Part 3

Take, for example, the little town of Milford. I remember it a miserable line of hovels, with only two decent buildings, the agent's house and the always imposing police barrack. To-day it has an excellent hotel, and every look of prosperity. I remember when every soul in it and for ten miles round was in the grip of a really tyrannical landlord, whose murder, when it ultimately came, was indeed an act of what Bacon calls "wild justice". Much of the improvement visible here is due to the able and courageous man who succeeded the "old lord". But, good landlord or bad landlord, no man can ever again hold that countryside at his pleasure, cowering under the threat of eviction. Rent is fixed by a court, and while a man pays his rent he is irremovable. And within a short period every man will be paying, not rent, but instalments of purchase for the land which he and his predecessors have worked--which in nine cases out of ten they have reclaimed from bog and barren moor. With the ownership of the land the game rights must ultimately go, and in many cases already they have gone. The hotel proprietor at Milford, an enterprising man, had, I found, bargained with not a few tenant purchasers for the exclusive fishing of little lakes in their property and for the shooting over their moors and bogs. That is the attraction which he has to offer to visitors, who, now that the country is opened up, come in shoals. On Lough Fern, the big lake adjoining, it was unusual to see two boats fishing, three made a rarity. Now, in summer, there will be fifteen or sixteen out. And not only that, but boats have been put on seven or eight of the numberless smaller lakes and bogholes which nobody ever fished at all, except once in a blue moon, when a curragh would be carted over. Some of them breed good trout, and now these are being stocked with a new strain of fish. All this means the circulation of money in the country where poverty before was universal, where famine even was not unknown. A failure of the potato crop to-day is a grievous loss: thirty years ago it meant something like starvation.

What took me to Milford the other day was significant of the new order. I was with a departmental committee appointed to consider how the fisheries of Ireland would be affected by the substitution of peasant proprietary for landlord ownership; and our main purpose was to emphasize the value of the interests involved, the possibility of increasing that value, and the necessity for combination unless the whole were to be destroyed. And here was no question merely of providing an attraction for the summer visitor: it meant conserving a mainstay of livelihood for hundreds of labouring men.

When I was a boy a regular feature in that countryside was the fish pedlar--some old man or old woman with a donkey and two creels, hawking round fish that had been carted up from the coast by Sheephaven. Along the prosperous settled shores of Lough Swilly, by Ramelton and Letterkenny, these poor folk found a market at the end of a day's journey. It was a poor market and a small one. But since the railroad was instituted, the fish pedlar takes a back place. Fish goes straight to the great towns, and it has been worth men's while to organize for catching the summer run of salmon which skirt the coast in June and July. From Malin Head to Arranmore, and from Arranmore into Donegal Bay, scores of thousands of pounds must have been earned in this way during the past seven or eight years by the coast-dwelling folk, half-farmers, half-fishermen, working through the short nights in their four-oared yawls. A lucky crew will earn ten pounds a man in two months' fishing--in a country from which each year thousands go across to Scotland or Lancashire for field labour and are content if they bring home ten pounds for their season's toil. It is easy to see how great an added source of prosperity this fishing means. Yet if the fish are killed out in the breeding streams, it ends the fishing; and when a river is divided into a hundred interests instead of one, no individual has a sufficient inducement to preserve the stock of salmon. A lesson in citizenship has to be learnt; public opinion has to be created. Donegal is leading in the attempt to develop co-operative preservation of game and fish, and whoever helps that endeavour is doing a good turn, not only to the interests of sport, but to the interests of Ireland.

Golf, which for the present is even a greater attraction than sport, does not extend into the wilder parts of the country; though, indeed, twenty years ago Port Salon and Rosapenna, where the most famous links are, were outlandish enough: it is golf that has brought them well into the pale of civilization--over-civilization, some of us grumble, when we see smart frocks among the sandhills by Downings Bay. Yet anyone who goes to Rosapenna, and has curiosity enough to enquire, can learn the whole history of a great industry's development within a score of years--for Downings is the centre of a most prosperous herring fishery, and the girls and boys from that outlying region are fetched at high wages to do skilled work in curing herring wherever herring are being caught, as far south as Dublin Bay, and very likely beyond.

And if I had any choice of all the fine places in Ireland to spend a holiday in, I would choose the one which makes the centre of Mr. Williams's sketch from Rosapenna--the low headland of Ards, jutting into Sheephaven, with wood of oak, and fir, and beech, and ash, so exquisitely blended, spread for a covering over ground so beautifully diversified; with little bays and creeks of blue water over the cleanest and tawniest sand running up into the heart of wooded or heathery slopes. Nowhere else is the scent of the brine so clean and strong across the other pungencies of heath, and bog-myrtle, of oak, and of bracken; nowhere else that I know does a perfect day give such fulfilment of desire.

Rosapenna shore and the village of Carrigart are too much dominated by the hotel and by foreign ways for my liking; but on the opposite shore, where Portnablah gives a harbour (not safe, alas!) to the boats of my friends, is the place of all my affections. This rocky little townland is set thick with whitewashed cottages, and here it has been an old custom for Irish folk from Derry and Letterkenny to come to the salt water and find homely quarters. The "bathers", as they are called, have of late years grown to be a multitude: if you want rooms in a farmhouse there you must bespeak them far in advance, and no wonder. If my ghost haunts any place it will be there, where the white road to Dunfanaghy (white, for this is a limestone tract), leaving the wall of Ards demesne, rises to a crest with a few houses (filled with bathers) on the right; and on your left is Sessiagh Lake, prosperously stocked with trout, and watched over by an old herring fisher, still able to pull a stout oar when the strong gale catches that high-lying water, but for the most part happy to drift contentedly and spin yarns about the men and the things and the fish that he has known. Quick with his tongue, too, in a leisurely way. "I suppose people very seldom die here," said a stranger, commenting on the healthiness of the situation. "Never more nor once," said old Tom.

Beyond the houses and the limekiln and the glimpse of Sessiagh's delusive waters (Heaven knows how many blank days I fished there!) is a line of grassy hillocks--the mass of Horn Head blocks the view beyond them to the west, but full north, suddenly, held in the curve between two of these little summits, you catch sight of the Atlantic blue. Blue, it may be, or purple, or greyish green, or black almost, with white spray flying; but there it is, held as if in a cup--the very quintessence of the saltness, the strength, and the freedom of the sea. When the herring are in, you shall see it dotted over with smacks and yawls, and here and there a curragh crawling slowly on the water like some black insect; or at night all a-twinkle with lights, till you rub your eyes and wonder if a town has not suddenly sprung into being. And all about, the steep shores of the bay are patched and striped with careful tillage, crops, well-tended, nestling in for shelter under every rocky hummock; and nestled, too, into the folds of the ground, are the white-fronted houses, with stone pegs across their eaves for cording to lash the roof secure against their terrible gales.

It is worth while being there in bad weather, to watch the run of sea on those cliffs; sometimes, in a sinister calm, rolling in mountain-high, tearing itself to whiteness on the long black spines of rock; and then, after this forerunner, comes the storm itself. It is then, when you see the smacks running in for shelter, or when, after a night of this, you see them put out to pick up costly nets that have been cut adrift to save men's lives, and that still must be recovered even at grave peril--it is then you will realize how these people take a grip of their country and cling to the foothold for which all life is a struggle.

Yet life goes merrily there. In the winter through some parishes there will be dancing almost every night in one cottage or another, and the crowd is thick on the floor and about the big turf fire.

These people are for the most part pure Irish, and west of Dunfanaghy all are Irish speakers. Under Irish rule it was the territory of the M'Swineys, chief urraghts of the O'Donnell, and Doe Castle, at the outfall of the Lackagh, was the fortress of the chief of the name. Owen Roe O'Neill made his landing here, Cromwell's most formidable opponent in Ireland--removed at last either by sickness or poison. Here Red Hugh O'Donnell was fostered by Owen M'Swiney of the Battle Axes before the treacherous kidnapping at Rathmullen. There were three M'Swiney clans--M'Swiney Doe, M'Swiney Banaght in the west of the county, and M'Swiney Fanad in the peninsula that divides Mulroy from Swilly. Each had its own war tune, and a schoolmaster friend of mine--himself a Sweeny--who collected native airs, had got two of the three, but not the third; until at last he heard of an old bedridden man in Fanad who might have it. He rode the twenty miles from his home at Gartan, with fiddle on his back, and found the old peasant wavering on the brink of death, yet still able to frame feebly the whistle or lilt, which my friend picked up on the strings of the fiddle bit by bit, till gradually he had it all, and, there and then, by the dying man's bedside, set the cabin ringing with the oldtime war march of his clan.

Another M'Sweeny that I have known was Turlough, the famous piper of Gweedore, whose repute has travelled far overseas. Aristocrat he is to the finger tips--saddened indeed because those fine finger tips have been coarsened by spade labour. "Look," he said to me; "can there be any music in these hands?" He told me his own generations, connecting him back with the hereditary bards of the M'Swineys, and I said that he must know the history of the county better than most. "No," he answered; "I was never curious of these things, except just as they concerned myself and my own people."

Mr. Williams's picture shows Errigal where it rises by Gweedore over Dunlewy Lake--one of the grandest among Ireland's mountains. But the most striking view of it is east of Gweedore, where the little river flows out by Gortahork; and here is a thing of much interest, the Cloghaneely College, where folk go to study Ulster Irish amongst those who have it for their native speech. Still farther east is Falcarragh, and the view which Mr. Williams has given adds less than due emphasis to the astonishing castellated outline of Tory where it rises out of a tremendous depth of water. I never landed there, though I often talked with the Tory fishers, including one who had made his fortune at the goldfields and come back to the place of his birth among the rocks and the fish heads. There is one sheltered spot, one growing bush, and one only, on Tory. There, of course, Irish is the language, and they maintain the practice of verse, chiefly for purposes of satire; quarrels are revenged in rhyme. I talked to a red-bearded mountainy man near Gortahork about this, but he said it was a peevish thing to do; he would rather have a skelp at a man. In truth there is an old feud between Tory and the shore, and fierce battles have been waged. I do not know why so few people stop at Falcarragh: there is a good little hotel, the views are beautiful, there are three little rivers, all holding salmon, and, at the point where the longest of them flows out across the long range of sand beach west of Horn Head, there is a view of Tory and of Horn Head that passes all I know. Running water across sand, clean sand dunes and grey bent, pure illimitable sea and high cliffs, sunsmitten or in shadow--there is landscape reduced to the simplest terms of a broad elemental beauty.

Also at Falcarragh there must be the makings of a links equal to any in Ireland. The line of dunes runs for several miles along the sea, ending in one of the strangest natural features I know, the huge mountain of clean sand which centuries of westerly gales have piled up against the rocky mass of Horn Head. That famous head is in truth an island, the counterpart of Tory on its seaward face, yet in the gap between it and Dunfanaghy such a deposit of sand has accumulated that only a small causeway has been needed to give access from the mainland to the tiny farms and the one demesne.

If in Donegal you want to buy Donegal homespun, Falcarragh is a good market for the product, since some weaving is done about there with an eye to local wear; and what the Donegal man means to wear, the Donegal housewife "tramps" in soapsuds and water till the web thickens into a fabric fit to turn weather. On the western shore, by Carrick and Ardara, where is now the headquarters of this industry, cloth is produced solely for export, and the English ladies and gentlemen for whom it is designed seek softness and fineness rather than solidity. Indeed the countryfolk themselves treat this merchandise with frank scorn: they fancy something far less flimsy for their own use, and in old days, when nothing but homespun was worn, it used to be sent to a tacking mill and battered till the cloth had the thickness of felt. But the tacking mill at Bunlin, whose big wooden mallets rising and falling used to interest us children, is a ruin now; and the homespun of to-day, with its multitude of pleasant colours, is very different from the massive greys or heavy indigo-dyed frieze which used to come from that mill.

The industry has been a godsend to that country, and one wet day in the little village of Carrick was redeemed to me by the chance of seeing all these folk, men and women, come marching over the hills with the baled cloth on their backs, and then watching the bargaining that proceeded among the various buyers. I bought, too, but I believe the merchants will not allow the people to sell to tourists any more.

I have not written yet of that western shore which stretches southward from Dungloe (much haunted by sea-trout fishers) to Glenties, Ardara, Carrick, and Killybegs. The most beautiful place that I know on it is at the mouth of the Gweebarra River where it flows out due west between a line of sandhills which shine dazzling white in the sun against the immensity of blue. No place is less known; but you can reach it easily from Portnoo, where is a hotel. And off Portnoo is an island where on certain days in summer a pilgrimage takes place, at spring tides, for it is essential to walk barefoot to the island. The ceremonies performed with certain stones are Christianized in form, but evidently had an origin long before Christianity. Glenties, some eight or ten miles farther south, is at a point where several glens converge (_na Gleantai_, the Glens) in the valley of the Ownea River, famous for its salmon fishing, which is now vested in purchasing tenants who have attempted to introduce co-operative preservation. If the experiment succeeds it will mean better preservation than has ever been known before; if it fail, I fear that one great source of the salmon supply will be wiped out, with loss to sport, and with loss much graver to all the labouring fishers who live by that industry. But, as things stand, the man who wants good fishing is more likely to get it cheap at Glenties or Ardara than any other place known to me. In both towns there is a decent hotel. Ardara stands near the outfall of the Ownea but actually on a smaller river, the Owentogher, which is not only very picturesque, but a good stream for salmon and sea trout, if only it could be preserved. And one of the most pleasant bits of fishing I ever had was on a tiny stream, the Brocky, which comes down a mile farther on and was fishable before the tearing flood had subsided in the bigger rivers.

Glenties and Ardara are places where you go for sport, though the beauty of mountain and river is all about you. But for scenery Carrick and Killybegs are your destination. Killybegs is the terminus of that light railway which runs from Donegal town along the north shore of Donegal bay, past the Marquis of Cunningham's wooded demesne at first, but gradually getting into wilder country, till at last it reaches this trim little town on its magnificent harbour. Warships use that harbour, and there is nowadays a good fishing fleet operating from it for the herring and mackerel; but of other commerce it knows little. Yet for the lover of boating and bathing it would be hard to discover a more attractive spot. There, too, you can see the parent factory of the Donegal carpet trade; and pretty it is to see the big looms, with a row of six or seven little girls bareheaded (and often barefooted) in front of each, with nimble fingers knotting on the tufts of richly coloured wool, or driving them down into their place in the solid fabric, while the pattern grows slowly before you on the wide warp. It is odd that so rare a merchandise should come out of these impoverished regions, for no costlier carpets are made; but labour is cheap, and willing, and skilful, and nowhere else is factory work done under more wholesome or happy conditions. All the big room seemed to be a-ripple and a-play with the young faces and the swift, graceful movements of these children, for most of them are no more than children; and small though the wage they earn, it is a big thing in that countryside, where the old-age pensioner with five shillings a week seemed at first to himself or herself rich beyond imagination. There is another of the factories at Kilcar, halfway to Carrick, built in a sheltered nook almost by the sea; and another in the wild tract between Gweedore and Falcarragh.

To the west of Killybegs begins that wonderful line of cliff stretching away past Carrick and Glen Columbkille, and girdling all the projecting headland till it runs back to Loughros Bay, near Ardara. For wildness and for majesty this region has no equal, except in Achill; and it has what Achill lacks, the charm of rivers. Mr. Williams's pictures illustrate well the coastline, which even when it is low runs out with huge flag stones and giant boulders into the deep--fit buttress against such waves as roll in there even on a day of calm. Everything is big there; distances are long, and a mile never seems to get you far in any direction. It is a country to walk, the finest of all the countries known to me; but I would gladly supplement my walking with a bicycle, travelling one of the roads as far as it will carry me and then leaving it simply by the ditch at the roadside, among the osmunda fern which grows everywhere free as the heather. It commits you to return that way; but what you leave by the roadside is as safe as if Argus watched it--unless, indeed, some mountainy heifer should pass that way and eat it: they will chew anything from a fishing rod to a suit of clothes. I have seen embarrassed bathers pursuing an active cow, who carried essential garments in her mouth, still masticating them even while she pranced in her clumsy gallop.--Carrick is the centre for this country and Slieve League the great excursion; it is a fine walk down by the little port of Teelin and then up the track which winds along the cliff edge of the mountain--perhaps the finest view of all is when you are halfway, with seven or eight hundred feet of sheer cliff below you and the steep face towering up another thousand above. At the somewhat overrated hazard of the One Man's Pass you would fall, I dare say, sixteen hundred feet before you reached the water; but from the top a pebble may be dropped two thousand feet plumb into the sea.

Horn Head is only seven or eight hundred feet; yet because the cliff face there is undercut, and the Horns themselves project so oddly, it always seemed to me a dizzier place than the greater cliff. The really marvellous thing at Slieve League is that view across Donegal Bay to the mountains of Sligo, Benbulbin of magic fame, and along the wild Mayo coast that stretches out and out to the west till the long promontory is finished off by island rocks, the Stags of Broadhaven.

Yet, since I scorn to deceive, what endears Carrick to me is not its cliff scenery, but its little rivers and its people. I know the rivers are too small: you cannot seriously hope to kill salmon there except in a raging flood, and then your flood runs off in a couple of hours: I hooked four fish there inside the first hour after breakfast, killed two of them, and never touched another all day. But for sheer beauty; for infinite variety in the shape and colour of flowing water (the most beautiful thing to me on God's earth); for pools where the eddy swirls past clean rock with glossy ferns in every crevice; for banks where the scent of bog-myrtle is all about as you brush through the heather; for anything that can entice the eye of an angler, I never saw the equal of that main stream. The little Owen Buidhe, too, in its boggy glen, has attractions of its own, deeper pools and seductive corners; but it is the Glen River, flowing down from Meenaneary, that haunts my vision when in London I crave for the things that I desired in boyhood, and love more in middle age.