A RUIN ON THE SHORE OF LOUGH GILLA RUIN ON THE SHORE OF LOUGH GILLTHE LAST FRAGMENT OF AN ANCIENT STRONGHOLD
What strange rites, I wondered, had these old stones witnessed; what pageantries, what sacrifices, what incantations? Of all that ancient people there remains on earth not a single trace, except in such silent monuments of stone as this, so mighty the passing centuries have been powerless to destroy them, more mysterious, more inscrutable than the Sphinx.
We tore ourselves away, at last, and went silently down through the heather, which was fairly swarming with rabbits; and we mounted our car and headed back toward the lake. We came out presently close beside the shore, and followed it around its upper end. Just there, out at the end of a point of land, stands the fragment of a tower, and our jarvey told us it was all that was left of the castle from which Dervorgilla eloped with Dermot MacMurrough—a tale already told by the little tailor of Limerick.
Of course I wanted a picture of it, and after much manœuvring, I managed to get the one opposite this page, which I include only because of the beautiful Japanesy branch across one corner; for this wasn't Breffni's castle at all, as we were presently to find. A little farther on, and quite near the road, was another ruin, and a most imposing one, with drum towers at the four corners, and a dilapidated cottage hugging its wall; and I took a peep within the square enclosure, used now as a kind of barnyard. There were littleturrets looking out over the lake, and a spiral stair in one corner, and mullioned windows and tall chimneys and yawning fireplaces; and it looked a most important place, but I have not been able to discover anything of its history. Then we went on again, with beautiful views of the lake at our right, and high on our left the flat-topped mountain called O'Rourke's Table, where, once upon a time, as told by the old ballad, "O'Rourke's Noble Feast" was spread:
O'Rourke's noble fare will ne'er be forgotBy those who were there, or those who were not.His revels to keep, we sup and we dineOn seven score sheep, fat bullocks and swine,
and so on. It is, indeed, a table fit for such a celebration—a rock plateau with sheer escarpments of grey granite dropping away from it, and a close cover of purple heather for a cloth.
The road curved on along the lake; then turned away from it through a beautiful ravine; and then a sparkling river was dashing along at our right, and beyond it loomed the grey walls of a most extensive ruin; and then we dropped steeply down into the town of Dromahair, and stopped at a pretty inn to bait the horse.
I wanted to get closer to the ruins, and I asked if there was a bridge across the river, and was told that there was, just behind the hotel. So I made my way down to it, to find that the "bridge" was a slender plank, without handrail or guard, spanning some ugly-looking rapids. I looked at the plank, and I looked at the swirling water, and I looked at the grey ruins on the farther shore, and I hesitated for a long time; butI wasn't equal to it; and I turned away at last and made my way back to the village in the hope of finding some more stable bridge there.
The dominating feature of the village is not the workhouse or lunatic asylum, but an enormous mill, five stories high, built of black stone as hard as flint, to endure for all eternity, but forlorn and deserted; and while I was gazing at it and wondering where the money had come from to build it, a man came out of the house attached to it and spoke to me. He was an Englishman, he said, who was spending his vacation at Dromahair. I asked him if there was any other bridge across the river except the slender plank, and he said there was not; and that it was characteristic of the Irish that there should not be, for a more careless, shiftless, happy-go-lucky race did not exist anywhere on earth.
I asked him about the mill, and he said that it was just another example of Irish inefficiency and wrong-headedness; that it had been erected at great expense and equipped with the most costly machinery to grind American grain, which was to be brought up Sligo Bay from the sea, and up the river and across the lake; and then, when all was ready, there was no grain to grind—or none, at least, which could be brought to the mill without prohibitive expense. Furthermore, the power was so poor and costly that it would have been impossible to operate the mill profitably even if there had been plenty of grain. But the owner of the mill, with some sort of dim faith in the power of Home Rule to produce the grain, was preparing to install a turbine to run the machinery, and had already startedto build a big aqueduct to bring the water in from above the rapids.
The rapids are just above the mill, and are quite imposing; and there, just beyond them, is the abbey. I was near enough to see it fairly well, though not, of course, in detail as I should have liked to do; but I comforted myself with the thought that it is a comparatively modern one, dating from the sixteenth century, when Margaret, the wife of another O'Rourke, having, perhaps, like Dervorgilla, done something she regretted, built it for the Franciscans.
I had another comfort, too; for I asked the Englishman if he had seen the Leacht-Con-Mic-Ruis; and he said that he had been hunting for it for a week, but hadn't been able to find it, as none of the people thereabouts seemed to know where it was; and he was astonished when I told him that we had found it, and commented with envy upon the energy of Americans. He asked me where it was, and I told him as nearly as I could; and then he wanted me to come in and have tea, and was for sending up to the hotel for Betty; but I had to decline that invitation. I think he was lonely and glad to find some one to talk to, for he was unusually expansive for an Englishman; and he said he would send his car in to Sligo after us, if we would come out next day; but I told him we were going on to Bundoran.
And then I left him and went back up the hill to the ivy-covered ruin which was really the castle of Tiernan O'Rourke. It stands on the edge of the hill overlooking the valley—the same valley which lay smiling before him that evening he came back from hispilgrimage to Lough Derg; and up there was the battlement from which no light burned. It was battered down in the sixteenth century, in some obscure fight, and all that is left of the castle now is the shell of its walls.
I am afraid Tom Moore, as well as O'Connell, journeyman tailor, has invested the story with a glamour which did not belong to it; for Tiernan O'Rourke was a one-eyed bandit who had sacked the abbey of Clonard a few years before, and who certainly had need of pilgrimages to shrive him from his sins; and Dervorgilla, so far from being a "young false one," was forty-two years old; and MacMurrough took care to carry off, not only the lady's person, but all her movable property, and most of her husband's, as well.
The clouds were gathering in the west as we set out from Dromahair, and presently the rain began to slant down, slowly and softly at first, and then in a regular torrent. I do not know when I have seen it rain harder; but we were soon fixed for it and didn't mind. Dromahair is about twelve miles from Sligo, and they are hilly miles, so we knew that we had at least three hours of this wet work ahead of us; but the people working in the fields or plodding along the road paid no attention to the rain, so why should we? In fact, most of them, though without any sort of protection, seemed to be quite unconscious that it was raining at all.
And then, just when the rain was hardest, I saw to the left a circle of stones crowning a little hill, and I knew it was a cashel. A cashel, as I have explainedalready, is a fort made of stones, just as a rath is a fort made of earth, both being in the form of a circle; and I knew I could get pictures of raths without much difficulty, but I didn't know when I would see another cashel; so I made the driver stop, and got my camera out of the well, and started off through a field to get a picture of this one, not heeding Betty's anxious inquiry if I had suddenly gone mad.
That field into which I plunged was thigh-deep with dripping grass, and I didn't realise how wet it was until I was well into it, and then there was nothing to do but go on. So I scrambled up the hill and took two pictures, shielding my lens, as well as I could, against the driving rain; and I hadn't any idea that the pictures would be good ones, but they were, and one of them is opposite the next page.
There was no vantage point from which I could take a picture which would show the circular shape of the cashel; but it had been built in a perfect circle about sixty feet in diameter. It was on top of a steep hillock, of which it occupied nearly the whole summit. The walls, pierced only by a single narrow entrance, were about six feet high, and four or five feet thick, and the lower stones were very massive, as the picture shows. They had been roughly dressed and laid without mortar—the ancient Irish knew nothing of mortar, apparently, for all these old stone circles are uncemented; but they had been so nicely fitted that they were still in place after many centuries, though the clambering ivy was doing its best to pull them down.
Right in the middle of the circle was a great stoneslab, flush with the ground. The only use I could imagine for it was as a base for a shrine or altar; but as I went down to the road again, an old man came out of a little house to talk, and he said that some antiquarians from Sligo, who believed the slab covered the entrance to a secret passage, had taken it up and found beneath it, not a passage, but a beautifully fitted pavement; and that the parish priest, investigating on his own account, had dug up some wood ashes, and so decided that this was the place where the fire was built.
A CASHEL NEAR DROMAHAIRA CASHEL NEAR DROMAHAIRST. PATRICK'S HOLY WELL
"But no one knows," my informant rambled on. "Maybe some day some wise man like yourself will be able to tell us what it was for."
I remarked that the man who did so would have to be far wiser than I; but he protested that he knew a wise man when he saw one; and I suspect that there is a blarney stone in some of these ruins, which the general public doesn't know about.
I was sorry it was raining, for there was another cashel on a hill to the right, and a great rath a little farther off, and I should have liked to explore both of them; but really the weather was too bad, so I went back reluctantly to the car, which our jarvey had driven close under a clump of trees for shelter, and we were soon jogging contentedly on again.
The valley which slopes down here to Lough Gill seems very fertile, and the little farms have a more prosperous look than is usual in Ireland. This is partly due to the fact that a number of neat labourers' cottages have been built to replace the usual tumbledown hovels, and still more are going up.
This erection of labourers' cottages, which is going on to-day all over Ireland, seems to me almost as important as land purchase. If there is any class of Irish more deserving of pity than another, it is the agricultural labourer. He is worse off than the tenants; he has no land, however poor, to cultivate, except perhaps a tiny patch in front of his door; he has no means of livelihood except the unskilled labour of his hands; if he can manage to earn ten shillings a week he is unusually fortunate. In most cases, his average income throughout the year will be scarcely half that. So naturally the labourers and their families live in the most wretched of all the wretched hovels, in want, discomfort and peril of disease.
It is for the relief of these unfortunate people that the new houses are being built. They are very plain; but they have large windows which can be opened, and stone floors which can be cleaned, and tight slate roofs, and sanitary outbuildings; and each of them has a half acre or so of garden, where vegetables enough to support the family can be raised during the summer; and they rent for from two to three shillings a week—just enough to pay interest on the amount invested in the house, with a small sinking fund for upkeep and repairs. The money needed is borrowed from the government by the county council, and the council has control of the houses, decides where they shall be built, what rent shall be asked for them, and exercises a general supervision over the tenants.
The same thing is being done in the towns, where the insanitary dwellings of the poorer artisans are being replaced by comfortable houses, rented at a very lowrate. Nearly a hundred thousand of these cottages have been built within the past ten years, replacing as many insanitary shacks, which, for the most part, have been torn down. The shacks were much more picturesque, but nobody regrets them. And the severely utilitarian aspect of the new dwellings will no doubt soon be masked with vines and climbing roses.
It was such cottages as this, then, that gave the valley sloping down to Lough Gill an unusually prosperous appearance, and many more were in course of erection throughout the neighbourhood. We padded past them, along the road above the lake, between beautiful hedgerows, gay with climbing roses; and then we turned away through a luxuriant wood, where the bracken was almost waist-high and the trees were draped with moss and ferns, just as we had seen them along the southern coast. And then we passed through a gate and jolted down a very rough and narrow lane; and finally our driver stopped at the edge of a wood, and pointed to a path running away under the trees.
"'Tis the path to St. Patrick's holy well," he said; and we clambered down, and made our way under the trees and up the hillside, and there before us was the well.
It is a lively spring, which bubbles up from the ground in considerable volume, fills a deep basin, and then sparkles away down into the valley. A wall has been built around it, with an opening on one side, and steps by which one may descend and drink of the magic water. Just above it on the hillside is a shrine, something like the one we had seen at St. Senan's well—reallyan altar, where, I suppose, Mass may be celebrated; and it was crowded with figurines of the Virgin and small crucifixes and rosaries and sacred pictures, and the bushes all about were tied with rags and strings and other tokens which the pilgrims to the shrine had left behind.
This well is a very famous one, and the number of pilgrims who come to it prove how general is the belief in its powers. It is really a belief in the power of prayer, for prayer is always necessary. I tried to get a picture of the well and the shrine above it, but it was very dark under the trees, and there was no place where I could rest my camera for a time exposure; but the photograph oppositepage 408, is better than I had any reason to expect.
We found that the rain had ceased when we came out from under the trees, and we jogged happily back to the highroad and on towards Sligo; and presently far ahead the bay opened out, rimmed by romantic hills, green nearly to the summit, and then culminating in steep escarpments of grey rock; and beneath us in the valley lay the roofs and spires of the town, and we were soon rattling through its streets.
We went back to the hotel to change out of our wet things and get a cup of hot chocolate; and then we took a last stroll about the streets, and stopped to see the church of St. John, said to be older than the abbey, but recently restored and now used by a Church of Ireland congregation. The graveyard about it is full of interesting tombs, and the street it fronts is one of the most romantic in the town. Indeed, the whole townis interesting; its greatest drawback for the visitor being the beggars who infest it, and who are nearly as pertinacious as those at Killarney.
We went back to the hotel, at last, and told the proprietor that we were going to Bundoran by the four o'clock train.
"You will make a great mistake," he protested, "to leave Sligo without going around Lough Gill."
It was then I had my revenge.
"We have been around Lough Gill," I explained sweetly. "That's where we were this morning."
It is no easy task to travel along the west coast of Ireland. The great bays which indent it, running far inland, and the mountain ranges which tower one behind the other, make it impossible to follow anything like a straight line. The only thing to do is to zig-zag around them. Our journey, that afternoon, was a striking example of this. Bundoran lies twenty-two miles north along the coast from Sligo; but to get there by rail, it was necessary to travel ninety-two—forty-eight miles north-eastward to Enniskillen, and then forty-four miles westward to the coast again.
The road to Enniskillen parallels Lough Gill, though it is so hemmed in by hills that we caught no glimpse of the water; and then proceeds across a dreary bog, climbing up and up with a wide valley opening to the south; and then runs into woodland and even orchards—the first, I think, that we had seen in Ireland; and then drops down toward Enniskillen, whose name lives in English history as that of one of the most famous of its regiments. It is said to be a pretty town, nestlingbetween two lakes and entirely water-girt; but we did not stop to see it.
We changed instead to the Bundoran line, which runs along the northern shore of Lough Erne; and we found the train crowded with people, on their way to spend the week-end at that famous resort; at least so we supposed, but when we got to Pettigoe, there was a crowd on the platform, waving flags and shouting, and as the train stopped somebody set off a series of bombs; and most of the passengers piled out of the train to take part in the celebration; and then we saw a man and woman standing rather sheepishly in front of another man, who was evidently delivering an address of welcome. We asked the guard what it was all about, and he said that the citizens of Pettigoe were welcoming home a fellow-townsman who had gone to Australia and won a fortune and also a wife—or perhaps I should put it the other way around—and had come back to Pettigoe to live.
I was half-inclined to get off there myself, in order to visit St. Patrick's Purgatory, a famous place of pilgrimage on an island in Lough Derg, five miles away; but from the map it looked as though it would be possible to drive over from Donegal, which would be much more convenient. I found out afterwards that there is a mountain range between Donegal and Lough Derg, and no direct road over it; so we did not get to visit the island where, so legend says, St. Patrick had a vision of purgatory, and which became so celebrated that pilgrims flocked to it from all over Europe. The time prescribed for the ceremonies is from the first of June to the middle of August, and the island is oftenso crowded with penitents performing the rounds that visitors are not permitted to land.
Our train moved on, after the address of welcome was concluded, and we could see the blue waters of Lough Erne stretching away to the south, while westward the sun was setting in a glory of crimson clouds; and presently the broad estuary of the Erne opened below us, hemmed in with high banks of yellow sand; and then we were at Bundoran—a bathing resort, consisting of a single street of boarding-houses facing the sea; and a little farther on, a great hotel, built on a projecting point of the cliffs. As we paused at its door to look about us, we realised that we had come very far indeed from primitive Connemara, for the first thing which met our eyes was a huge sign:
Beware of Golf Balls!
THE WINING BANKS OF ERNE
Theweather god was certainly good to us in Ireland. The occasional showers and two or three heavy downpours were merely short interludes, and by no means unpleasant ones, in the long succession of sweetly beautiful days which I remember when I run my mind back over those delightful weeks. That day at Bundoran was one of them, soft and fragrant and altogether perfect.
There is nothing Irish about Bundoran except its climate—not, at least, if one stays at the hotel which has been built there by the Great Northern Railroad, and which is one of the most satisfactory hotels I was ever in. And perhaps it would be as well to say a word here about Irish hotels.
The small, friendly inn, which is one of the delights of European travel, does not exist in Ireland; or, if it does, it is so carelessly managed that it is not endurable. Commercial hotels are also apt to be inferior. The only hotels that are sure to be pleasant and satisfactory are the large ones which cater to tourist traffic. In the more important towns, of course, there is never any difficulty in finding a good hotel; in the smaller towns, the only safe rule is to go to the best in the place, and if there is one managed by the railway, that is usually the one to choose.
Some years ago, the Irish railways realised thatthe surest way to encourage tourist traffic in the west and south was to provide attractive hotel accommodations, and they set about doing this with the result that the traveller in Ireland is now well provided for. Such hotels as those at Bundoran, Recess and Parknasilla—and there are many others like them, handsome buildings, splendidly equipped, set in the midst of beautiful surroundings—leave nothing to be desired. Nor are their rates excessive, considering the excellent service they offer, averaging a little over three dollars a day. In the smaller towns, the tariff is considerably less than this, though the service is almost as good. In places where the railroad does not itself own or manage a hotel, it usually sees to it that at least one under private management is kept up to a satisfactory standard. So no one wishing to explore Ireland need hesitate on account of the hotels. They will be found, with a few exceptions, surprisingly good.
THE COAST AT BUNDORANTHE COAST AT BUNDORANTHE HOME OF "COLLEEN BAWN"
The hotel at Bundoran is set close to the edge of the scarred and weather-beaten cliffs, which look right out over the Atlantic toward America. It was along the top of these cliffs that we set out, that Sunday morning, and below us lay the strand where three galleons of the Spanish Armada went to pieces, as they were staggering homewards from the battle in the Channel. From time to time, an effort is made to find these "treasure ships," but, though cannon and anchors and such-like gear have been recovered, no one as yet has found any treasure.
The great waves which roll right in from the Atlantic, and which proved too much for the galleons, have worn the cliffs into the most fantastic shapes; and alittle way above the hotel there is a natural arch, called the Fairy Bridge, some twenty-five feet wide, which the water has cut in the rocks. When the tide comes in, it may be seen boiling and bubbling below the bridge, as in a witch's cauldron. Most beautiful of all is a wide yellow strand, a little farther on, with the rollers breaking far out and sweeping in, in white-topped majesty. We sat for a long time watching them, rolling in in long lines one behind the other; and then we scrambled down to the beach through the bare and shifting dunes. Seen thus from below, the black cliffs are most impressive.
We went on again, at last, over the upland toward a wide-flung camp, where the Fourth Inniskillens were getting their summer practice; and one of the men directed us how to find a cromlech and a cairn, which we knew were there somewhere, but which we were unable to see amid the innumerable ridges. From the cairn, which crowns a little eminence overlooking the Erne estuary, there was supposed to be, so our acquaintance said, an underground passage to the other side of the river, where stands the old castle of the Ffolliotts; but as the estuary is at least a mile wide, I doubt if this ever existed except in the imagination of the country-side. The castle is there, however,—we could see its towers looming above the trees; but there was no way to get to it, that day, for the river lay between. I was determined to see it closer before we left the neighbourhood, because it was from that castle that the fair Colleen Bawn eloped with Willy Reilly.
Farther down the stream, a two-masted schooner lay wrecked beside a sand-bank, and across from ussome soldiers were fishing in tiny boats, while a company was going through some manœuvres on the shore, so far away they looked like a company of ants deploying this way and that. For a long time we watched them; then we bade our companion good-bye, and went slowly back through the bracken, where Betty picked a great bouquet of primroses and violets and blue-bells; and we stumbled upon another ancient burial-place; and stopped at the ruins of an old church; and got back finally to the hotel to find the golf-links full of industrious players.
Betty got into talk with the owner of a shaggy English sheep-dog—shaggy clear to its feet, and looking for all the world like Nana, the accomplished nurse of the Darling children; and I went on down to the beach to watch the tide come in. It was swirling threateningly about the black rocks; and out at the farthest point of them I found a man sitting. He invited me to sit down beside him, and we fell into talk. He was a handsome old fellow, a barrister from Dublin, who had come clear across Ireland (which isn't as far as it sounds) to get a breath of sea air. There was no air like the Bundoran air, he said, and two or three days of it did him a world of good. And then we began to talk about Ireland; and I was guilty of the somewhat banal remark that, before Ireland could make any real progress, life there would have to be made attractive enough to keep her young people at home, for she could never hope to get ahead as long as her best blood was drained away from her.
He pooh-poohed the idea.
"The best advice you can give any Irish man or Irishgirl," he said, "is to leave the country the first chance they get; and that will always be good advice, because there will never be anything here for them to do. All this talk about the revival of industry is foolish. You can't revive what's dead; and industry here has been dead for three hundred years. Besides this is an agricultural country, and it will never be anything else; and over wide stretches of it, grazing pays better than tillage will ever do, so grazing there will be. Home Rule will make no difference—how can it? I suppose we're going to get it, and I'll be glad to see it come, if only to stop this ceaseless agitation; but as for its reviving any industries, or increasing wages, or making Ireland a place for ambitious young people to live in—I don't believe it."
