Part 2

Striking in, then, behind Kilbreedy Mountain, which sunders upper Lough Mask from the main water, you soon come out on the shore of the lake, and I wish you the luck to see two as pretty girls as met me just where the counties join at the little Owenbrin river. A few miles of tolerable road will bring you to the prosperous-looking little village of Tourmakeady, where is a hotel. Here is fishing to be had for pike and for big trout, and here much that is pleasant and profitable can be studied. At the Franciscan monastery, a civil-spoken stranger will always find a welcome, and, at least while Brother Leo is still living, one of the best of talkers to instruct him in the history of all that countryside. These monks have largely helped on the work of the Congested Districts Board in teaching improved methods of farming, and the like: they have been what monastic centres were often in old days. Close by is another factor in the modern development of Ireland, the Connaught college for study of the Irish language, here where it is living on the lips of young and old. In summer you shall find from eighty to a hundred students working there, with classes held largely in the open air: but all centring about a farmhouse converted to these unforeseen uses. Most of the students will be school teachers, desirous to advance themselves in a subject for which there is a swiftly growing demand; but you will almost to a certainty find a sprinkling there who have come, it may be, from France, from Hungary, from the Western States of America, from heaven knows where, to pursue this long-neglected but now eagerly followed branch of learning. And you may hear, and perhaps see, how with the study pleasant festivities interweave themselves of an evening, dances, jigs, reels, hornpipes, and the rest--or simply the _céilidhe_, a gathering for talk and story-telling round the fire.

From Tourmakeady, I would have you proceed by boat, crossing the lake to Ballinrobe, and seeing on your way _Caisleán na Caillidhe_, Hag's Castle, a very early example of the fortifications which Irish chiefs began to build when they had learnt from the Normans how much stronger were stone walls than earthen ramparts. Yet here the stone wall is on the model of an earthen dun, built circular, and of no great height--an enclosure for defence rather than a dwelling place--doubly defended too, for it stands on an island near to the Ballinrobe shore.

As you drive from Ballinrobe to Cong, you shall see on your left a huge cairn of stones crowning a low height. This is an outlying monument of that famous battle of Moytura, fought, it is said, between the legendary Tuatha de Danann, warrior demigods, against those older inhabitants of Ireland, Firbolgs, men of the leathern wallet. Who fought that fight, when they fought it, is obscure, but fought it was, and the cairns rise thick over the battlefield, a couple of miles behind Cong. All this lore was studied out and set down by the notable father of a still more celebrated son. Oscar Wilde must have spent no small part of his boyhood at Moytura House where his father, Sir William Wilde, passed what holidays a great surgeon could secure, and where he wrote his _Antiquities of Lough Corrib_.

There is another legendary battlefield in Sligo called the northern Moytura, which tradition identifies with the site of a second and final battle in which the De Danann defeated the men of the wallet, and it is marked by the same profusion of cairns and stone circles--which, it must be allowed, can be constructed with less labour in the west of Ireland than elsewhere, because the whole surface of the ground is covered with the material for them. Yet assuredly some great event must be marked by monuments so laborious: though I find their associations a trifle too shadowy for interest.

The great cairn on the road to Ballinrobe is said to be that of King Eochy, the Firbolg leader, who was slain on the last day of the fight. But near it stands a modern landmark of undisputable authenticity. Lough Mask House was in the early 'eighties the residence of Captain Boycott, against whom was first organized the "boycott" which proved to be the peasantry's most effective weapon in the revolution which has been in progress for the past thirty years. All this countryside is peaceable enough nowadays, but there was wild work there before compulsory rent fixing, followed by voluntary purchase, began to settle the land war.

In Cong itself is a wealth of things to be seen: first of all, the demesne, planted by one of the Guinness family, who showed his fine understanding of trees in the disposal of that varied wooding: and leave can be had also to visit the gardens whose owner, Lady Ardilaun, is famous among Irish lovers of flowers. But apart from this, there is the strange river which past Cong flows crystal clear over a limestone bed, and about half a mile off issues from its underground journey out of Lough Mask in a strange cavern called the Pigeon Hole. Near by is costly and deplorable evidence of the queer tendency to fissure in this limestone formation: for sometime in the last century a canal was dug laboriously to connect Mask and Corrib, and so open traffic by boat and barge to Tourmakeady and Ballinrobe from the sea. But when the long digging and hewing was finished, they let the water in, and it promptly leaked away through a hundred clefts and crannies--making, no doubt, wonderful and mysterious noises. All through East Galway (for west of Corrib the stone is mostly granite) there are rivers that appear and disappear in this strange fashion, running now overground, now under; and where the stream sinks out of sight can often be heard queer rhythmic throbbings and beatings, in which the sound of a fairy mill is easily detected; and about these popular imagination quickly builds legends, telling how in old days corn would be laid there and in the morning its owner would come back to find it ready ground, till at last some covetous man failed to leave the unseen miller his due portion, and so no more corn was miraculously ground for deceitful mortals.

These are the marvels of nature. But by the river of Cong, which divides Mayo from Galway, stands one of the most beautiful ruins in the west--all that is left of what was once St. Fechin's monastery. But St. Fechin belongs to the old days of the seventh century, long before any builder in these islands had the skill to construct that graceful cloister. The abbey which we know is pre-Norman, an Augustinian foundation, and it has a special interest, for to its repose came Rory O'Connor, last of the native kings to claim sovereignty over all Ireland. Already he had been sorely driven and harried by the Norman invaders, before he retired here in 1183 to spend yet fifteen years more of his life. It was doubtless he who made it into the gem of the western dioceses; and in all the changes and chances of the centuries there still was an abbot of Cong till a date hardly outside living memory. In Cong, too, was treasured--or rather was heedlessly kept--the most famous of all the jewels which descend from the ancient craftsmanship of Ireland. The cross of Cong, a reliquary, made to be borne in procession, enclosing a fragment of the true cross, stands two feet and a half in height and is covered with gold tracery of the most incredible complexity and fineness. What the artist could do with his fine pointed brush in the Book of Kells, this artificer could almost rival in his twisting of the delicate wire. The thing is priceless and was bought (in a transaction of doubtful morality) for the Royal Irish Academy through Wilde's agency. But in truth the National Museum in Kildare Street where it reposes is the proper place for it: though one cannot but feel sympathy for the zealous young priest who made his way from Cong to Dublin, boldly smashed the case and rushed into the street with the reliquary, prepared at all hazards to bring it back to the home which it had known for seven centuries.

A stone now set up in the street at Cong commemorates in a Gaelic inscription two Abbots of Cong, Nicol and Gillibard O'Duffy, and I hope that one of them may be the O'Duffy to whose order the cross was made--not in Cong, but in the other abbey of Roscommon, by the cunning craftsman whose name is inscribed on its arms: MAELISU MACBRADDAIN O-H-ECHAN.

An inscription of even greater interest can be seen in a setting of the most fascinating beauty. Sail or row across from Cong (you can fish as you go, and I caught a trout seventeen pounds weight on my first venture in that water--why should not you be as lucky?) to Inchagoill Island, and you will see one of the oldest churches in Ireland, called _Teampul Phadraig_--Patrick's Church. Its walls are of stone, very roughly put together; its doorway of the oldest type--two sides sloping towards the top, which is covered by a huge lintel slab. All this can be matched elsewhere, but the special interest is a stone graven in the oldest Celtic characters with these letters: LIE LUGNEEDON MACC LMENVEH: that is, The slab of Lugneedon, son of Lemenueh. Now Lugneedon was Patrick's nephew and his pilot; and this inscription may be contemporary--or may have been erected less early than the sixth century, but yet so early that the tradition was still alive of him who had died there. For the island's full name is _Inis an Ghoill Chraoibthigh_, the island of the Devout Stranger, and certainly keeps a memory of someone who, coming from far away, identified himself with it either by his life or by his death.

It is set in the most beautiful portion of the lake, midway from Cong to Oughterard, and you can see thence Benlevi steep over the isthmus of Cong, and Leckavrea with its grey, slaty cliff frowning over the upper end of Corrib between Oughterard and Maam.

In this sheet of water, which (by a sudden winding between cliffy wooded sides where the lake narrows at Doon) is so shut off as to seem a lake by itself, stands not far from the western end, _Caislean na Circe_, Hen's Castle. And popular imagination, stimulated by the name, has invented the story of a miraculous hen which was guaranteed to lay enough eggs to keep the garrison alive; but they tired of eggs, killed the bird, and so came by disaster. The truth, however, I believe to be that this castle, which was built for Rory O'Connor by one of the great De Burgos who made their way to Connaught, fell later into the de Burgos' (or Burkes') possession; and the Hen who gave her name to it was Grace O'Malley, Granuaile; for she proved herself the better bird when her second husband, the Burke who then owned it, was in danger of being forced to submit, till the doughty warrioress relieved him.

All these things you can see from Cong by easy pleasant excursions, to be combined if you so choose with fishing in waters where trout if caught are worth the catching; and when you have had your fill of Cong, the steamer will take you to Galway, down that long narrow lake with rick-shaped Benlevi steep above Cong and Leckavrea making a cliff on the southwest. To the east all is flat plain, the long level tract of limestone which stretches out to the Shannon, and which on this side of Tuam is for the most part stone and nothing else. Only one height rises on that hand--your left as you travel to Galway; it is the conical hill of Knockmagh, the greatest mount of fairies in all Ireland; crowned with a cairn, of course--Carn Ceasair--under which sleeps, they say, Ceasair, chieftainess of the first invasion that came to Ireland, just forty days before the Flood. There are lesser cairns on its sides, in which recent exploration has discovered funeral cists, flag covered, holding in them bones and even an urn of "bodkin-pencilled" clay.

Anyone who cares to see what is not in the common run of tourist visitation should make his way from Cong to Tuam, by Headford, where is the splendid ruin of Ross Errilly, a famous monastery of the Franciscans, standing almost intact, though unroofed, and stripped of its ornamentation by the Cromwellian soldiers. The friars clung to this abode till 1753, though six several times expelled, returning under the protection of Lord Clanricarde; since in those days Clanricarde, head of the Burkes in Connaught, was a name of shelter for the native Irish, among whom his de Burgo stock had been so long and so fully naturalized. The famous rallying song of 1848, "The West Awake", tells how "Glory guards Clanricarde's grave", and in truth, with scarcely an exception, not a Clanricarde of them all but was loved by the people. And if the name that was once so kindly, bears a very different sound to-day, Connaught has its own way of accounting for the change.

It is worth climbing Knockmagh to see across that spreading plain, crossed and chequered with the stone walls which endear Galway to all who like big jumping in the foxhunt: for the mountains of Connemara show westward but Croaghpatrick and Nephin away north. Under Knockmagh beside the road is the church of Donagh Patrick, marking the western point of St. Patrick's missionary journey here. But his favourite disciple Benen, or Benignus, had a monastery near Tuam at Kilbannon, where stands the stump of a round tower, and pushed his journeyings even to Aran where monuments bear his name.

Tuam itself is well worth a visit for things old and things new--or shall I say the survival of the remote and the recent past. Its long street of thatched houses, its marketplace crowded with Irish-speaking men and women all in characteristic western dress, make it more typically Irish than any town in Connaught except only Galway--and Galway is a thing apart. The modern cathedral, too, is of interest for the sake of sculptured heads wrought by a local craftsman who was a kind of Cruickshank in stone--preserving in his craft a glorious tradition of the place. For the great sculptured arch which can be seen in the ancient cathedral, restored more than a quarter of a century ago for Protestant worship, is the finest example of native Irish decorative architecture, before Continental influences came in. It is the Romanesque half-circle, with six concentric orders of arches included in the great span. The red sandstone of which it is wrought lent itself freely to carving, and the unknown and unnamed workers bestowed a wealth of detail upon it, blending, after the Celtic fashion, shapes of man, bird, and beast, into the interlaced scroll of the design.

The rest of the building must have been worthy of this glorious centre: but, in years of desolation, plunder was made of carved stones for common building work, and the tall cross which stands now, imperfectly put together, in the marketplace, was rescued by sections from various houses and buildings. Eight stones went to complete it and only five are there: it is a pity that their places are not filled in with uncarved slabs, for the proportion of the monument is destroyed.

If you drive or motor from Tuam to Galway it is easy to visit another famous ruin, the Abbey Knockmoy erected for the Cistercians by Cathal O'Conor of the Red Hand, as a thankoffering for his victory over the first Norman party of invaders whom, with their leader, Almeric St. Laurence, he destroyed near the abbey's site. There is a trace of frescoes discernible on the chancel walls; and it is easy enough to see how the original and most beautiful twelfth-century building was, so to say, cut down and curtailed for a reduced community of monks who may have been there in some interval between persecution and persecution.

In the graveyard here you can see what is common in all Connaught up to the present day--tombstones carved with the insignia of the dead man's trade, the carpenter's plane and saw, the smith's hammer, and so forth.

Apart from this the road is over flat land, little raised above the level of Lough Corrib, till you near Galway, when it rises over low hills of limestone rock, in springtime blue with gentian, at all times singular enough with their flooring of stone. At the last rise you reach a view point, looking west from which the city comes suddenly into sight with its bay beyond, and beyond the bay the hills of Burren. It tells something of what Galway was that the name of this spot is _Bois le h-eadan_, "Hand to Brow", for here it was supposed that you would stop and shade your eyes to consider the glory that lay before you.

Little enough glory is there to-day; but the city keeps a picturesqueness at this distance, couching there at the outflow of the vast sheet of water which is comprised in Corrib and Mask; and that blue expanse of bay reaching up into the level land--brown rather than green, since bog and stone and scrub cover most of it--has a beauty all its own; and southward the eye follows with delight the open gap between the hills of Burren by the western sea, and that other line, Slieve Echtge, which divides the plain of Gort from the Shannon. Here was the boundary and pass between Connaught and Munster, the country of the O'Kellys, Hy Many; and no place in Ireland was so often fought over. As you go south from Athenry to Ennis, the whole landscape is studded with old castles and peel-towers, set for the most part in pairs, every one watching his neighbour, like players lined up at football.

Galway town, once you have entered it, is depressing beyond words, but also more picturesque than any town in Ireland. A hundred years ago it was the greatest port of the country, in its own way a rival to Bristol and Liverpool. Those were the days of small towns, and Galway numbered forty thousand people. To-day the population is barely fourteen thousand--but it is not the drop in numbers that signifies most. Go about the streets and you will find tall, solid buildings of black stone built very high, for the town was walled and space was scarce in it. Some of these were dwelling-houses, and over their doorways are the great scutcheons carved in stone belonging to this or that one of the thirteen "tribes"--Blakes, Lynches, Bodkins, Brownes, Skerrets, Kirwans, Morrises, Ffrenches, Martins, and the rest--names which to-day sound Irish of the Irish, yet which in truth belonged to English settlers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries who established here a flourishing merchant community. In those early days the great trade was with Spain; for a glance at the map will show how short a run it is from the west of Ireland to that other western outpost of Europe--a run which can be made either way with the prevailing westerly wind. "Spanish Parade" keeps its memorial of that traffic, but more clearly is it preserved by a famous story. In the wall which surrounds the old Church of St. Nicholas is a stone engraven with skull and crossbones, and a recent inscription commemorating the austere virtue of James Lynch Fitzstephen, Mayor of Galway in 1493. The Mayor was a merchant in close commerce with Spain, and on one of his journeys he brought back with him a young Spaniard, son of his host and friend. But at home in Galway, quarrel broke out (it is said, over a lady) between Lynch's own son and his guest, and the Galway man stabbed the Spaniard. For his offence he was arraigned, and his father passed sentence of death; but a compassionate horror seized the townspeople, and none would execute the sentence. So, that justice might be done, the laws of hospitality asserted--and perhaps, too, lest there should be a break in the friendly relations with Spain--Lynch Fitzstephen hanged his son with his own hand.

In the church, a fine building of the fourteenth century, are many monuments of the "tribes"--but of more interest are the mansions: chief of them the "Lynch House", standing in the main street and richly decorated with stone mouldings. Nearer the port are huge buildings of more recent date, grain-stores erected in the early eighteenth century when a tremendous export trade to England ran from this port. All of them, or all but all, mansions and stores alike, have fallen on evil days, and you shall see the decorated scutcheon over the entrance to some rookery of wretched tenements.

The port is hardly less depressing. Admirable as a shelter in the days of small vessels, it is unfit for these days when even coasting traffic comes in ships of three thousand tons. It is true they have a dock hollowed out of rock and holding eighteen foot of water; but the Board of Works (a department of Dublin Castle) which executed the work at a cost of forty thousand pounds omitted to notice that there was only twelve foot of water at the entrance: and the accommodation is thought as useful as a second storey with no stair to it. Nearly all the shipping consists in fishing boats: many trawlers, but most numerous of all, the little hookers worked by the fishermen who live across the river in the very odd community called the Claddagh. These people till recently had a "king" of their own (just as happens on the small islands of the coast) and they lived their own life, and indeed still live it, almost wholly distinct from the regular townsfolk. Their thatched cottages scattered in a huddled group without streets or plan of any kind make a curious feature of the place; but it is a curiosity rather than a charm.

In the main street of the town lives a jeweller who manufactures still the Claddagh ring which these folk and the Aran people use for marriage or betrothal: joined hands surmounted by a crowned heart make an emblem which needs no posy to expound it. You can get in Galway also another local object which is worth having, the woman's strong cloak of red or blue flannel with hood to shelter the head in the stormiest of weather.

Perhaps one of the most interesting sights in the place--at least to the angler--is to be seen from the bridge which spans the main river below the broad weir which holds up water for the sluices and mill powers. Here is a long, swift shallow which in summer becomes crowded with salmon to a degree almost incredible; the fish lie under you there, some twenty feet from your eyes, their sides touching as the dark backs sway in the water, so that at the first glimpse one seems to look into a mass of weed. Anglers can be seen fishing there close together, and many hundreds of fish are killed yearly from the bank. It was here that one enthusiast achieved a fisherman's euthanasia, for he dropped dead suddenly in the very act of playing a fish. The papers gave long accounts of the sad event, recalling the dead man's achievements and qualities as sportsman and citizen; then added a final paragraph--

"Our readers will be glad to learn that the rod which Mr. ---- dropped was immediately taken up by our esteemed townsman Mr. ---- who found the fish still on, and after ten minutes' play, succeeded in landing it--a fine clean-run salmon of fifteen pounds."

What more was needed for epitaph? The soul of "Mr. ----" had departed under the most satisfactory auspices.