Part 2

That country north of the glens--which stop at Ballycastle, where Glen Shesk and Glen Tow have their meeting--is called the Route, and so keeps alive a memory of a period older than the Ossianic legends. Dal Riada, or Dal Reuda, that is, the "Portion of Reuda", was the name given to a principality established by one Reuda, who about the second century broke off with a body of followers from the kingdom of Ulster, and established rule on both sides of the narrow seas. Reuda was of the Pictish race, probably; and here in the north the Picts held out longest against the invading Milesians, who came (according to modern theories) drilled foot soldiers, to defeat the earlier chariot-fighting warriors. But the Milesians pushed their conquest here also in about the sixth century, and Fergus, an offshoot of the northern Hy-Neill (Sons of Niall), the dominant Milesian house, made a petty kingdom for himself on both shores; and from him the kings of Scotland traced their descent. This prince, Fergus Mac Erc, has left his name on the Irish coast, for Carrickfergus is shown as the rock on which he came to wreck, when sent adrift by tempest in one of his crossings between the two portions of his kingdom.

Shortly after its establishment, this kingship, or chieftainship, lost its Irish character and centred in Scotland. But relations were constant--though by no means constantly friendly--and the Lords of the Isles held Rathlin Island for many centuries. However near the Irish coast this island lies--only divided by some five miles from the base of Fair Head--the sound between it and the mainland is so dangerous, with its racing tides, as to be an effectual barrier; and very often passage may be easier made from the Scotch coast than from the bay of Ballycastle. At all events, the Mac Donnells owned Rathlin when Robert Bruce needed a refuge, and the castle is still there in which the Bruce sheltered for seven years--and in which it was that he watched the spider's patience and drew the moral for his own far-off designs.

The Mac Donnells were one of three great clans who divided a disputed lordship in Ulster before Ulster (last of the provinces) was finally subdued. The Mac Donnell lordship was the least authoritative and (although it traced descent to the sixth century) the latest in date. O'Neill and O'Donnell, the true Gaelic overlords of Ulster, sprang from two sons of Niall of the Nine Hostages, High King of Ireland from 379 to 405. Of their sons, Conall settled himself on Donegal Bay, and Eoghan (or Owen) on the Inishowen hills. Tyrconnell--_Tir Chonaill_--takes its name from the one son; Tyrone--_Tir Eoghain_--from the other. About these centres power grouped itself, each chief having sub-chiefs or _urraghts_ under him, each with his own sept. It was only in the tenth century when Brian Boru was High King that the hereditary surnames came to be adopted--O'Neill for the lord of Tyrone, O'Donnell for the princes of Tyrconnell.

Their country was remote of access, difficult of passage for troops; their people were hardy; and so it happened that in the reign of Henry VIII, and even of Elizabeth, when all else in Ireland had been fairly brought within British sovereignty (even the O'Briens of Thomond submitting) O'Neill and O'Donnell could still hold their own. But mutual jealousies and border feuds weakened the Gael; the O'Neills were the strongest people, yet the O'Donnells on one flank and the Mac Donnells on the other often sought advantage by English alliance. Shane O'Neill, perhaps the most dangerous foe that Elizabeth had to meet in Ireland, of whom Sir Henry Sidney wrote that "this man could burn, if he liked, up to the gates of Dublin, and go away unfought", met his crushing defeat at the hand of Irish enemies, the O'Donnells, who routed him on the Swilly river near Letterkenny; and in his trouble he fled to unfriends on the other side, the Mac Donnells, in whose camp at Cushendun he was poniarded, and his head sold to the English.

Yet after his day another O'Neill, Hugh the great Earl of Tyrone, levied desperate war on the English, in close league with a successor of the O'Donnell who defeated Shane; and though the Mac Donnells gave them no direct assistance, they also made an effort at that time to throw off the invader's yoke. The history of Ireland under Elizabeth is largely the history of war with these three clans--and a shameful history it is, full of horrible records of treachery and cruelty.

Each of the three peoples threw up remarkable leaders in the final struggles under the Tudors, and no figure of those days is more notable than the MacDonnell chief, Somhairle Buidhe, "Yellow Charles", Sorley Boy, as the English wrote him: and often the State Papers had occasion to write his name between 1558, when he came to lordship of the North, and 1590, when he died (singularly enough) a natural death in his own castle of Duneynie and was buried among all the Mac Donnells in the Abbey at Bonamargy near Ballycastle. Two sayings of his are memorable. They showed him the head of his son impaled above the gate of Dublin Castle. "My son," he retorted, "has many heads." And in truth that stock sprung up like nettles after cutting.--Elizabeth, in one of the phases of her diplomacy, sought to enlist this warrior on her side, and sent him a patent for his estates and chieftaincy as Lord of the Pale, engrossed on parchment. They brought him the writing to his castle of Dunluce, and he hacked the scroll to shreds. "With the sword I won it," he said; "I will never keep it with the sheepskin."

Nevertheless, time brought him counsel, and when Sir John Perrot, Henry VIII's bastard, came and battered Dunluce with cannon, Sorley, now eighty years of age, made his submission and travelled to Dublin, to pay his homage to the Queen's picture, going on his knees to kiss the embroidered pantoufle on the royal foot. After his death, his son Randal joined the rising of Hugh O'Neill and Hugh O'Donnell; but when that last great effort to throw off England's power was foiled by the defeat at Kinsale, the Mac Donnell made submission, and Elizabeth's successor, James, who after all had a natural kindness for the Mac Donnells (seeing that they were to the last Scotch rather than Irish) accepted his submission and endowed him with the whole territory from the Cutts of Coleraine to the Curran of Larne.

Dunluce, which stands on a projecting rock, approached only by a narrow footway over a very deep natural trench, has to stand a battery more continuous than Perrot's cannon could bring to bear. The sea is under it, for a cave pierces the rock, and wind and wave are for ever straining at the old fortress. Part of it fell in 1639, and to-day they say the whole ruin is menaced with collapse; and, since it stands in private grounds, no public authority can intervene to save it.

For some heads the crossing of that wall into Dunluce has a danger; and a fall would be serious. But the real test of resistance to giddiness can be made at the famous hanging bridge which joins the mainland with the island rock of Carrickarede, near Port Ballintoy. The bridge consists of planks laid two abreast, and lashed to ropes; a single rope is the only handrail. The people use it to get out to their nets and boats for the salmon fishing, which are kept out here, and also, since there is grass on the island, for carrying sheep across on their backs. For my own part I stepped on to it readily enough; but when it bent down steeply under me, and inclined to swing, the surprise was not pleasant. And though I forced myself to cross it a second time, back and forward, to convince myself that there was no necessity for qualms, I cannot say that the qualms wholly disappeared. As for carrying a sheep over, or a bale of nets, heaven defend me! But I never heard that anyone, native or tourist, drunk or sober, came to grief there! The drop is about eighty feet into deep water between cliffs.

THE MAIDEN CITY

Adjoining the Route, and divided from it by the River Bann, is County Derry, which was once the territory of the O'Cahans, chief _urraghts_ or sub-chiefs of the O'Neills. When the O'Neill was by adoption of the clans installed after the Irish usage at Tullaghogue in County Tyrone, it was the O'Cahan who performed the ceremony of inauguration. With these facts two memories connect themselves for me. The first is that when the Gaelic League was established, to save the language of Ireland from oblivion and decay, amongst those who joined it was the Reverend Dr. Kane, a mighty orator on every Twelfth of July, when the anniversary of the Boyne is celebrated. "I may be an Orangeman," he wrote, "but I do not forget that I am an O'Cahan." Many of us who did not share his politics cherish his memory for that saying. The other associated idea for me is that, once setting out with other nationalist speakers, I was followed by a strong body of police. Asking why, I was told they were to prevent an attack on us in Tullaghogue, which is now a strong Orange centre!

Coleraine is where you join the train to get to Derry, and the rail skirts the shore of Lough Foyle--easternmost of the great succession of sea loughs which make the distinctive beauty of Donegal. Inishowen, its western shore, is included in that county by English geography, though this peninsula never formed part of Tyrconnell. Its lordship was always disputed between O'Neill and O'Donnell, and the best evidence of its separateness is given by the ecclesiastical boundary, which here, as always, follows the old tribal demarcation. All the rest of Donegal is comprised in the diocese of Raphoe, but Inishowen falls under the see of Derry. One result of that was traceable in the fact that _poteen_ (illicit whisky) was freely procurable in Inishowen long after its manufacture had ceased in any other part of Donegal; for the austere decree which the present bishop of Raphoe--an O'Donnell and a ruler of men--proclaimed against this "smuggling" had no effect east of the Swilly, though throughout Tyrconnel it was heard and obeyed, to the great advantage of his people, whom the old traffic (which I remember flourishing in spite of law and police, fines, seizures, and imprisonments) had seriously demoralized.

Derry and Raphoe have for a century been in the Protestant Church one united see, and in the days before disestablishments, made a princely preferment. You can see the proof of it at Castlerock, where the line from Coleraine strikes out on the shore of Lough Foyle by the long Magilligan strand. Here is Downhill, the seat built in the eighteenth century by that amazing prelate Lord Augustus Adolphus Hervey, Earl of Bristol and Bishop of Derry, who took a leading and not a very pacific part in organizing the volunteers and in winning Ireland's legislative independence.

"He appeared always", says Sir Jonah Barrington, "dressed with peculiar care and neatness, generally entirely in purple, and he wore diamond knee and shoe buckles; but what I most observed was that he wore white gloves with gold fringe round the wrists and large gold tassels hanging from them." A troop of horse headed by his nephew used to escort him everywhere and to mount guard at his door. Later, growing tired of Ireland, he migrated to Italy on the plea of ill health; and though many of his costly purchases were sent home to Downhill, where unhappily a fire destroyed the most valuable, he never came back, but remained abroad (says the austere Lecky, himself born on the shore of Lough Foyle), "adopting the lax moral habits of Neapolitan society", and in extreme old age writing letters to Emma, Lady Hamilton, "in a strain of most unepiscopal fervour".

There are no such bishops nowadays, but my childhood was familiar with the last of Lord Bristol's successors under the old order--the late Bishop Alexander, most eloquent of divines, afterwards Primate of Ireland. His talents brought him to the episcopate, while still a young man, only a year or two before disestablishment, and the life-interest in his £12,000 a year came to be compounded, not only for his own benefit, but for that of the Church. While the financial negotiation was still in progress, my father, then rector of a parish in Donegal, and financier-in-chief to the diocese, sent his bishop out for a day's driving in charge of a young curate, and trysted to meet them on Mulroy Bay. Arrived there, he saw with dismay the bishop, not on land but afloat, being sculled by the curate through the numberless rocks and swirling currents of Mulroy in a battered curragh--a hundred thousand pounds of ecclesiastical capital divided from submersion by a piece of tarred calico. And the famous orator, even at that period of his life, could not have weighed less than eighteen stone. Long years after, the curate, become venerable in his turn, remembered and recalled for me the rating which he received when at last he landed his passenger.

Another memory from the same source may be worth recalling. Downhill is the house which Charles Lever describes in his novel, _The Bramleighs of Bishop's Folly_, though the story has no historic connection with the house or any of its inmates. But Lever knew this "Bishop's Folly" in the days when he was a dispensary doctor at Portstewart, and my father remembers well how _Harry Lorrequer_ came out by instalments in the _Dublin Morning Magazine_, with what delight he heard them read aloud, and how sudden was the addition of interest when one day the news came in that the anonymous author was no other than their own dispensary doctor--the brilliant young collegian for whom a place had been suddenly created in this outlying village during one of the visitations of cholera. After that, whenever the doctor came to call, a shy boy used to creep into the drawing-room and ensconce himself, apparently with a book, out of sight behind a sofa, where, undisturbed by apprehensions, he could be all ears for the rattling talk of that wonderful tale-teller.

Lever learnt a good deal in Portstewart from a neighbour, W. H. Maxwell, author of _Wild Sport of the West_, who lived in those days at Portrush. But it was the west and south of Ireland that always drew Lever--his florid taste in incident and humour found its choice elsewhere than in the discreet greys and browns of Ulster character. And east of Lough Foyle he was still in the Ulster which politicians mean--the country of the plantations. Derry is in reality its frontier town, though the Scotch strain and the Protestant element ramify out from Derry a certain distance into Donegal.

But the frontier town, like all frontier towns in a country that has been much fought over, keeps an intense, militant, and aggressive character. Derry stands for the extreme type of Protestant assertion--oddly enough, for in the beginning of its history, it was the monastic seat, Doire Coluimchille, "Columba's Oakgrove", to which that great apostle of Christianity looked back from his mission overseas--"thinking long" in Iona for--

"Derry mine, my own oakgrove, Little cell, my home, my love".

There is no reason to doubt the authenticity of that Irish poem, transmitted in ancient manuscript, which a scholar has thus translated--Columba's lyric cry towards the Ireland which he had left.

Yet, after all, the new is more to us than the old, and Derrymen have good right to be proud of Derry walls. The famous siege was a great event, the resistance was indeed heroic, though I think that popular fame has selected the wrong man to be the centre of hero-worship. A tall column which rises from the walls behind the bishop's palace is Walker's monument, and Walker was no soldier but an elderly, loquacious, and somewhat vain, preacher. If contemporary records are any safe guide, the true organizer and inspirer of that long resistance was Murray--whose fame, I am glad to say, is kept alive by a Murray club. Yet the man who best of all, perhaps, deserves commemoration has no memorial in Derry. The siege had lasted from April 18, and on June 13 the town was already starving when a fleet was sighted in Lough Foyle. Kirke, who commanded it, lay outside, intimidated by the defences of the narrow channel. So it went on for six weeks; but there was at least one Derry man with the fleet who could brook the delay no longer. This was Captain Browning, of the _Mountjoy_, and he insisted that attempts should be made to run the batteries and to break the boom, whose site is still preserved in the name "Boom Hall". The _Mountjoy_ was a merchant-man, and another, the _Phoenix_, of Coleraine, joined the venture, and a frigate was sent with them to help in drawing the enemy's fire. The _Mountjoy_, with Browning himself at the helm, headed straight for the boom under full sail, struck it, and with the impact the boom gave. But the shock caused a rebound which flung the ship back on a mudbank, and at the same moment Browning was shot down at his post. The _Phoenix_ had slipped already through the gap and was away with her full cargo of meal. Boats were out from the forts to seize the _Mountjoy_; but she fired a broadside, and the recoil lifted her off the bank, and she too slipped through, carrying the body of her dying skipper to the wharf of the city which his courage and determination had rescued from famine and from enforced surrender. Life stayed in him long enough to let him hear the cries of welcome, to know that the goal was reached, the blockade broken, and his city saved, before the rush of blood from his pierced lungs finally choked him: and surely no man ever died a more enviable death.

Yet in truth it was the people who had rescued themselves. In the previous month of December, before hostilities were really declared, King James had been imbecile enough to withdraw the troops which held the city. A fresh garrison under Lord Antrim was marching in, and was seen actually outside the walls. The city fathers deliberated; it was thirteen prentice boys of the town who armed themselves, rushed to the Ferryquay gate, seized the keys, and locked it in the teeth of Antrim's men, when they were within sixty yards of the entrance.

This deed is commemorated annually on December 18th, when Lundy, the officer who commanded in James's interest, is duly burnt in effigy--or used to be. Nowadays Catholic and Protestant are so evenly balanced in the "Maiden City" that such demonstrations risk a formidable riot, and are accordingly kept in check.

But the embers are always hot, and crave wary walking. Once a concert was being held, "strictly non-sectarian", and it had been decided to omit "God save the King", which in Ireland is made into a party tune. All went off smoothly, and the building was being emptied, when suddenly war rose. The organist, a stranger, had thought it would be proper to play the people out with "Auld Lang Syne"--not knowing that to this tune is sung "Derry Walls", most aggressive of Protestant melodies.

Derry walls are there, broad and solid--you can drive a coach on them. But, what is more important, you can there find the best entertainment that I know in Ireland. A little hotel, whose doorway gives on to the east wall, is kept by Mrs. MacMahon, and all persons of understanding go there to get the kind of meal which you may hope for in the pleasantest north of Ireland country home: the fruits of the earth, the fowl of the air, the fish of the sea, each according to his kind (not omitting Lough Swilly oysters), with the home-made bread, which is one of Ulster's greatest charms. It is not an elaborate modern hotel. If it were, you would not get the sort of entertainment that I describe; but to stay there is to get an insight, and a most happy insight, into the homeliness, the hospitality, the shrewdness, and the good housewifery of Ulster.

TIRCONNELL

Donegal has become to-day the best pleasure ground in Ireland. Second only to Kerry in natural beauty, and superior to it in grandeur, for Kerry has no cliff scenery to compare with Slieve League and Horn Head, it has far more variety of resource than the southern county--or, in two words, it has golf and Kerry has not; and it has much more free fishing. It is equipped as a playground, and as a playground I shall write of it--with this preface. When I was a boy, between thirty and forty years ago, there were only two passable hotels west of Lough Swilly, Lord George Hill's at Gweedore, and Mr. Connolly's at Carrick. Both of these were built for men who wanted to fish and shoot; and to reach them meant in literal truth a day's journey into the wilderness. There was no railway in the county except the little line from Derry to Buncrana; and it was the regular usage for strangers to bring introductions which got them hospitality from the resident gentry. I remember scores of such casual visitors at the big, old rectory where I was brought up.

To-day there is hardly any point in the county more than ten miles distant from a rail--Irish miles of course, and hilly ones. But when the train takes you from Derry to Burtonport, curving in behind Lough Swilly, and following all the northern coast to its extreme remotest corner, you may fume, as I have often fumed, at the vagaries of that wonderful organization; you may think it amazing to be a matter of three hours late in a journey of four hours, as has happened to me; still, it is well to remember how you might have had to drive the same distance on an outside car in such wind and rain as Donegal can furnish.

And of course the delays I speak of are probably not so usual as at the first wild beginnings of that traffic. No longer, probably, will you see the engine driver getting out to replenish his supply of fuel from a wayside turf stack; no longer will you need to scour the whole countryside for a truckload of luggage casually mislaid. It is only fair to add that where I finally unearthed our possessions was at a mountain siding near two excellent salmon pools, with which I then became acquainted and where I subsequently caught fish. If the engine does break down anywhere on that run there is sure to be a little river within a mile or so, and it is quite worth putting up your rod and going out to have a try; at least one man to my knowledge returned triumphantly with a good salmon--the messenger sent to fetch him having come in handy to gaff it.

But in all seriousness tourists have got to remember that these lines are not there for holiday traffic. Goods and passengers travel together, and the real purpose of the whole is to give a market to the thousands of cottagers along that wild yet populous shore. What it means is that the coast fisherman who nets a salmon now can sell it for perhaps twopence a pound less than it will fetch in Billingsgate--tenpence, a shilling even, for summer fish. In the old days there was no one to give him more than perhaps a shilling for his whole fish. And in truth in the old days a Donegal peasant hardly conceived that he could be the legitimate possessor of a salmon.

That is the real change. In the days that I remember, the country was owned by the landlords, was governed by them and by their agents, with assistance from the Church of Ireland clergy. To-day a great part of the land is owned by the people who till it; it is all governed by them. And in increasing measure they own even the game, most jealously guarded of seigniorial rights.