"You don't foresee a roseate future, then?"
"Not for Ireland. All these schemes for land purchase and new cottages and pensions and so on may make life here a little more comfortable than it has been; but this country has been in a lethargy for centuries, and it will never be shaken off. The Irish have no ambition; they just live along from day to day without any thought for the future; and they will always be like that. It's their nature."
He would doubtless have said more to the same effect, for he was very much in earnest, but the rising tide drove us in, and I did not see him again.
The picturesque old town of Ballyshannon is only a few miles from Bundoran, and we took train for it next morning, after a last stroll along the cliffs and a look at the "rock-pool," a treasure-house of fossils andmarine growths of every kind. First of all, we wanted to see the Colleen Bawn castle, so we got a car at the station, and set out.
Ballyshannon, after the fashion of Irish towns, is built on the side of a hill, and no horse unaccustomed to mountaineering could have got up the street which leads from the river; but our horse had been reared in the town, so he managed to scramble up; and then we turned to the left and followed along the river to the falls—a dashing mass of spray, where the whole body of water which rushes down from Lough Erne sweeps roaring over a cliff some thirty feet high. Two or three miles along country roads brought us to a gate; and here our driver, looking a little anxious, had a short conference with a woman who lived in a neat labourer's cottage near by; and finally he opened the gate and drove through.
Half a mile along this lane brought us to another gate; and there our driver stopped, and showed us the castle just ahead, and said that was all the farther he could go, and that we would have to walk the rest of the way. There was a certain constraint in his manner which I did not understand till afterwards.
We went on through the gate, and across what had once been the demesne, but had been swept bare of trees, and was now divided between a meadow and a stable-yard, and in a few minutes we stood before the castle which was the scene of a romance very dear to Irish hearts. It is not really a castle, but merely a tall and ugly house, with three bays and a low terrace in front, and it is not very old, since it dates only from 1739, when it was built as the home of the Ffolliotts,a powerful English family into whose hands this whole neighbourhood had fallen. The Ffolliotts, of course, were Protestants, and Willy Reilly was a Catholic; but Helen Ffolliott was so ill-advised as to fall in love with him, and one night packed up her jewels and eloped. A hue and cry was raised after them, and they were soon captured, and Reilly was thrown into Sligo jail, and it looked for a while as though he might be "stretched," for all this happened about 1745, when the penal laws against Catholics were most severe. But the fair Helen came to the rescue, and swore at the trial that she had been the leader in the affair, not Reilly, and so he escaped with a sentence of banishment. What happened thereafter history does not state; but Will Carleton, who wove a poor romance about the affair, manages to reunite the lovers in the end.
It is not to be wondered at that Reilly became a popular hero. Here was a young and handsome Catholic, who, in the most daring way, had captured the heart of a great Protestant heiress, the daughter of a persecutor of Catholics, and, in addition, a girl so lovely that she was the toast of the whole country-side. The ballad which celebrated the affair had an immense vogue. It is a real ballad, rough and halting, but rudely eloquent. You remember how it starts:
"Oh! rise up, Willy Reilly, and come alongst with me,I mean for to go with you and leave this countrie,To leave my father's dwelling, his houses and fine lands;"And away goes Willy Reilly and his dear Colleen Bawn.
In the ballad, the family is called Folliard, whichis the way the name is still pronounced in the neighbourhood; but the old mansion is now occupied by a tenant. And pretty soon we understood our jarvey's uneasiness, for first a man came to the front door and looked at us, and then went quickly in again; and then an old woman opened the side door, and glared at us, and when we asked if we might have a glimpse of the interior, slammed the door in our faces. I must give her credit, however, for restraining a particularly savage-looking dog eager to be at us. But it was evident we weren't wanted there, for even the turkey gobbler resented our visit, and strutted fiercely about us, trying to scare us out. So we went back to the car, and our jarvey breathed a sigh of relief when he saw us.
"Sure, I didn't know whether you'd come back alive or not," he said. "The master is away from home the day, and the woman that does work for him wouldn't be above settin' the dog on you. But it's all right, glory be to God," and he climbed up to his box and drove us back to Ballyshannon.
We left our luggage at the station of the Donegal narrow-gauge railway, and then walked down into the town. We found it a quaint place, with the friendliest of people; and we were fortunate in discovering a clean inn on the main street, where we had the nicest of lunches, after which we set off to see the abbey.
The road to the abbey lies through a deep, romantic dell, at the bottom of which we found a grain mill working, its great wheel turned by the brook which rushes through the glen; and a little farther on were four or five other mills, all fallen to decay, their wheelsmere skeletons, and their machinery red with rust. Just beyond, a little higher up the hill, stands all that is left of the abbey, a few shattered fragments of the old walls. Yet the abbey was, in its day, a great foundation, patronised by the mighty Prince of Tyrconnell, and taking its name of Assaroe from the falls in the river—Eas Aedha Ruaidh, the Waterfall of Red Hugh, who was High King of Erin about three centuries before Christ, and who was swept over the falls and drowned while trying to cross the ford above them. A boy who played about the ruins described them, when he grew to manhood, in a musical stanza:
Grey, grey is Abbey Assaroe, by Ballyshanny town,It has neither door nor window, the walls are broken down;The carven stones lie scattered in briars and nettle-bed;The only feet are those that come at burial of the dead.A little rocky rivulet runs murmuring to the tide,Singing a song of ancient days, in sorrow, not in pride;The bore-tree and the lightsome ash across the portal grow,And heaven itself is now the roof of Abbey Assaroe.
We had heard certain legends of underground passages, which could still be explored, and we asked an old man who was cutting grass in the graveyard if he knew anything about them, and he said that he did not. We remarked that it was a hard task cutting the grass around the gravestones; and he said it was so, and would not be worth doing but that the grass was given to him for the cutting; but the guardians were unreasonable men who wanted it cut long before it was ready—it ought really to stand a week longer, now, but them ones would not wait!
We went back past the mill, and met a man in flour-besprinkledclothes, who bade us good-day and stopped to talk; and it proved to be the miller. He invited us in to see the mill, which was grinding Russian corn, very red and hard, into yellow meal which was used for feeding cattle. We tried to tell him something of the delights of corn-bread and griddle-cakes, but he was plainly sceptical.
He was an Ulster man, and had been running the mill for three years, but he said it was a hard struggle to make both ends meet. If it was not that his power cost him nothing, he would have had to give it up long ago. Power apart, I could imagine no poorer place for a mill, for it was at least two miles from the railway, and the road into the hollow was so steep that it must be a terrific struggle to get a loaded wagon into or out of it. There had been a number of mills in the neighbourhood at one time, but they had all given up the struggle long ago, except one flour mill, which had somehow managed to survive.
We told him that we had seen the ruins of some of them as we went to the abbey.
"Have you been to the abbey?" he asked. "Did you see the underground passages?"
"Are there really some?"
"Come along, and I'll show you."
We protested that we didn't want him to leave his work, but he said the mill could take care of itself for awhile; and we started off together up the hill, through a gate to the right, and then knee-deep through the grass to the brook which ran at the bottom of the ravine, under the walls of the monastery. And there, sure enough, was the mouth of a passage cut in the solidrock of the bank. It was about six feet high by three wide, and ran in about a hundred feet, for all the world like the entrance to a mine. How much farther it extended I don't know, for an iron gate had been put across it to keep out explorers; but there can be no doubt that, at one time, it connected with the abbey itself, and formed a secret means of ingress and egress, which was no doubt often very convenient.
And then our guide showed us something else, which was far more interesting. In the penal days, Catholic priests were forbidden to celebrate Mass under the severest penalties; but nevertheless they managed to hold a service now and then in some out of the way place, carefully concealed, with sentries posted all about to guard against surprise. A short distance down stream from the entrance to the secret passage was a shallow cave in the cliff, so overhung with ivy that it could scarcely be seen, and here, many times, the Catholics of the neighbourhood had gathered at word that a priest would celebrate Mass. On the heights all about lookouts would be placed, and then the men and women would kneel before the mouth of the little cave and take part in the sacrament.
At the back of the cave, the shelf of rock which served as the altar still remains, and at one side of it is a rude piscina—a basin hollowed in the rock, with a small hole in the bottom to drain it; and it was here the vessels used in the celebration of the Mass were washed, after the service was over. I wanted mightily to get a picture of this cave, but it had started to shower, and though I got under the umbrella and made an exposure, the picture was a failure.
