, ducks, dogs, chickens and children, only to find the way closed by an iron gate, securely padlocked. But a passer-by told us that the village blacksmith hadthe key, and indicated vaguely the way to his shop, which we found after some circuitous wanderings. The smith was a gnarled little man, quite the reverse of Longfellow's, and as soon as we had made our errand known, he snatched down the keys and hastened to lead the way to the ruins, leaving his work without pausing to remove his apron, and without a backward glance at his helper, who stood open-mouthed by the forge.
THE CHOIR OF THE ABBEY AT ATHENRYTHE CHOIR OF THE ABBEY AT ATHENRYA COTTAGE AT ATHENRY
There were three gates to unlock before we reached the ruins, and then the blacksmith hurried back to his work, leaving his daughter to keep an eye on us. The church is all that is left of the monastery, for the domestic buildings, and even the cloisters have been swept entirely away by the rude hand of time, and the far ruder ones of the villagers who needed stone for their houses. The church itself has suffered more than most, for not only is the roof gone, but the tower and one transept and most of the window-tracery, and the whole interior has been swept by a savage storm, the tombs hacked and hewed, and the carved decorations knocked to fragments. Doubtless if we had questioned the girl who stood staring at us, she would have said that "Crummell did it," and in this case, history would bear her out, for the Puritan soldierydiddo a lot of damage here. They and the sans-culottes suffered from the same mania—a sort of vertigo of destructiveness before memorials of kings or Catholics!
But they couldn't destroy everything, and what is left in this old church is well worth seeing, for there are some graceful pointed windows, and six narrow lancets in a lovely row along the north wall of the choir, and a fine arcade in the north transept, and many detailsof decoration beautiful in spite of mutilation. The place is crowded with tombs, for this was the burial place of the Dalys and the Lynchs and the De Burgos, and is still in use as such. The tomb of the "noble family of De Burgh" is in one corner, and there are many mural tablets, with inscriptions in French and Latin and Gaelic, as well as English. In fact one of them announces in French and Latin and English, presumably so that every one except the Irish might read, that "here is the antient Sepulchre of the Sept of the Walls of Droghty late demolished by the Cromellians."
We went back through the town, at last, and while I was manœuvring for the picture oppositepage 270, Betty got into talk with a girl who was leaning over a half-door, and found, marvellous to relate, that she had once lived in Brookline, Mass. We asked her why she had come back to Ireland, and after a moment's thought she said it was because "America wasn't fair." We thought of aristocratic Brookline, the abode of millionaires, and then we looked about us—at the ragged donkey standing across the way, at the pig wandering down the middle of the dirty street, at the low little houses and the shabby people—and perhaps we smiled, but be sure it was in sympathy, not in derision.
We crossed over to the railway hotel, finally, and had lunch, and when we came out, the woman who managed the place waylaid us at the front door for a chat. She told us of a woman from the village who was on theTitanic, but was saved, and discussed various scandals in high life, which she had gleaned fromthe half-penny press; and then we spoke of the girl we had met in the village, and she deplored the high-and-mighty airs which some of the girls who come home from America give themselves.
"But I once heard one of them put well in her place," she added, "when she came back with her hat full of flowers and her petticoat full of flounces, and walked about the town as though we were all dirt beneath her feet. Well, one day an old man stopped her for a word, a friend of the family who wished her well, but she put up her nose at him—and perhaps he was not very clean—and was for going past. But he put out his hand and caught her by the arm. 'You're after bein' a fine lady now,' says he, 'but I mind the time, and that but a few years since, when I've seen ye sittin' on your bare-backed ass, with your naked legs hangin' down—yes, and I can be tellin' ye more than that, if so be ye wish to hear it!' She didn't stay long in the village after that," added the speaker, with a chuckle of relish.
Our train came along, presently, and we were soon running over as dreary, bleak and miserable a land as any we had seen in Ireland. Vast boggy plains, bare rocky hillsides, with scarcely a house to be seen anywhere—only a ruin, now and then, marking the site of some ancient stronghold; and so, in the first dusk of the evening, we came to Athlone.
One would have thought that, with so important a town, the station would have been placed somewhere near it; but habit was too strong for the builders of the line, and so they put the station about a mile away, at the end of a dreary stretch of road, beyond a greatbarrack, along the river, past the castle, and over the bridge.
Athlone has been famous for its widows ever since the days of Molly Malone, ohone! who
Melted the heartsOf the swains in them parts;
and we found that the best hotel in the place, which was not as good as it might have been, was managed by a widow, who might well have posed for the lovely Molly. She had not been a widow long, and I judged would not be if the swains of the town had any voice in the matter, for the bar was very popular when she was behind it.
We went out, after dinner, to see the town, and found it one of the most ugly and depressing we had yet encountered—a sort of cross between a town and a village, but with the attractions of neither. The water-front is its most interesting part, for a fragment of the old castle which was built to guard the second of the all-important fords of the Shannon still stands there. Kincora, you will remember, guarded the other. But Kincora was three days' march to the southward; and for two days' march to the northward there was no other place where the Shannon could be crossed; and so here at the ford just below Lough Ree, in the old days, a franklin named Luan set up a rude little inn, and the place came to be known as Ath Luan, Luan's Ford—Athlone. Here in the year 1001, hostages were sent from all Ireland to meet Brian Boru and proclaim him High King; and here, a century later, the O'Conors built a rath and a tower to guard the ford and levytribute upon all who used it. In another hundred years, the Normans had seized it, and put up the strong, round-towered castle, parts of which still remain; and for seven centuries after that, the English power "sat astride the passage of Connaught," save for the brief time, after the battle of the Boyne, it was held by the Irish. But Ginkle captured it, as he was soon to capture Limerick, and a few years later, most of what was left of the town was destroyed when the magazine of the castle blew up during a thunderstorm.
But though there is little in Athlone to delay the visitor, there are two places in the neighbourhood worth seeing. Nine miles to the north is Lissoy, made immortal by Goldsmith as
Sweet Auburn! loveliest village of the plain;
and ten miles to the south, on the bank of the Shannon, are the ruins of Clonmacnoise, whither, twelve centuries ago, men in search of knowledge turned their faces from all the corners of Europe.
It was for Lissoy we started next morning, on a car for which I had bargained the night before. Our jarvey was a loquacious old fellow, who talked unceasingly, but in so broken a brogue that it was only with the greatest difficulty we could follow him. He had known some people who had gone down on theTitanic, and he told us all about them; but most of his talk was a lament for the hard times, the sorrowful state of the country, the paucity of tourists, and the vagaries of the landlady, of whom he spoke in the most mournful and pessimistic way. She was not, I gathered,a native of Athlone, but a Dublin woman whose ideas were new-fangled and highfalutin, and who, I inferred, did not look kindly upon the careless habits of her "help."
The road lay through a pleasant, rolling country, with glimpses of Lough Ree to the left, and on a hill to the right a tall shaft which our jarvey told us marked the exact centre of Ireland. When one looks at the map, one sees that it is at least somewhere near the centre. But it has been explained to other passers-by in many ways: as the remains of a round tower, as a tower which a rich man built in order to mount to the top of it every day to count his sheep, as a pole for his tent put up by Finn MacCool, as a wind-mill in the old days, and as a dozen other things—anything, in fact, that happened to occur to the man who was asked the question. One answer, you may be sure, he never made, and that was that he didn't know!
Therearesome remains of old windmills in the neighbourhood—we saw one or two on near-by hillsides, close enough to recognise them; and if I had known at the time what a divergence of opinion there was about that lonely tower in the distance, I would have driven over to it and investigated it on my own hook. But our jarvey's answer was so positive that it left no room for doubt, so we drove on through a village of tiny thatched houses, with the smoke of the turf giving a pleasant tang to the air; then up a long hill, to the left at a cross-roads, and at last our jarvey drew up before a five-barred gate. We looked at him questioningly, for there was no village in sight.
"'Tis here it was, sir," he said, "sweet Auburn, theloveliest village of the plain. 'Twas up that path yonder the village preacher's modest mansion rose, though there is little enough left of it now; and over yonder, behind that wall with the yellow furze atop it, unprofitably gay, was where the village master taught his little school, and there is nothing at all left of that; and a little furder on is the 'Three Jolly Pigeons,' where news much older than the ale went round."
THE GOLDSMITH RECTORY AT LISSOYTHE GOLDSMITH RECTORY AT LISSOYTHE "THREE JOLLY PIGEONS"
I looked at him wonderingly.
"Where did you pick up all that patter?" I asked.
He snickered.
"Ah, you would not be the first gintleman I have driven out here, sir," he explained; "and many of them would be speakin' parts of the poem."
"I suppose ale is still to be obtained at the 'Three Jolly Pigeons'?"
"It is, sir, if so be your honour would be wantin' some. And they have one of the big stones of the old mill for a doorstep," he added, as an extra inducement not to pass it by.
We got down from our seats, went through the gate, and up the path which Goldsmith and his father trod so many times; for, whether or not Lissoy was really Auburn, there can be no doubt that the elder Goldsmith was really vicar here, and that he lived in the house, the rectory of Kilkenny West, of which only a fragment of the front wall remains, and that Oliver was a boy here. The ash trees which shadowed the path have disappeared, but there are still plenty of gabbling geese around, and a file of them went past as I took a picture of the remnant of the rectory. A shedwith a hideous roof of corrugated iron has been built behind it, and near by is a two-storied house where the present tenant lives. We found an old woman, for all the world like Goldsmith's "widowed, solitary thing," carding wool in an outhouse, and she showed us the old well, deep in the ground, walled around and approached by a steep flight of steps.
There was nothing more to see, so we went back to the gate, escorted by three friendly pigs, and clambered up to our seats again, and looked out over the valley. There is nothing in that valley but gently-rolling pastures, and nothing lives there now but sheep and cattle. And it sends a chill up the spine to realise that once a village stood there, and that it has melted away into the earth. Not a stone is left of its houses, not a sod of its walls, not a flower of its gardens.
But that village was Lissoy, not Auburn. No such village as Auburn ever existed in Ireland, where the young folks sported on the village green, and the swain responsive to the milkmaid sung, and the village master taught his school during the day, and argued with the preacher in the evening, and a jolly crowd gathered every night at the inn to drink the nut-brown ale. There is not a single Irish detail in that picture; it is all English, just as Goldsmith intended it should be, for it was of "England's griefs" he was writing, not of Ireland's. In that day, few people here in Westmeath spoke anything but Irish; the village children knew nothing of schools, except hedge-row ones, taught by some fugitive priest; the "honest rustics" had no "decent churches," but only hidden caves in dark valleys, where Mass was said secretly and at the risk oflife; and, rest assured, when any inhabitant of this valley had money to spend for drink, he wasted it on no such futile beverage as nut-brown ale!
I am sure that little of it is sold to-day at the "Three Jolly Pigeons," where we presently arrived, a low wayside tavern with thatched roof and plastered wall, kept by John Nally, who welcomed us most kindly, and grew enthusiastic when I proposed to take a picture. There was a rickety donkey-cart standing by the door, and its owner came out to be in the picture, too—raggeder even than his donkey, disreputable, dirty, gin-soaked, and with only a jagged tooth or two in his expansive mouth, but carefree and full of mirth.
Betty, who had been admiring the supreme raggedness of the donkey, asked its name.
"Top o' the Mornin', miss," answered the man, with a shout of laughter, and I am sure the name was the inspiration of the moment.
And then, while our jarvey drank his whiskey, I had a talk with Mr. Nally, who, of course, for reasons of trade perhaps, is firmly of the belief that Auburn is Lissoy and no other. And he told me of another poet who was born down on the banks of the Inny, a mile or two away, and who, in the old days, spent many an evening at the Pigeons—Johnny Casey he called him, and it turned out to be that same John Keegan Casey, who wrote "The Rising of the Moon," and "Maire my Girl," and "Gracie og Machree," and "Donal Kenny,"—Irish subjects all, and most of them local ones, as well. Donal Kenny, for instance, was a bold blade, a clever hand with the snare and the net, who turned the heads of all the girls in the neighbourhood,and broke those of most of the boys, until it was glad they were when he went off with himself to America. I have looked up the poem since, and I fear that Casey enveloped the parting scene with exaggerated sentiment; yet the verses have a swing to them: