Chapter 15

There are still the remains of three buildings; one, said to be the prison, was loopholed through the solid stone, some loopholes being quite close to the ground, some straight through, some slanting, so as to cover a man come from what direction he might, or what height soever, even if he crept on the ground. Most of the castle, as well as these buildings attached, had their roof on the floor, but in the square tower of the castle proper still remains a stone staircase of the circular kind.

As you go up this stair lit by narrow slits in the wall formed in hewn stone you find an arched door at three different places admitting to three arched galleries roofed and floored with stone. These have their loophole slits to peep out of, or fire out of, stone spouts through which molten lead or boiling water could be poured on the besiegers. In one gallery a trap door let down to an underground passage which came out at the lake some distance off. By this they could send a messenger to raise the O'Malley clans, or by it could escape if necessary.

The goats of Mayo are inquisitive, and would persist in climbing the circular stair and exploring the galleries. Whenever they found this secret passage, for pure mischief they fell down and were killed, to the great loss of their owners; so the secret passage is filled up, for which I was very sorry.

We must take our car again and rattle back over the road to Ballintubber Abbey. Ballintobar (town of the well) near this was one of the sacred wells of St. Patrick. The abbey gates were locked, and it was some time before the key was forthcoming. The church part of the abbey is entire except the roof and the lofty bell tower. The arch that supported the tower was forty-five feet in height, but I do not know how high the tower was which it supported. At last the key was found and we were admitted into the church. The chancel is still roofed, and here in these solemn ruins, watched over by the crows and the jackdaws, the few inhabitants still left assemble for mass. There is a rude wooden altar and a few pine benches; the ivy waves from the walls; the jackdaws caw querulously or derisively; the dead of the old race for centuries sleep underneath, and now in a chancel the remnant gather on a Sabbath. I cannot describe it as an architect or antiquarian, and these classes know all about it better than I do, but I want to convey as far as I can the impression it made upon me to others as delightfully ignorant on the subject. The roof is made in the same way as all arched roofs of old castles which I have yet seen, of thin stones laid edge-wise to form the arch and cemented together. The country people tell me that a frame of wood was made over which they formed the arch and then poured among the stones thin mortar boiling hot. On the inside of the arch run along ribs of hewn stone cemented into their places, running up to meet in a carved point at the extreme top. These groinings spring from short pillars of hewn stone that only reach part way down the wall to the floor and run to a point. These consoles are highly ornamented with sculpture. The mouldings round the doors, and the stone window frames and sashes, are wonderfully well done, and would highly ornament a church of the nineteenth century.

I think we undervalue the civilization of the far past of Connaught. Those who erected such churches, such abbeys and such castles were both intelligent and possessed of wealth in no small degree. The ingenuity of the cut stone hinge on the stone that closes the tomb in the chancel, the carving on the tomb of the Prince of the O'Connor line, the staunch solidness of every wall, the immense strength of every arched roof, show skilled builders, whether they worked under the direction, of the Gobhan Saer or another man. The plans of the castles, for offence, defence or escape, show them to have been built by men of skill for men of large means and great power.

XXXVIII.

OVER-POPULATION OF THE WEST--HOW PEOPLE FORM THEIR OPINIONS--MR. SMITHWICK AND JONATHAN PYM--A DEARTH OF FISH.

Left Castlebar with regret and went down to Westport. I find at every step since I landed the information that in going round Ireland I should have begun at Dublin. In Dublin I could have procured a guide book. I have sought for one in every considerable town from Belfast round to the edge of Galway without obtaining it. If I had started from Dublin I should have taken a tourist's ticket there. Well, I am not sorry for that, for it is rather hard on me when I get into the beaten track where I encounter tourists--some of them are trying specimens of humanity. However, I am made to feel as if I was patting the wrong foot, instead of the best foot foremost.

I got into Westport in the fair sunlight in the early part of June. Between Castlebar and Westport the land is part stony, part bog, part better land under grass. Mountains with hard names, that one makes haste to forget, are to be seen all round from whatever side of the car you look. They are all over--a good deal over--one thousand feet high. A few lakes are spread out here and there also. I am as ignorant of their names as of those of the lakes I saw crossing Maine. Westport, like Castlebar, has a mall. Castlebar mall is a square of grass with some trees drawn up on one side. It is fenced in with chains looped up on posts--a fence that nobody minds except to step over and they track the grass with paths running in every direction. Westport's mall is a long space with trees standing sentry by a river, walled in as if it were a canal.

I had a wish to meet with a Mr. Smithwick, a land agent, from whom I might receive a good deal of information. I had information from himself that he should be at Newport upon the day after I arrived at Westport. I fought successfully against myself, and got up at an uncomfortably early hour and went to Newport by mail car. Newport, Mayo, is six Irish--seven and a half English--miles from Westport and is at the head of Clew Bay. The road lies through a nice rolling country, entirely desolate and empty.

The only passenger by the car besides myself, was a gentleman, English I presume, who, after he became tired of silence, began a conversation with me, taking for his subject the over-population of the West. I looked to the side of the car where we sat--it was a country of fine grassy hills with not one wreath of smoke curling up from a solitary chimney as far as the eye could reach. I leaned over the well of the car and looked to the other side--to the limit of the horizon, behold, the land was empty of house or home or human being. I looked over the horses' ears--there was the same scene of utter desolation. I turned round with difficulty and looked behind us--saw the same grassy hills swelling up in green silence without man or beast. I said softly, "Lift up thine eyes, sir stranger, and look northward and southward, eastward and westward. Is not the land desolate without inhabitant, where then is the over-population?" The strange gentleman looked, not at the empty hills and the silent green valleys, but at his fellow-traveller with emotions of fear. To doubt that this fair and desolate Mayo is over- populated is to show signs of lunacy or worse. Fenianism, Communism, or even Nihilism, is possible if there is no lunacy to account for such strange ideas.

Mildly, but with resolution like Samantha's, I urged on the gentleman to look at the prospect, and he was like one awakening from a dream, for the country from Newport to Westport, seven and a half miles, is without inhabitants. I believe Lord Lucan was chief exterminator over this stretch of country. Brought up at the little inn at Newport, and the stranger and I had breakfast together. We conversed about over- population. He had travelled much, and when he recollected what his eyes saw instead of what his ears heard of a false cry, he admitted that a loneliness had fallen upon this part of the west.

After breakfast he went his way, with a new subject for thought, and I, deserted in a wilderness of a commercial room, took out some paper and began to write. There was no sound but the steel scratch of a pen that grew monotonous. After a long time--some hours--of solitude, the door opened and a gentleman entered with some luggage and a young woman followed him. I gathered up my scribblings and put them away. The gentleman took off his overcoat, and shining out of the breast pocket was a bright revolver. I grew afraid, though, generally speaking, I am too busy to think of being afraid. There was a trans-Atlantic look about the gentleman, a Mississippi appearance about the too conspicuous revolver, and, I admit, I thought of some Fenian leader and wondered what Stephens was like. I heard the gentleman order lunch and afterward he left the room.

When he returned he introduced himself as Mr. Smithwick. He was not at all the kind of gentleman I had expected to see. By some perversity he had become fixed in my imagination as a very tall gentleman with fair curled hair. Now this was sheer foolishness, but it had a disastrous effect on the interview. My mind, instead of gathering itself up into an attitude for receiving information about the land question, would go off wool-gathering in speculation whether this was the very Mr. Smithwick or not. The gentleman said with all politeness that he was willing to give me all the information in his power on any subject on which I wanted information.

There is something not canny in the west. I had felt it before, but never as I did then. I could not possibly disentangle my ideas enough to be clear as to what information I did want. I was under some spell. I could only look at Mr. Smithwick, wondering if he was he, and smile at my own stupidity. Time passes quickly; the gentleman remained but about an hour and a half at most, and he had to have luncheon out of that and attend to some little business in town besides. Before I got to be myself he was gone. We did talk a little about reclaiming bog land. He put the cost per acre for trenching, laying stones in the drains, sand and manure, at L21 per acre. Reclaiming bog land has been done by tenant farmers all over the country, who were evicted afterward when they fell behind in rent in the bad years, and did not get any compensation for the land so reclaimed. Mr. Smithwick did not think the relief money in all cases reached those for whom it was intended; believed it was partly intercepted on the way. Did not have a high opinion of his countrymen of the poorer class. Thought them a useless set who did not do the work of their farms properly; did not even make a drain properly if done for themselves; made it in a proper manner if made on another man's land, because there he was overseen, and if he slighted his work he would not get paid for it. In short, "Paddy anywhere but at home is a splendid man, but at home he is worthless."

Mr. Smithwick deplored the present agitation among the people; deplored it as an agitation got up, not for people's benefit, but to feather the nests and fill the pockets of agitators. He informed me that he himself had to carry a pistol wherever he went. In speaking of rents Mr. Smithwick informed me that the lands were really rented low; that the people could pay, and were quite able to pay, were it not for the advice of agitators; said he was getting no rent at all these years. The total cessation of rent coming in was a great deprivation to landlords, who depended on their rents for the means of living.

Mr. Smithwick thought emigration was the remedy for the undeniable poverty of the country, for if the people got their farms for nothing they could not make a living out of them, owing to their shiftless method of farming. I objected that it would be scarcely fair to send their people, who were so useless and helpless, over to be a burden on us, but Mr. Smithwick thought that they would soon come in to our ways, and help themselves, and be not a burden but a help to the community. I found out in conversation with this gentleman that to reach Ballycroy, where he lives, I should have come from Ballina. I seem perversely to take the long way round. Mr. Smithwick kindly explained to me the way I should go to reach Ballycroy by private car. He thought there was so little of interest in that direction that it would hardly repay me for a long tiresome journey, and that Connemara direction was much more full of interest. After his croydon had driven off I began to remember various points on which I should have liked to obtain his opinion that I had never thought of once when I had the opportunity. Perhaps it was the very early drive that had wearied me, but I was dreadfully stupid all through the interview. I had counted a great deal on seeing this man, and I seemed to myself to have gained nothing of facts to which one could refer triumphantly in support of an opinion in consequence of it.

To wake myself up I enquired of the civil landlady if there were any wonderful sights to be seen in the neighborhood within an easy drive. Yes, there was Borrishoole Monastery (the place of owls) and Carrig a Owlagh (rock of the fleet) Castle, one of the strongholds of Granna Uisle Well, got a car and driver and drove off to see these ruins. I was told that no tourist ever visited Newport without going to see them.

As we rattled and jolted over the roughest bit of road which I have yet seen in Ireland, the driver, a dark, keen-eyed man, began to talk of landlords, of the wasting and exterminating Lords Lucan and Sligo. I asked him whom did he think a good landlord. He answered immediately, "Jonathan Pym." "If you think him so good you might say Mr. Pym." "When a man is the best in any way he's too big for Mr.," said the man readily. "I dare say," I remarked, "that this Jonathan Pym is very little better than the rest." "But I say he is," retorted the man fiercely. "Where inside of the four seas of Ireland will you get his aiquil? He bought the land, coming among us a stranger, and he did not raise the rents. The people live under the rents their fathers paid." "Well, that's not much?" "If you were a tenant you would think differently. He took off the thatch of the cabins and put on slates at his own expense: There is not a broken roof on the land that he owns. Every tenant he has owns a decent house, with byre and barn, shed and stable, and he done it all out of the money he had, that never was lifted out of the land, and after all left them in at the ould rents. There has never been wan eviction on his place yet." "Has he been shot at yet?" I enquired innocently. "Arrah, what would he be shot for?" demanded the man, turning his swarthy face and black eyes full on me. "I thought maybe some one might shoot him for fun," I explained, feebly. "Fun!" growled the car-man, "quare fun! If a man is shot or shot at he deserves it richly. He's not a rale gentleman, word and deed, like Jonathan Pym."

The driver continued to praise the wonderful landlord, Jonathan Pym, in a growling kind of tone as if, were I his spouse, he would thwack me well to cure my unbelief, as we jolted over the stones to the ruins of the monastery of owls.

There is a lake, the lake of owls, near this ruin, and in it, it is said, gentlemen anglers can readily obtain leave to fish. I have heard that amateur anglers give the fish they catch to the person who gives the permit, retaining the sport of catching as their share; or if they want the fish paying for them at market price. I think this unlikely, but it may be so nevertheless.

The monastery was once a splendid place, to judge by the remains of the carving on window and arched door. One of the skulls of Grace O'Malley used to be kept here as a precious relic. There was another at Clare Island and I think I also heard of another. It seems some speculative and sacrilegious Scotchman brought a ship round the west coast of Ireland to gather up the bones lying in the abbeys to crush them for manure, and they took the brave sea queen's bones and skull with the rest.

Returned to Newport in a very undecided frame of mind whether to go to Ballycroy or not. There was a Land League meeting to be held there, and I might see that; but then I had been at two Land League meetings, and they are pretty much alike. Of course it is well to see a great assemblage of people, for they always are of interest as showing what condition the people are in, and what sentiments find an echo in their hearts. But the length of the way, the uncertainty of a place to stop at had some weight, and I found myself unable to decide. To clear up my brain I asked for a bit of fish for dinner, but such a thing could not be obtained at Newport. The fish caught there are exported. They might get a fish by going down to the boat for it, and paying dearer for it than the Dublin price. I asked for fish at Westport with the same result. If you mention salmon they will say, "Oh, yes," and if not stopped, rush off and buy a can of American salmon for you. I got something to eat--not fish, and not very eatable--and wrote a little while, with the same stupid sensation bothering me that I had felt during my interview with Mr. Smithwick, and decided to put off all decision and go to bed, which I did.

In the morning, having found that Newport was the nearest point by which to reach Achill Island, I determined to go there, and if I thought I could endure the journey to diverge at Mulrany and drive to Ballycroy on my return from Achill Island.

XXXIX.

BY THE SHORE OF CLEW BAY--ACROSS ACHILL ISLAND--A LONELY LOVELY RETREAT.

The drive from Newport, Mayo, to Mulrany was very pleasant. The roads winds along Clew Bay, that bay of many islands, for quite a distance. Clew Bay was resting, calm as a mirror, blue and bright, not a lap of the wave washed up on the shore of Green island or Rocky Point the day we drove past. No fisher's boat divided the water with hopeful keel. The intense solitude of bays and inlets as well as the loughs looks like enchantment. It reminds one of the drowsy do-nothingness of "Thompson's Castle of Indolence," only here the indolence is not the indolence of luxurious ease but of hunger and rags. If the knight of arts and industry will ever destroy monopoly, and these silent waters will be alive with enterprise:

"When many fishing barks put out to fish along the coast."

there will be a happy change in the comfortless cabins that dot the shores of Clew Bay.

The islands of Clew Bay, being treeless and green, have a new look, as if they had just heaved up their backs above the waters and were waiting for the fiat that shall pronounce them good. I looked with longing eyes in the direction of Clare Island, that has one side to the bay and one side to the broad Atlantic which lies between me and home. On Clare Island is the remains of Doona Castle, the principal stronghold, of the heroic Grace, where she held the heir of Howth captive till ransomed, and till his father learned to understand what _Cead mille failte_ means at dinner time.

Here, by Tulloghan Bay, I was told to look across the bay, where the heather-clad mountains rise above the broad heather-clad bog, where the road to Ballycroy winds along between the bay and the mountains, past houses of mortarless stone, hard to be distinguished from the heath; for over there in a certain spot occurred the shooting affray which has made young Mr. Smith, the son of the then agent for the Marquis of Sligo, a man of renown.

The hard feeling between the exterminating Marquis, the agent who executed his will and the tenantry was intense. Four men were lying in wait here with the intention of shooting Mr. Smith, who was expected to pass that way. He drove along accompanied by his son. The would-be assassins fired; they were concealed above the road; the shots passed harmlessly over the heads of the two Smiths. Young Mr. Smith, who is an exceptionally good shot--can hit a small coin at an immense distance-- saw the men run and fired after them, killing one, fired again, wounding another, and would have fired again, but was prevented by his father.

Young Mr. Smith is quite a hero among the people on this account. There is an expressed regret that Mr. Smith the elder interfered to prevent the young marksman from shooting them all; very few would blame him if he did, as the men, though too nervous to do harm, lay in wait for the purpose of murder. Still it is revolting to hear people in cold blood regret so heartily that there was not more bloodshed.

The scenery--as scenery--was as grand as bare heathery mountains and wide desolate waters could make an almost treeless solitude, but viewed as a home for human beings, viewed as land that has rent and taxes and existence to be carved out of it, it has a hopeless look.

The houses are something dreadful, to consider them in the light of human habitations. Limestone does not abound here, and therefore the houses of the poorer sort are built like a cairn or a fence of loose stones without mortar. When the Atlantic winds sweep in here in winter time, the crevices in these houses will be so many chinks to whistle through. God pity the poor!

The people along the road here had a thrifty look; the men wore homespun coats; the pinned-up dresses of the women showed petticoats which were homespun of warm madder red, well dyed, good and comfortable looking. Of course the majority of the women were barefoot, but they were used to it.

At Molraney we stopped to deliver mails. In these cases the passengers sit on the car in the street, while the driver hands in the mail, gossips awhile, goes into the convenient "licensed to sell" for a taste of something, and the police saunter down for the mail and look you over, judiciously but not offensively, and at last you make another start.

Arrived at the Sound, you find a nice-looking hotel for such a remote place. There is any amount of liquor to be got: you can also get the never-varying chop or steak served up with another variety of miserable cooking, but you cannot get a bit of fish any more than if the sea were five hundred miles off instead of lapping on the rocks less than a perch away. Was pulled across the Sound by two young girls, who handled the big oars as if they were used to them, and urged the boat with its load of men across the green waters very swiftly with their strong white arms. As we neared the island of Achill trees were conspicuous by their absence, and purple heather was plentiful.

Achill island is a treeless place. There are mountains beyond mountains lying against the sky, heather clad or mossgrown; there are small lakes lying at the foot of mountains or between mountains; there are dreary expanses of bog stretching for miles on each side of the road between us and the mountains, and rising out of the bog are wee bits of fields and most horrible habitations. We passed the plantation, noticeable because there is not another, that Mr. Pike has coaled to flourish round his fine house. There are dark green firs, feathery light green larches, birches, and other trees that dress in green only when summer comes; great clumps of laurel and rhododendron, the latter one mass of blossoms that almost hide the leaves beneath their rosy purple. Mr. Pike has already made for himself a delicious looking home amid this barren waste. It enriched our eyes to look at it.