We bade our guide good-bye, with many thanks for his kindness, and went slowly back along the highroad toward Ballyshannon; and presently from a tiny cottage beside the road two old women issued and greeted us with great cordiality. They were clean and neatly dressed, and the younger one, who did most of the talking, seemed to be quite unusually interested in our private history and solicitous for our welfare, and the blarney with which her tongue plastered us was the most finished I have ever listened to. We thanked her for her good wishes, and were about to go on, much pleased at this new demonstration of Irish cordiality, when we had a rude awakening.
"Ah, your honour," she said, "would you not be giving me something for my poor sister here? You see she is all twisted with rheumatism, and can scarcely walk, and the medicine do be costing so much that she often must go without it. Just a small coin, God bless ye."
I didn't want to give her anything, for I suspected that she made a practice of waylaying passers-by and begging from them; and then I looked at the older woman, who was standing by with her hands crossed before her, and I saw how the fingers were twisted and withered and how the face was drawn with pain—so I compromised by dropping sixpence into the outstretched hand.
"If your honour would only be makin' it eightpence now," the woman said quickly; "we can get three bottles of castor-oil for eightpence—"
But the other woman stopped her.
"No, no," she protested; "take shame to yourself for askin' the kind gentleman for more. We thank your honour, and God bless ye, and may He bring ye safe home."
And the other woman joined in the blessings too, and they continued to bless us, considerably to our embarrassment, until we were out of ear-shot.
Betty had had enough of Ballyshannon; besides, the showers were coming with increasing force and frequency; so she elected to go back to the railway station and rest, while I wandered about for a last look at the town. And now, I suppose, I shall have to say a word about its history.
All this country to the north of Lough Erne is Tyrone—Tir Owen, the Province of Owen—and was once a great principality, which stretched eastward clear to the shore of the Channel about Belfast. Northwest of it, answering roughly to the present county of Donegal, was Tyrconnell—Tir Connell, the Province of Connell; and Connell and Owen were brothers, sons of Nial of the Nine Hostages, who was King of Ireland from 379 to 405, and whose eight sons cut Ireland up between them into the principalities which were, in time, by their own internecine warfare, to make Ireland incapable of defending herself against the invader. Saint Patrick, about 450, found Connell in his castle on Lough Erne and baptised him; and then he journeyed north to Owen's great fortress, which we shall see before long on a hill overlooking Lough Swilly, and baptised him.
Five centuries later, when Brian Boru had broughtall Ireland to acknowledge his kingship, he decreed that every family should take a surname from some distinguished ancestor, and so began the era of the O's and the Macs. The two great clans of Tyrone and Tyrconnell chose the names of O'Neill and O'Donnell, and the river Erne was the frontier of the O'Donnell domain. There was a ford here at Ballyshannon, and so, of course, a castle to guard it, and many were the herds of lifted cattle which the O'Donnells, sallying south into Sligo, drove back before them into Donegal. Cattle was the principal form of property in those old days—about the only kind, at least, that could be stolen—and so it was always cattle that the raiders went after.
The English brought a great force against the place in 1597, and for three days besieged the castle and tried unavailingly to carry it by assault; and then the O'Donnell clans poured down from the hills, and the English, seeing themselves trapped, tried to cross the river at the ford just above the falls; and the strongest managed to get across, but the women and the wounded and the weak were swept away.
There is no trace remaining of the castle, but just below the graceful bridge of stone which crosses the river is the ford over which the English poured that day, and an ugly ford it is, for the water runs deep and strong, quickening at its lower edge into the rapids above the falls. From the centre of this bridge, some twenty-five years ago, the ashes of one of Ireland's truest poets were scattered on the swift, smooth-running water and carried down to the sea, and a tablet marks the spot:
WILLIAM ALLINGHAMA Native of This TownBorn 1824; died 1889.
Here once he roved, a happy boy,Along the winding banks of Erne,And now, please God, with finer joy,A fairer world his eyes discern.
It is certainly a halting quatrain, quite unworthy the immortality of marble. A couplet from Allingham's own poem in praise of his birthplace would have been far more fitting; but I suppose that the lines on the tablet were composed by some local dignitary, and that nobody dared tell him how bad they were. I know of no more graceful tribute to any town than Allingham paid to Ballyshannon in his "Winding Banks of Erne." The first stanza gives a savour of its quality: