Part 1

THE IRISH PENNY JOURNAL.

NUMBER 8. SATURDAY, AUGUST 22, 1840. VOLUME I.

The bold and nearly insulated promontory called the Hill of Howth, which forms the north-eastern terminus of the Bay of Dublin, would in itself supply abundant materials for a topographical volume--and a most interesting work it might be made. For the geologist, botanist, and naturalist, it has an abundant store of attractions, while its various ancient monuments of every class and age, from the regal fortress, the sepulchral cairn, and the cromleac of Pagan times, to the early Christian oratory, the abbey and the baronial hall of later years, would supply an equally ample stock of materials for the antiquary and the historian. With all, or most of these features, we propose to make our readers somewhat familiar in our future numbers; but our present purpose is only to give some account of one of its most recently erected structures--the singularly picturesque and beautiful lighthouse, which we have attempted to depict in our prefixed illustration.

The Baily lighthouse, as it is popularly called, is situated at the eastern extremity of Howth, on a nearly perpendicular rock, whose vertex is elevated one hundred and ten feet above high-water mark. This rock, which is nearly insulated, is the terminus of a long and narrow peninsula of still higher altitude, which stretches out into the sea from the eastern end of the promontory, and whose cliffs are equally precipitous on both sides, so that the most striking and romantic views of the lighthouse can be had from various points, in some commanding the horizon-bound sea, and in others the Bay of Dublin, with all its delightful sceneries of wooded country and mountain ranges. The view which we have chosen for our illustration is taken from the northern side of this peninsula, that presented from the other side having been already published in several popular works; but we trust that this view will not be deemed less striking or picturesque; and we are of opinion that a more romantic subject of its kind is not to be found in the empire.

The lighthouse is itself an object of great interest and beauty, and is constructed according to the most approved models of modern times. Its form is that of a frustrated cone, supporting a lantern which exhibits a fixed bright light. The illumination, according to the system now generally adopted by the Trinity-house, is produced by a set of reflectors ground to the parabolic form, in the foci of which twenty large oil lamps are placed: an outer gallery, lightly but securely railed, surrounds the dome. Connected with the building on its east side, there is a large room, which opens by folding doors on a platform, and where an excellent telescope is kept, by means of which the shoals which obstruct the entrance to the bay may be distinctly observed--namely, the great Kish, and the Bennet and Burford banks, which are links of the chain extending along the Wicklow and Wexford coasts, and called the Irish grounds. These, though not visible, are distinctly marked in stormy weather by the surf, which breaks over them with uncommon violence, and form a dangerous obstruction to the approach to the bay.

The Baily lighthouse was erected by the Ballast Board of Dublin in 1814, previous to which time the Howth light, as it was commonly called, stood on a hill considerably more to the north, and at an elevation of more than three hundred feet above sea level. This circumstance of its great elevation, led, however, to its being abandoned, and the erection of the Baily lighthouse in its place, as it was found to be frequently involved in clouds and mist, while lower stations were clear and well defined.

The Baily lighthouse is a spot of no less antiquarian than picturesque interest. Its name, which is cognate with the Latin _ballium_, is derived from an ancient circular stone fortress which encircled the apex of the rock, and of which considerable remains existed previous to the erection of the present buildings. This great keep was fortified by three earthen walls, with deep intervening ditches placed at the entrance to the narrow peninsula, and by extending from one side of it to the other, cut it off completely from the promontory. These works still remain, though in a very ruinous state; yet they are sufficiently distinct to mark their purpose, and to convey a good idea of the style of military defensive works in use in extremely remote times. They will be found marked on the Ordnance map.

In the popular traditions of Howth, these works--like most others in Ireland, the real origin of which has been forgotten--are ascribed to the Danes, a remnant of whom, after the battle of Clontarf in 1014, were supposed to have fortified themselves in this peninsula, till they were carried off in their vessels. But such tradition is wholly opposed to history, and the works themselves exhibit sufficient evidences of its fallacy; they belong to a much earlier age, being nothing less than the remains of Dun-Criomthan (pronounced Dun-Criffan), the fortress of Criomthan Nia-nair, who, according to our ancient histories, ascended the throne of Ireland in the year 74, and who, after being dethroned, died in this fastness in the year 90, after a reign of sixteen years. His sepulchral cairn--crowning the summit of Sliabh-Martin, the highest pinnacle of the ancient Bin-edair--is still to be seen.

A century or two more will wholly obliterate these remains of the once powerful prince and warrior Criomthan; but his celebrity belongs to history, and will not thus pass away. It was in the third year of his reign that Agricola fortified the bounds of the Roman empire in Britain from the incursions of the Picts and Irish, the latter, it is said, led by the monarch Criomthan himself, who, according to our annalist, returned to Ireland, loaded with spoil, as thus stated in the record of his death in the Annals of the Four Masters:--

“Criomthan Nia-nair, sixteen years monarch of Ireland, died, after his illustrious foreign expedition. It was from that expedition he brought home the noble spoils; the golden chariot, the golden chess-board studded with three hundred sparkling gems, and the _ceth-criomthan_, which was a parti-coloured shirt, interwoven with gold. He also brought with him a battle-giving sword, having various figures of serpents engraved upon it, and inlaid with gold; a shield embossed with bright silver; a spear which gave an incurable wound; a sling from which no erring cast could be thrown; two hounds linked together by a chain of silver; together with many other valuable rarities.”

How long after this period Dun-Criomthan existed as a fortress, it would perhaps be impossible now to ascertain, but from the following record in the Annals above quoted, it would appear to have been preserved at least for six centuries:--

“A. C. 646. The battle of Dun-Criomthan was gained by Conall and Kellach (co-monarchs of Ireland), the two sons of Maolcobha, over Aongus, the son of Donall. Aongus was killed in this battle, as was also Cathasach, the son of Donall, his brother.”

These notices, which have not hitherto appeared in an English form, of a highly interesting historical remain, not previously identified by the antiquarian topographer, will, it is hoped, impart a new interest to the Baily of Howth; but, independently of such claims on our attention, its singular picturesqueness should have made it long since not only more familiarly known to the visitors of our capital, but also to ourselves.

P.

JOHNNY HALFACRE; OR, THE VALUE OF TIME.

BY MARTIN DOYLE.

Statesmen and professional men, whether occupying stations of eminence, or struggling to attain them, duly estimate the importance of time; they know the value of an hour too well to mis-spend it. The lawyer of high practice, during the term season, steadily pursuing his laborious studies, and determined to overcome every difficulty in his pursuit of professional rank and wealth, rises early, and borrows from the night so many of those hours which are spent in rest and sleep by men of less mental activity, that he leaves himself but a very contracted measure of time for those essential purposes. As to dining out with friends at this period of care and labour, he rarely ventures to indulge in such a recreation; or if he does on some very particular occasion, such is the discipline of his mind, such the strength of his self-denying habits, that he can rise from the table at a prescribed moment, and with a cool lawyer-like head apply to his nocturnal labours as if there had been no interruption of an exciting nature.

The physician--I do not mean him who is regularly called out of church, or from the social party, by his servant, under the pretence of a pressing call, but the real and laborious practitioner, to whom minutes are money and fame--will not idle away an hour; neither will the sober steady shopkeeper, until he has realized an independence, absent himself from his counter as long as there is a reasonable chance of a customer dropping in; nor the operative mechanic, who has to finish his piece of work within a prescribed time, and who will contrive to do it even in despite of all the petty interruptions to which he is liable.

Time is proportionably valuable to the meanest peasant who possesses a cabbage garden, and if properly estimated and applied, will add to his comforts in a degree of which, he who is habitually uncalculating and unthrifty in this respect can have but little notion.

This I am anxious to impress upon the class of labourers, many of whom I hope can read what I write, for in them I take an especial interest, probably because they are the least cared for of any class in the community. Some of them perhaps will say, with a show of reality, “If _our_ time were to bring us in such profits as the counsellor and the doctor make, we would be busy too, and no one would see us standing idle, sitting on a ditch side, or smoking and coshering by the fireside, or talking to the neighbours, of a wet day, in a forge. If we could be coining guineas as easily as the likes of them makes the money, sitting in their soft chairs, and never doing a hand’s turn of work that would tire their limbs, we would; but what _could_ we make, after our regular day’s work, if we can get that same, out of a bit of a garden, that would better us any thing to signify?”

Now, I shall show them by actual facts what they _could_ in many cases do.

Johnny Halfacre is a little farmer, whom I occasionally see, and who, being in no way connected with me, nor even conscious that I am particularly observing him, goes on in his own way, without any hint or encouragement from me, or indeed from any one else, as far as I can perceive.

Johnny two years ago had not as much land as would correspond with his name, which is really genuine; he had for several previous years but a rood, including the site of his house, and a shed for a pig, and some poultry; but this rood produced more than half an acre usually does with many, and entirely by his good management and judicious application of _time_.

Johnny had exactly five shillings a-week, paid in full every Friday evening, from his employer, for Johnny never had time to be sick, far less to be drunk, and always avoided broken days, by contriving in-door work, at Mr B.’s, in wet weather; his wife, who had two children, washed occasionally for a neighbour’s family, thus adding two shillings and sixpence each week to their income, and the contribution of additional suds to the dunghill; but in other respects they had no advantage over other labourers. Their own little garden added greatly to the support of the family, by judicious cropping and excellent management. Johnny had every year some drills of very early ash-leaved potatoes put down in January, if possible, which he either sold at a very high price in summer at a neighbouring town, or consumed as he found most economical; and his early sowing of potatoes was far better than the more common practice of the Irish cottier, who leaves his garden uncropped with them until March or April, with the view of obtaining a more abundant crop (but of inferior quality) at a late season, when they might be purchased at a mere trifle, and that, too, without the advantage of a second crop of any description to succeed them. Johnny had too much sense for this: he began to dig his dish of potatoes for dinner in the first or second week in July, when his neighbours were half starving, or paying exorbitantly for oatmeal and old potatoes; and as he dug out his crop, he either sowed turnips, with a little ashes and a sprinkling of dung, or planted borecole for the winter; generally he had some of both, for he found turnips good for his own table in winter, and profitable for the support of some poultry, of which I shall take notice soon. He had also every variety of common kitchen vegetables in small patches, continually changing places, and thus improving the soil; he had, besides, two hives of bees; and for the sake of the _straw_, as well as for rotation, and the support of his pig and poultry, a little rye, vetches, or clover.

Johnny, however, only worked in the garden in the evening, after his ordinary day’s work, or, in summer, at sunrise; yet there never was a weed to be seen in it, for they never had time to grow: by using the hoe for a few moments now and then, they were always kept down, and every waste blade and briar and useless sod around the hedge which enclosed it, was carefully pared and burnt for manure.

He had worked in the large garden of a gentleman who kept an English gardener, who had taught Johnny the use of a _sprong_ in preference to a spade for turning up the earth, especially when too hard for the latter implement; and though the handle was short, and, according to my own notion, fatiguing to the back, the fact was, that Johnny soon preferred it for dispatch and correctness of operation to the long-handled spade which all my other neighbours use. When he cut his own rye or other corn, the ground was usually so hard that a broad spade could not enter it: but Johnny quickly turned it up and broke it with his sprong, and then completely pulverized it with what the Englishman called a beck, a three-forked hoe, which, acting like the long tines of a harrow, loosened and rendered the whole perfectly fine, while it brought any latent roots of couch (or scutch grass) that might have escaped on former occasions, to the surface.

Johnny’s various vegetables greatly assisted his housekeeping. He had often a good bowl of soup, flavoured with leeks, onions, carrots, &c., made with the least conceivable portion of meat, but thickened with barley, properly shelled, and prepared like French barley, but at only one-third of the price of that which is sold under such denomination in the shops; and his family always breakfasted on porridge, or coarse bread of their _own baking_, with or without milk, according to circumstances--for Johnny at this time had no cow--sometimes washed down with a cup of tea, and more generally in winter with a mug of light and good table beer, which the Englishman taught Johnny to brew at Mr B.’s brew-house. Half a bushel of malt, with a quarter of a pound of hops, produced ten gallons of _unadulterated_ beer which could not be bought any where, and the grains (given to his pig) fully counterbalanced the cost of fuel. Even at this time he killed a pig every year, and never wanted a small supply of salt meat for his cabbage or beans, which with this combination of flesh went farther in this way towards the actual supply of his dinner, and sometimes of his supper too (for any remainder of the dinner was heated and peppered up for the supper, with the addition of a broken loaf, or a skillet full of potatoes), than can be imagined by the poor man who has never cultivated his garden in the same manner--whose cabbages are of little value from want of bacon, and whose allotment, producing but one crop instead of two each year, is thus of but half its proper value to him; besides, with him potatoes succeed potatoes continually, until the ground becomes sick of yielding them.

But, further, Johnny Halfacre’s garden, in which he seldom ceased from doing something in the summer evenings as long as daylight lasted, greatly aided in supporting his pig at that time when food is so dear and scarce for swine. The tops of blossoming bean-stalks (by the plucking off of which the crop is improved) and other vegetable waste, besides vetches and rye--the latter both in the green and ripe state--gave him sufficient food to keep the pig in fair order, with a little help from other sources; and the pig, by being always well littered, and supplied with this food, gave a return in most excellent manure, which with other sources of a similar kind, and the economical distribution of crops, supplied the entire garden with fertilizing matter.

What the other means of providing manure were, ought to be mentioned, for the man’s system is of such easy application that it only requires to be stated in order to be followed.

For two or three evenings in the summer before last, I perceived Johnny Halfacre without his coat, rolling a wheelbarrow frequently from an adjacent common to a corner of his garden separated from the road by an old weather-beaten paling. When I had leisure to see what he had been doing at this time, I found that he had marked off an oblong space for four geese and a gander, which he had bought from Bridget Gozzard at rather a high price, partly for the sake of their powerful manure, which, combined with other substances, is good for stimulating the growth of vegetables, as well as for the profit which he expected to realize by rearing goslings for the market. Johnny was aware that fat green geese are worth from six to ten shillings each, in the very early season in the great English markets, and are also profitable if reared for the stubbles at Michaelmas; and he did not see why he and his industrious wife should not realise a profit as well as English housewives by the breeding of such poultry, when a steam-packet and a rail-road could take them off even to London in a few hours. Cocks and hens would ruin his own garden, and bring him into disputes with his neighbours--he had the advantage of a run on the common for geese--there was a pond of water near his house--and therefore he gave them and ducks the preference. He first built his back wall two feet and a half high and ten feet in length, with the sods from the common, and then put down ten upright stakes in front, every pair answering for the jambs of each compartment, with a board stretching the whole length across, and which formed the front support of his rustic roof; from this board he laid rafters to the top of the back wall, and having first interwoven some small branches of a tree through these rafters, he laid as many scraws (thinly pared grassy sods) as secured the whole roof from rain. The jambs were then contracted to a narrow opening, for the sake of shelter and warmth, by more sods laid one over the other.

By this simple process of construction he formed a separate chamber for each bird, with a yard in front six feet broad and ten long, and with an opening through the paling at the road side, by which the inmates could go in and out at their pleasure. His rye assisted in feeding them, and he also cultivated grey peas for them, which are excellent for fattening; and with cabbage and lettuce leaves, the pods of beans, and other green food, he afterwards kept them in high condition; and in the succeeding year, when other young geese were dying of disease, occasioned by want of shelter, and from _starvation_, his were thriving.

And to the credit of this worthy man and his wife I must mention, that the feather-plucker was indignantly sent away from his door whenever he came round for the execrable purpose of plucking the geese alive. Johnny’s wife would as soon have let him pull out the hairs of her own head, as give up one of her birds to his barbarous hands; and the consequence was, that while their neighbours’ geese were miserably crawling about, with draggling and mutilated wings and smarting bodies, until many of them died, in their miseries invoking as it were in their dying screams shame and curses on their unfeeling owners, Johnny Halfacre’s geese strutted about on the common, with an independent and unconstrained step, as if conscious of their security from the tortures to which their fellows had been doomed.

HOW JOHNNY HALFACRE BECAME A LITTLE FARMER.

If it be true, and it unquestionably is, that “he who despiseth small things, shall fall by little and little,” the converse is, I think, no less so--that he who pays attention to little matters will rise by degrees.

Mr B. having narrowly observed Johnny’s general good conduct and extreme industry as a common labourer, put him in possession, two years ago, of a field adjoining his cottage and garden, which contains about six statute acres, and which fortunately was in good condition.

Johnny at first was afraid to accept the tempting offer, at which any other labourer would have jumped, on the sincere and modest plea that he had no capital for such a weighty speculation. He did not wish to grasp at more than he could properly manage; but Mr B. set him at ease, by telling him that he considered health, industry, and skill, sufficient capital for Johnny to possess, as he himself would not only build a barn, cow-shed, ass-house, and pig-styes, but put the boundary fence into perfect order (according to the frequent practice of _British_ landlords), and lend Johnny a sum sufficient for the purchase of every thing necessary to give him a good start, charging him only five per cent on the advances. Mr B., who in riding over his property often “went by the field of the slothful,” which “was all grown over with thorns and nettles that covered the face of it, and the stone wall whereof was broken down,” wished to render Johnny an exemplar of superior management to other tenants.

I shall not trouble the reader with all the details of Johnny’s management during the two last years, but shall very briefly notice those particulars of husbandry which are new to my countrymen of the same class. He has not subdivided the field, nor does he intend to do so, as he values every foot of it too much for such waste. He does not keep a horse, nor will he do so, unless his holding be increased; but he keeps a donkey and a well-constructed cart. As yet he has no cow, not having his land in sufficiently clean order for laying down any part of it with grasses; but he has two yards full of pigs, which he keeps for the sake of the rich manure they supply. I do not advocate his system altogether, but merely relate the most striking features of it. His pig-yards are very commodious, and well arranged for weaning, fattening, &c.; and his stock now consists of a sow with ten young ones in one yard, and six store pigs in another. These are in fine condition--fed on vetches, rye (of which the grain is now, July 20, ripe), and wash, consisting of pollards and water; their food next week, and for some time after, will be beans, ripe and unripe, according to their successive stages. These pigs are now ten months old, and have never been outside their yard, nor do they seem to be (compared with pigs of the same age which have had the run of the common) injured by confinement. Being always highly littered in the yard, having the sleeping chamber kept perfectly clean, and being abundantly fed, they sport about the straw, and seem quite contented. But without such care and comfort young swine will certainly not thrive in imprisonment.