Part 3

But supposing that at Kilmacanoge you do what forty thousand other people will have done that year before you, and hold straight on between the Sugar-loaves, the road, curving gradually eastward and seaward, brings you into the Glen of the Downs, another noble defile, wooded to the very crest with scrubby timber, so close as to be almost impassable--lovely as the loveliest in its way. Yet somehow the little gazebo of an octagonal summerhouse set high up on the north side in Bellevue grounds stamps the scene. It is nature, but nature decked and laid out and caressed and petted by man. A little farther and the road brings you into Delgany, at the foot of the sloping Bellevue grounds, a village prettier even than Enniskerry. And in truth Bellevue was a splendid type of what I have in mind: place and grounds created in the eighteenth century by a cultivated Dublin merchant of Huguenot stock; a house where Grattan was a frequent guest; which till the other day showed in gathered perfection all the domestic art of that great period, with its Sheraton and Chippendale sideboards, its marvellous plaster cornices and ceilings, its inlaid marble mantelpieces, and, for a final glory, its bedstead painted by Angelica Kaufmann. The grounds were planned to match--in the same delicate graceful taste, a little mannered, but always admirable. It had a lovely nature to work upon, and that same taste has made the seaward fringe of these nearest Wicklow Hills into the very garden of Ireland. That is the beauty nearest to the capital. And if the feeling of trimness wearies you, all you have to do is leave the road and strike out where you will across the heather. To their great honour, the liberality of all landowners in this playground of Dublin leaves the casual passer-by free to wander almost as unrestrained as he might be in Achill or on Slieve League.

For the country which lies beyond Dublin's immediate playground there is this to be said. Even the railway going to it is delightful. I know of no prettier line than the Dublin, Wicklow, and Wexford, and if its trains are something sluggish, why, you have the more time to admire the view. Beyond Greystones you pass through a long marsh, full of wild fowl, and then come to Wicklow, a pleasant little town sheltered by its low head. There is an old Norman keep here, Black Castle, but much more remarkable is the work of modern builders. Wicklow Head is adorned with three lighthouses--one carrying a light. The first tower was built by a wise and thoughtful Government, and the lamp duly fixed with ceremony. But when it came to be lit, seamen reported that while from certain quarters it was admirably visible, the Head itself blocked it from half the horizon. Nothing daunted, Government ordered another tower to be built on a spot indicated in their offices, and built it was. This illumined the previously excluded section of sea, but was shut out from the area lighted by the first tower. Finally, as a counsel of despair, they sent down someone to look at the ground, and the third tower, which now carries the light, was duly erected. The other two remain as monuments of the persistence with which the English Government has sought to do things right in Ireland.

From Wicklow you strike into a new type of country. Rathnew brings you close to the Devil's Glen, another Dargle, but one with less urbanity and more rusticity. At Rathdrum you strike the valley of the Avonmore, which is the centre of all this beauty that makes southern Wicklow famous. The line runs through a wooded ravine with the river below it, plunging and swirling, and beyond the river you catch a glimpse of Avondale House, now a school of forestry, but once known to every Irishman as the home of Charles Stuart Parnell. The water comes down here discoloured with mineral washings that remind one of the chemical investigations which made up the pleasure of Parnell's strange life. He dreamed of gold mines in Wicklow--it was only in politics that the stern practical bent of his mind made itself apparent and effectual.

A little farther on the Avonbeg meets the Avonmore; farther yet, beyond Woodenbridge and its hotel, this main stream is joined by the Aughrim River, and controversy still rages as to which of the two confluences was honoured in Moore's melody:

"There is not, in the wide world, a valley so sweet As that vale in whose bosom the wild waters meet!"

Moore himself very diplomatically said he was not sure; but at any rate the valley through which the train runs till it reaches Arklow at the river's outfall is Moore's "Sweet Vale of Avoca"; there is no mistake about that, and no question of its gentle loveliness. Arklow itself is an ancient town, whose name keeps, like Wicklow, a memory of Danish beacon fires--"low" or "lue" is the word for flame (still preserved in lowland Scotch). Its population keep the hardy seagoing tradition--Ireland has no better fishermen; but they are incommoded by an odd circumstance. At this point of the coast there is practically no rise and fall of tide, and many a useful harbour is useful only because it can be reached with the flood, which never comes to Arklow.

Here first one meets a landmark of the great "ninety-eight" rising. The Wexford insurgents received at Arklow the decisive check which curbed their very wonderful successes. The rebellion spread no farther north, though, after the rout of Vinegar Hill, stray parties of fugitives maintained themselves for long enough in the mountains where the meeting waters have their rise.

To reach this wider and more open region--far less beautiful, yet having for some eyes an even greater charm--you should follow up the valley of the Aughrim River. A train will take you to Aughrim town, then comes a road, passing at first between slopes of cultivated and well-planted land. But as you go on, the valley widens and spreads, the woods recede, and before you are the great brown flanks of Lugnaquilla, highest of all the Wicklow Mountains--higher indeed than many a hill in Donegal or Kerry whose bolder shape gives a far more imposing appearance.

Here at last, far up on the moors, you strike the military road near its southernmost point; and planted on it, facing down the glen, is a queer, gaunt, half-ruined building, evidently a barrack. A barrack it was; but in more recent times it fell to Parnell, who rented these moors, and he used it as a shooting-lodge--furnished in the roughest way, with a few bedsteads and chairs. There is a kind of legend about the haughty, unbending chief, who treated all his followers with the scantest courtesy. Very different is the impression I have got from those who were privileged to walk the hills after birds with him and to camp in that bare but friendly shelter. To-day, indeed, its grimness is somewhat mitigated; but, as you may readily discover, the old barrack has not lost its associations with the nationalism of to-day.

From Aughavanagh the military road will carry you north across the hill, till beyond it you reach the valley of the Avonbeg and Drumgoff Bridge. Here is the foot of Glen Malure--boldest and wildest of all these glens--which divides Lugnaquilla from Lugduff. This valley, commanding the pass westward into the plains at Dunlavin, was always the central stronghold of the O'Byrnes, the great Irish clan who held out stubbornly among the hills. Lord Grey de Wilton, Elizabeth's deputy, tried to drive them out in 1580, but his force was cut to pieces by the mountaineers, and a few years later they had a sure asylum to offer to Red Hugh O'Donnell, when he escaped from Dublin Castle and the captivity into which he had been foully kidnapped.

But the spot in all this region which offers most attraction to travellers is Glendalough, site of the Seven Churches, a place of most venerable memories. Kevin, to whom it owes its fame, was born A.D. 498, sixty-six years after Patrick first preached in Ireland. His name, _Caomh-ghen_, means the _Gentle-born_, and he was son of the King of Leinster. The whole of this princely family became passionately religious, for two brothers and two sisters of Kevin were canonized, and their names are in the Calendar.

Kevin was sent for nurture to a Cornish holy man, St. Petroc, who had come to spread the light in Wicklow, but the young Prince finished his studies under the guidance of his own uncle, Eoghan or Eugenius, who had a monastic school somewhere in the beautiful parish of Glenealy on the sunny south-eastern slope of these hills.

He was a handsome lad, and his looks so distracted a beautiful girl that she tried to seduce him from his vocation. Modern tradition tells that she followed him into his cave in the cliff above the upper lake, and that he flung her out into the water. The Life of him relates a different version, according to which he threw her into a bed of nettles and whipped her with them over her face and arms till, as the pious author says, the fire without subdued the fire within, and his discipline determined her to follow his example and enter the monastic life.

However that be, Kevin fled from the society of men--and women--to take up his abode in the lovely but peaceful spot for ever associated with his name: "a valley closed in by lofty and precipitous mountains beside a lake". "On the northern shore", says the Life, "his dwelling was in a hollow tree: but on the southern shore of the lake, he dwelt in a very narrow cave, to which there was no access except by a boat, for a perpendicular rock of immense height overhangs it from above."

This is an overstatement: any active man can get into the Bed from above; but even from below (where Mr. Williams shows the boat lying in his picture) it needs some climbing. Within is only room for a man to sit or lie--not to stand. But Kevin's dwelling on the north shore was leafy and bird-haunted, and the wild creatures, it is said, used to come and light on his shoulder, and sing their sweetest songs to God's solitary.

At last his fame went aboard, and folk flocked to his sanctuary and begged him to found a monastery. He submitted unwillingly, and let them build him (still on the slope of the same mountain, Lugduff) a beehive cell of stones, or "skellig": and near it they built an oratory, _Tempul-na-Skellig_, on a rock projecting into the lake--now wrecked, for, as Archbishop Healy writes in his _Ancient Schools and Scholars_, "fifty years of tourists in the mountain valley have caused more ruin to these venerable monuments than centuries of civil war".

But there was no room on this cliffy shore, and Kevin was admonished in a vision to build in the open space by the outfall of the lower lake. "If it were God's will," said Kevin, "I would rather remain until my death here where I have laboured." "But," said the angel, "if you dwell where I bid you, many blessed souls will have their resurrection there and go with you to the heavenly kingdom." So Kevin consented to move; and he built the monastery on which all those churches and towers sprang up that can be seen or traced to-day. Yet in this city he did not depart from his austerities, but slept on the bare ground and lived on herbs and water.

The foundation of the monastery may date from about 540. Kevin lived on, they say, till 620, and died surrounded by his disciples, a man of God and a peacemaker, among the best beloved of Ireland's saints.

All that great congeries of ruins dating from pre-Norman times speaks of a very large community. They are typical. There is the round tower, _cloigtheach_, a belfry, place of retreat into which the pious monks used to retire, drawing up the ladder after them; there is the big church with high-pitched roof of stone, and its galaxy of lesser chapels, just as in Ciaran's city at Clonmacnoise. About these doubtless were numberless huts of wattle and clay, dwellings of the clergy and the students. For here was the real metropolitan see of Irish Leinster. Dublin was a Danish foundation, and for centuries the primacy was disputed between them, till the dispute was ended by calling the provincial see the Archbishopric of Dublin and Glendalough--joint dioceses with separate organization to this day.

For archæological and historic interest no place in Wicklow can approach this "glen of the two lakes", _Gleann Dá Loch_. But for romance, I at least should put Glen Malure far before it; and, for beauty, would infinitely prefer the lovely cup of Lough Tay or Luggilaw, where it nestles under the western slopes of Douse. This, and Lough Dan as well, you can see by a slight detour on your way to Dublin; and if you have come by Bray, it is best to take the military road back to Dublin, which brings you through Sallygap by the headwaters of the Liffey, and past the other beautiful little lake of Lough Bray at the sources of the Glencree River. So, keeping high among the hills till you have passed Killakee and begin the descent into Rathfarnham, you will complete almost the whole of your journey amid the haunts of shepherd folk such as those among whom Synge lived, and from whom first he got his vivid vision of Irish peasant life--a vision coloured no doubt by long residence in far-off Aran, and told in words that keep an echo of the Gaelic tongue, yet always, as most of our visions must be, in its essence the vision of that particular countryside where he was born and bred.

V

The very antithesis of Wicklow, with its mountains, its small plunging rivers, and its breed of little light-footed sheep, is the plain country of Meath, watered by the deep stream of the Boyne, and grazed over by the finest and biggest cattle. No other place in Ireland is so rich in monuments of all the ages; nor is there anything in Ireland better worth seeing than the valley of the Boyne itself, from Navan to the sea.

If I had time and a motor car, I should begin by driving to Trim, and stopping just short of it at Laracor, to see where Swift lived in the early days of his growing fame. At Trim you will find an amazing cluster of beautiful ruins, but notably "King John's Castle", as fine a specimen of the Norman keep as can be seen. It was founded in 1173 by Hugh de Lacy, so no Norman building can be much older in Ireland. Its history is full of romance--Richard II held Henry of Lancaster prisoner there for a while--and many deeds of note were done in the old place. But there is not space to deal with Trim, nor with the beautiful ruins of Bective Abbey, which you can arrange to see on the way to what no traveller should leave unseen--the Hill of Tara.

Tara of to-day is only a field or two of rich grass, covered with the trace of ancient earthworks--most curious of them the Banqueting Hall of King Cormac, a long narrow parallelogram--250 yards in length by 15 wide--with the fourteen openings of its doors still traceable, as they are shown in two plans preserved in very ancient Irish manuscripts. But for the detail of these monuments you must consult the plan in Mr. Cooke's admirable "Murray"; for some general account of the history of Tara I may refer to my own _Fair Hills of Ireland_. Here I single out only one thread in that vast fabric of associations.

Looking north-east from Tara you will see easily (any child can point it out) another somewhat higher rise of ground, seven or eight miles distant--the Hill of Slane. That is where, on Easter Eve in the year 433, Patrick lighted the Paschal fire which gave menace and warning to the High King and his druids, keeping their state on Tara. It was a bold challenge, for a great druidic festival was in preparation, and no man in Meath was permitted to light a flame till Tara itself should give the beacon signal; and the night of that challenge is a marking-point in the history of Ireland--even in the history of the world.

For in that period of the fifth century, all Europe, as we know it to-day, was included within Rome's Empire, save for two exceptions--the outlying retreats of Scandinavia and of Ireland. Christianity was the religion of the Empire, the religion of civilization, and there is little doubt but that before Patrick's coming Christianity had got some footing in the south-eastern parts of Ireland, which were in closest commerce with Great Britain.

Patrick, by birth a Briton (almost certainly of Wales), was a Roman born in the same sense as St. Paul; his father was an official of the Empire; and from his father's house he was carried into captivity by these outer barbarians of Ireland. In his captivity he found his mission, escaped, with the fixed design to prepare himself for it, and spent thirty years on that preparation before, in 432, he came back to make captivity captive. He touched at a port in south-eastern Ireland--probably Wicklow--but stood on with his vessel, coasting past Dublin Bay till he landed again for water and provisions at the little island of Skerries, which since then is called Inishpatrick. Still north he sailed, up to Strangford Lough, where, landing, he made his first convert, the chief Dichu, and founded his first church--Down Patrick--where many years later he returned to die. Here for a time he sojourned. Before he turned south there was an errand he had to do, to bring his message to the valley of the Braid, in Antrim, where he had been a captive, herding swine on the slopes of Slemish. But at last, in the spring of 433, he set his face to the very core and centre of his purpose--the evangelization of Ireland at the fountain head of pagan civilization and pagan power. For the success of Patrick's mission lay in this. He addressed himself to the chiefs, he bearded the pagan in his strong places: he won those who carried others with them. That was the method he had learnt in more than a generation of labour, spent seeking knowledge throughout Europe "in the college of the Lateran at Rome, at Cecina on the Tuscan Sea, at Auxerre in Gaul", jealously profiting by his right as a citizen of the Empire, before the Empire should crumble, and knowledge and religion perish with it, under the redoubled assaults of barbarism. No man will despise the Hill of Slane who realizes what lay behind the kindling of Patrick's watchfire. I quote a passage from a great Irish writer, who had the gift of seeing things in their relations--the late Sir William Butler. It is from his last volume _The Light of the West_:

"The Easter Eve, 433, is falling dark and cold upon the realm of Ireland--dark and cold because to-morrow is sacred to the idols--and it has long been ruled in Druids' law that on the night preceding the great fast of Tamhair no fire is to burn on hearth or hill--no light is to gleam from palace or hovel until the flame of the sacred pile, kindled by the king on the green 'rath' at Tara, shall be seen burning over the plains of Meath. So the twilight comes down, the light lessens in the west, and the wide landscape is wrapt in deep and solemn gloom, as though it had been a land in which man's presence was unknown. While yet the sun was high in heaven, the missionary had quitted his boat in the estuary of the River Boyne, and had passed on foot along the river valley towards the interior of Meath. Evening found the little band encamped upon a grassy ridge on the north side of the Boyne, and overlooking the winding channel of that river. To the south, some miles away, the hill of Tara was in sight. The March evening fell chilly upon the pilgrims; but the hillside yielded store of furze-faggot and oak-branch, and soon a camp fire blazed upon the ridge, casting around a wide circle of light into the momentarily deepening sea of darkness. What memories of far-off nights on the Antrim hills come to the pilgrim over the mists of thirty years, as here he stands in the firelight, on Irish soil again! How much has passed since last the furze-faggot warmed his lonely shepherd's bivouac! How much has yet to be in all yon grim surrounding gloom ere his task shall be accomplished! Never in all the ages of the world has the might of savage man been more manifest on earth. Already the Vandal king is in Carthage; the Visigoths are seated at Toulouse; Attila has reached the Rhine, having ridden his charger over the ashes of the Eastern Empire.

"And here, in the light of the solitary fire, stands an unarmed, defenceless man, who, even now, keeps this Easter Eve as a vigil of battle against the powers of Pagan darkness, throned over yonder in all the might of armed multitudes.

"The darkness deepens over the scene; the March winds smite the faggot flame, and around the lonely bivouac the breezes come filled with the vast sadness of the night. Feeble to outward sense must seem the chances of the coming struggle. But the inner sense of the Great Missionary may this night be looking upon a different vision. Beyond the bleak ridge and circle of firelight--out beyond void of darkness, perchance those deep-sunk eyes are beholding glimpses of future glory to the Light he has come to spread; and it may be that his ear, catching in the echoes of the night wind the accents of ages yet to be, is hearing wondrous melodies of sound rolling through the starlight.

"... Yes, there was light far away in the West--out in the great ocean--far down below the sunset's farthest verge--from westmost hilltop, the New World lay waiting for the light. It came--borne by the hands of Ireland's starving children. The old man tottered with the precious burthen from the fever-stricken ship; the young child carried the light in feeble hands to the shore; the strong man bore it to the Western prairies, and into the cañons of snowy sierras; the maiden brought it into the homestead to be a future dower to her husband and a legacy to her children; and lo! ere famine's night had passed from Ireland, the Church of Patrick arose o'er all that vast new world of America, from where the great St. Lawrence pours its crystal tide into the daybreak of the Atlantic, to where California flings wide her 'golden gate' to the sunsets of the Pacific. Nearly 1400 years have gone since, on the 17th of March, 493, Patrick passed from earth to Heaven. Empires have flourished and gone down, whole peoples have passed away, new faiths have arisen, new languages have sprung up, new worlds have been born to man; but those fourteen centuries have only fed the fire of that faith which he taught the men of Erin, and have spread into a wider horizon the light he kindled. And if there be in the great life beyond the grave a morning trumpet-note to sound the réveillé of the army of the dead, glorious indeed must be the muster answering from the tombs of fourteen centuries to the summons of the Apostle of the Gaels.

"Nor scarce less glorious can be his triumph when the edge of sunrise, rolling around this living earth, reveals on all the ocean isles and distant continents, the myriad scattered children of the Apostle, whose voices answering that sunrise rollcall re-echo in endless accents along the vaults of heaven."

That is no untrue vision. Rome went down in blood and dust, and in the centuries that followed, if the lamp of learning was not wholly quenched, it was because Patrick had kindled, in this remote island beyond the bounds of Empire, "the Light of the West"; if Christianity did not perish in the weltering chaos, it was very largely due to the fruit of the seed which Patrick sowed.