Part 3

Whoever is at Galway and does not shrink from a three hours' sail should really make the voyage to Aran: a little steamer in these bustling times plies in and out twice or thrice weekly. In the sail down the bay you have the long low shore of Connemara on your right with the Twelve Pins rising in superbly grouped mass behind it: on your left, the steep shore of Burren, its rocks shining in the sun, and as you open out, the cliffs of Moher dark and frowning away south of you. Between you and America lie the islands--three of them, Inishmore, Inishmaan, and Inishere--stretching a vast breakwater against gales from the west and sou'west. Inishmore, the Big Island, lies nearest, and when you are landed at Kilronan, the adjacent fields and hill slopes are not much stonier than Connemara. But on Inishmaan you land direct on to a formation of vast, flat flagstones, stepped upwards tier by tier, and you walk as if on pavement, though a pavement filled with deep chinks and crevices in which grow quantities of maidenhair fern. You have easy walking, perhaps, for ten yards together, then a kind of a leap. Here, still, most of the people wear not boots but pampooties--moccasins of raw hide: and men and women alike have the free forward rising gait of those who walk as nature designed man to walk, springing off the ball of the toe. Nearly all are in homespun homewoven cloth, grey or dyed with indigo and madder: the women wear grey shawls, the men frequently a tam-o'-shanter, but oftener the black corded _caubeen_ which is the most picturesque of headgear. Inishmaan is the place to see Aran in its most characteristic aspect and community, hardly touched by the modern world--though many a man and woman there knows well the great cities of eastern America. I heard of a man who made his journey across every autumn: he had been gardener to a rich American, and the millionaire would let no other prune his grapes but this handy islander. So back and forward he went, year by year, on this errand, returning always to his own cabin, his shelter under the thatch which strong lashings held in place against the storm.

But the extraordinary interest of these islands lies in the abundance of prehistoric forts and of very early Christian buildings. The greatest of the forts is Dun Conor on Inishmaan, with walls of dry masonry eighteen feet in thickness; but by far the most famous is Dun Angus on Inishmore which, built on the edge of a steep cliff, needed no protection that way, but turned landward a semicircular front of four vast ring fences of stone--the innermost eighteen feet in height. Between the second and third walls is a chevaux de frise formed by sharp, jagged stones set endwise, very difficult to pass over in times of peace. We have it under Dr. Healy's own hand that an archbishop broke his shins there. This fort might have seemed defence enough for the island, but it is studded over with duns--one of them, Dun Eochail, is only half an hour's walk from the pier, and being set high was once utilized for a lighthouse station. To reach it gives one some idea of the island economy, for half a dozen high-piled walls of loose stone have to be crossed or knocked down. There are no gates in these fields; to let in a cow you "knock" the wall, and then pile it again. But you will not easily knock the walls of Dun Eochaill. The outer ring is only some eight foot high and six wide, but the inner circle rises sixteen foot, and may be twelve in thickness. Who built these fortresses, no man can say; probably that early race whom the Milesians superseded. Yet the population of Aran is by no means the little dark type; many fair-haired women, many a red-headed man are among them, and not a few of almost giant stature. It is not surprising, since for many centuries the O'Briens of Clare were overlords of the islands, and the Clan Dalcais were Milesian, if any ever could claim that title.

Generally speaking, too, Aran is more in touch with Clare than with Connemara; though it serves as an intermediate centre for the traffic in poteen--illicit whisky--distilled in creeks and bogs along Galway Bay. Aran brings its turf from Connemara and carries them limestone in exchange. Stand on Dun Eochaill, the most commanding point, and you may see the two shores, Clare and Connemara, so near, yet so different in their peoples, and you shall have one of the noblest views in Ireland: southward, away past Loophead and the Shannon mouth to the great mountain promontory of Brandon in Kerry; northward, past the Twelve Pins to Mweelrea and Croaghpatrick and Achill even. Or if, as happened when I saw it last, the view is obscured with driving mist, still you may have a glint of sun between showers to fling a rainbow across the wide water; and you may watch a squall of wind and rain pass flickering over the sound, raising a patch of whitening foam where its fierce edge strikes the surface.

It is likely that the nearness of warrior tribes in Clare may account for the number and the strength of these stone fortresses; the island folk, Firbolgs or whoever they were, would not have so ensconced themselves without grim necessity for the labour. Yet all this is conjectural. What lies well within the bounds of historic knowledge is the Christian history of Aran--_Ara na naomh_, Aran of the Saints, not rashly so entitled.

Enda, the first founder of the famous monastic settlement, was a king's son when St. Patrick came to Ireland. His father ruled the kingdom of Oriel, the southern tract of Ulster, reaching across Cavan and Monaghan. Enda's sister took the veil from the hands of Patrick, and she it was, according to legend, who turned her brother from his career as a prince and a warrior. He underwent long training in Louth and over the seas in Britain before he returned to Oriel; but there he found no peace. He wanted solitude, and he begged the islands of Aran from the King of Munster. And, if tradition be accurate, he made his way to them miraculously wafted on a great boat-shaped stone which lies till this day on the shore at Killeany, _Cill Eadna_, Enda's Church.

The fame of his settlement spread rapidly, for the missionary period was now being succeeded by an enthusiasm for the contemplative life; and all the great saints of the sixth century came to Aran and were his disciples. St. Brendan the Navigator came there, already prospecting his journey to the unknown land of the west; Columbkille, prince of Tirconnell, the apostle of Scotland, came thither, subduing his proud and fierce temper; and there, too, was nurtured Ciaran, the founder of Clonmacnoise, best loved of Irish saints. All these men were not only centres of piety, but lamps and torches of learning in a dark age: only scholars can estimate what it meant to civilization that this home of studious thought should be maintained outside the weltering chaos of Rome's disruption when sheer barbarism threatened to engulf the world.

There are many ancient churches on Aran: seven or eight, says Archbishop Healy, in the single town-land of Killeany, and one called after Saint Benen is virtually intact and may date from the sixth century. But the most interesting of all, _Teglach Eadna_, St. Enda's oratory, is a mere ruin: though outside of it pious islanders can show you the _leac_, or flagstone, under which the saint lies buried. In such places tradition passes from father to son unbroken, with a fidelity that has often been verified; and there is much reputable evidence which I would less readily believe.

At all events there is enough and to spare of interest in Aran for a week's visit or a month's; and if you spend that time there, it is odds but you shall run up against some scholar, German, Dane, or Frenchman, of European repute in Celtic scholarship, who has come here to study the ancient language and tradition where they are best preserved. Incidentally you may follow out the history of a great experiment in paternal legislation, the Congested Districts Board's successful attempt to develop a well-equipped fishing industry among these islanders, who had neither seaworthy boats nor nets of any considerable dimensions, nor when they caught it, any means of marketing their fish. All this is changed and much more with it: there are no more famines in Aran: and even in Aran an industrious and courageous man may gather a little prosperity about him without leaving the island of the saints and the way of life in which he was brought up.

II

That part of Mayo which adjoins Joyce country and Connemara is most easily reached by the coast road from Clifden by Leenane; and the drive from Leenane to Westport is famous. You pass through the defile of the Bundorragha river flowing into the north of Killary Bay--a mountain pass with Mweelrea gigantic on your left; and beyond that, farther along the same route, Croaghpatrick divides you from the sea, while inland is Nephin, the great cone that rises above Lough Conn.

All this very wild district was the territory of the O'Malleys, just as Connemara was of the O'Flahertys, but the O'Malleys have left a greater name in history--and a stronger stock, for to-day they have overflowed into the country of the other clan and dominate Connemara and Joyce country alike. But they have departed from their old tradition which linked them to the sea: and the most famous of all these western sea-rovers was a woman, Grace O'Malley, Granuaile, whose name has become one of the titles by which the spirit of nationalist Ireland is known in song. "Poor old Granuaile" is another appellation of the Shan van Vocht. This ruler of men and warrioress was a contemporary of Elizabeth's, and no mean opponent of Gloriana's power in the west. She married, diplomatically, first an O'Flaherty by whom she spread her influence over the shores of Galway as well as of Mayo, and what was more to her purpose, got control of his galleys as well as hers, and with them raided so far, that she carried over Lord Howth's heir from the strong castle a bare ten miles from Dublin. O'Flaherty dying, she bestowed her hand on a man of Norman stock, one of the Burkes, the MacWilliam, and through him got her own adherents posted in a string of castles--which purpose accomplished, so they say, she declared the union at an end. All the castles along the Mayo shore are associated with her name; but the place of her resting is in the little old church with vaulted roof (and still a trace of colour in the stonework) on Clare Island--most important of the long line which fringes that dangerous coast, from Inishboffin northwards. Aran belongs to a different grouping, its amazing formation links it to Burren, and it was, in truth, always owned by the O'Briens, lords of Thomond, the heart of which was Clare. But this string of petty island communities lies nearer the coast, is less separate from it--and yet, after all, very distinct. Land on Inishturk or Inishark, and the headman of the island will receive you with majestic courtesy--and he is still in some cases called the "king". But if you go there to collect rates for the county, I cannot promise you so kind a hospitality: there is unending though intermittent war, the islanders affirming (not unreasonably) that it is no business of theirs to pay for maintaining roads and bridges on the mainland.

Clare Island is somewhat unlike the rest, its people having always depended on agriculture rather than on fishing; and it is one of the best examples of the Congested Districts Board's beneficent work in purchasing the whole, reselling to the tenants, re-allotting farms, dividing off commonage, and providing materials and instruction for the islanders to put up decent dwellings for themselves. In earlier days rents were collected there at huge cost by the aid of posses of police; now instalments of purchase come in regularly and smoothly, and people who have begun to prosper a little by their holdings see no reason why they should not add to prosperity by taking their share of the sea's harvest. Herrings have come back to those waters, and it is no longer as it was when a spokesman of the people declared that "the shoals came and there was no one to catch them, and so the fish went away"--slighted, it would seem.

But Clare Island belongs to the outer fringe of the isles which lie across the entrance to Clew Bay, whose waters are sprinkled with little points and fields of sod-covered rock in a labyrinth past counting. Some affirm that the view from Westport over this blue water so bespeckled with green is the finest thing in all Ireland--and Croaghpatrick rising over against the little town is certainly a mountain worthy of all its associations.

Here takes place annually one of the most impressive ceremonies to be witnessed at home or abroad--the saying of mass at the summit to which St. Patrick, they say, pushed his western journey, and looking out over the Atlantic blessed all that he beheld. Ruder legend, with its touch of grotesque, tells that from this steep height he drove out into the deep all venomous things that had haunted unchristian Ireland, tumbling toads and snakes by his white wizardry into the ocean depths.

Be that as it may, there are no snakes in Ireland, and St. Patrick's name is great there still--fitly celebrated when the archbishop of the West and of the isles climbs that long steep path, and there in the face of heaven celebrates the mysteries which link times old and times new, before a multitude which extends far away from him down the hill slope--for there are always laggards whose attendance at that strange mass finds them kneeling half a mile away.

Westport town has, what is rare in western Ireland, the look of being cared for: trees planted in a Mall by the little river make a pleasant feature, due to the fact that Lord Sligo's demesne adjoins the town, and that the lords territorial have here always been resident and always capable and executive persons. Wooded slopes, planted with an eye to beauty as well as to shelter, tell the same story and enrich the landscape, which is best seen from a low hill above the parsonage. But Westport town and its neighbourhood have been so often and so well described by the sharp-pointed pen which "George A. Birmingham" handles that one need only recall those witty volumes. I cannot pretend to place the island where "J. J.", the resourceful and philosophic curate, went to discover Spanish gold; but nearly any of them all would do.

A little farther along the coast on the way towards Achill is Newport, on a salmon river of some repute, which flows from the most enchanting lake to which my fishing ever took me. I reached Lough Beltra by a long ride from the other direction, and found it away in the hills with Nephin high over the eastern end, and Croaghpatrick filling the south-western outlook. The fishing was nothing to brag of, and I ate most of the few small sea trout that I caught in the kitchen at the keeper's cottage--but how good they were, grilled fresh out of the water, with mealy potatoes and butter, and an egg or two, and a dash of whisky in the tumbler of fresh milk. I should have liked to stay a week or a month in that neat, wholesome, comfortable cottage--where the only serious trouble was that pike had somehow got into this mountainy water, where no such brutes should be.

Mallaranny farther along the coast is the place where most people go to see Clew Bay, for the railway has put a good hotel there; but the real attraction of this coast is the amazing island of Achill, to which the railway has now been carried; or rather, to the bridge across the narrow sound which divides Achill from the mainland, and under which such a tide sweeps as can be seen hardly anywhere else.

Achill is virtually all one mountain which has its highest points, Slievemore and Croghaun, on the outer seaward rim and they drop almost sheer into the sea. Slieve League itself in Donegal cannot vie with the wonder of those cliffs; and the little bays of Kim and Keel on the southward, with their curve of pure sand, have a kind of daintiness of beauty most bewitching in that grim landscape. From Dugort on the north shore there is boating to be had, which in fine weather may bring you into seal-haunted caves, under cliffs where the wild goats scramble in herds; and you may see readily enough strange creatures of the deep, sunfish, huge basking sharks, with every seabird that frequents these islands. Once it was my luck to effect a landing on a flat island rock some ten miles out, called the Bills of Achill, where I suppose not once in three years man sets his foot. It was the breeding season and the birds hardly moved to let us pass: puffins sat in the quaintest droves, three or four hundred together, staring at us with parrot eyes barely out of arm's reach. I looked over a ledge of rock and saw below me a guillemot on her eggs, so near that I could touch her--and as she fluttered off, realized why these birds have an egg so big at one end that it cannot roll except round in a circle--for they are laid by two and three on a bare shelf of rock where the bird has hardly room to cover them. Only the great black-backed gulls forsook the island and their nests, soaring high into the air in hundreds where we landed, and leaving their big, ugly eggs and their big, ungainly young ones sprawling all over the turf. They are great robbers of other people's nests, worse than hawks on a grouse moor: but they provide securely for their own young, building only here and in one or two other places equally inaccessible.

But for all that it may offer of wildness, of grandeur, and of interest, Achill has no charm for me. Poverty is a show there: in the village of Keel can still be seen beehive-shaped wigwams rather than houses; and it always seems as if the elements there had been too strong for man and left him huddled and cowering on the earth. Famine, or at least continuous underfeeding through generations, has helped that work. Yet the Achill folk set out hardily year by year in companies, men in their troops, girls in theirs, to field labour in different parts of Great Britain. It is thus that the population of some thousands supports itself on that barren promontory--pitifully enough, heaven knows. No doubt the sea is at their doors rich in fish; but the sea that runs off Achill Head is a very different antagonist from what men wrestle with in the English Channel.

Yet Achill has been just big enough to encourage its people with a barren hope of finding a living on the land. It is the real islanders who reap the harvest: and now a strange new source of prosperity has come to one of these communities. Just north of Achill Head, outside the long peninsula of Belmullet which encloses Blacksod Bay, lie the two islands of Inishkee, and on the south island some few years ago a Norwegian company established a whaling station of the new type.

The Gulf Stream sweeps along here within a few miles of the coast, and whales, it seems, spend their lives strolling peaceably along its course, following always one direction. They stroll less peaceably nowadays, for from these islands steamers push out and harry them with new-fangled harpoons fired from a gun and headed with a bomb as well as the barb. The result is that whereas old-time whalers could only kill the "right" whale which is fat and leisurely, and stays long on the surface, your modern captain makes prey of everything, manoeuvring his steamer so as to get on to the whale's line, and fire the harpoon into him when he rises porpoise fashion for one swift tumble. In this way they kill--not without difficulty and danger--the lean, swift monsters, eighty or ninety feet in length, rorquals, and the rest, which can drag even the steamers about after them; and, having killed, they couple up the whale beside the steamer, as you may see a barge beside a tug-boat on the Thames, and run back to their station where the huge fish is dragged on shore, cut up, separated into its constituents of blubber, bone, and entrails--but every particle of it converted into some kind of use; what is not oil is desiccated and makes feeding cake, and what is not feeding cake makes manure. All this boiling down has two effects--one a prodigious stench which, some say, makes houses uninhabitable on the mainland six miles off; the second, a vast deal of employment for the islanders--of one island only. Work on the whaling station is jealously guarded for southern Inishkee; woe betide the man even of the northern island who should try to get a share of it. As for the folk of the mainland, Inishkee employs them (at a very modest wage) to attend to its potato patches and oat fields in the summer, while the privileged folk are at a special wage on the whaler's work. So far as I can learn, protection has never been more rigorously employed than by this energetic community.

From the point of the Mullet to Erris Head, and across Broadhaven to Benwee Head and Portacloy, runs the wildest country and the most inaccessible in these islands. I have reached it only from the sea, and never anywhere in Ireland have I seen people so far removed from civilization as rowed out in their curraghs to meet us. Yet--so odd a place is Ireland--it is ten chances to one but in the loneliest of these creeks and mountains you would find folk who knew the great cities of America, and who if they landed in Boston or New York would find friends and kindred in plenty to greet them and help them to a living. Life is not so difficult here as it was formerly: for nowadays the trade in lobster fishing becomes very profitable on this unexploited coast, with its profusion of kelp-covered rocks and islands, and they have learnt in late years to take their toll of the salmon droves that pass this headland, making for Galway or the Shannon. What they have to sell, what they win at risk of life in the tremendous sea that runs among their rocks, they can sell now at a fair price. There is talk, too, of carrying a railway along the Mullet, in the hope of making Blacksod a haven for transatlantic commerce, and when that happens, the country will be gradually changed, as I have seen in my lifetime similar regions changed in Donegal; but till that day, whoever wants to see Ireland as Ireland has been any time for three or thirteen centuries (altered only by the introduction of three things, tea, paraffin oil, and American flour) can see it only in the northern parts of the Barony of Erris. It is no place to go for comfort; but "for to admire and for to see" it is well worth while.