Stephen Lucius Gwynn

“ I have reached it only from the sea, and never anywhere in Ireland have I seen people so far removed from civilization as rowed out in their curraghs to meet us. Yet—so odd a place is Ireland—it is ten chances to one but in the loneliest of these creeks and mountains you would find folk who knew the great cities of America, and who if they landed in Boston or New York would find friends and kindred in plenty to greet them and help them to a living. ”

“ Poverty is a show there: in the village of Keel can still be seen beehive-shaped wigwams rather than houses; and it always seems as if the elements there had been too strong for man and left him huddled and cowering on the earth. Famine, or at least continuous underfeeding through generations, has helped that work. Yet the Achill folk set out hardily year by year in companies, men in their troops, girls in theirs, to field labour in different parts of Great Britain. It is thus that the population of some thousands supports itself on that barren promontory—pitifully enough, heaven knows. ”

“ Off the mouth of the bay, making a natural breakwater for its superb natural harbour, lie the three islands of Aran which are, like Burren, built up of flat limestone slabs—in whose crevices there grows herbage, sweet and nourishing for cattle; but how human beings, let alone cows, travel those rocks without breaking a leg a week in the fissures passes all comprehension. ”

“ Galway town, once you have entered it, is depressing beyond words, but also more picturesque than any town in Ireland. A hundred years ago it was the greatest port of the country, in its own way a rival to Bristol and Liverpool. Those were the days of small towns, and Galway numbered forty thousand people. To-day the population is barely fourteen thousand—but it is not the drop in numbers that signifies most. Go about the streets and you will find tall, solid buildings of black stone built very high, for the town was walled and space was scarce in it. ”

“ Still, when you get to Connemara or Mayo, you will not grudge these folk the access to a market which makes lobster fishing almost the most profitable of their industries. Along Galway Bay you look out over one of the most beautiful scenes in Ireland, and the most barren. Across, opposite you, is the mountainous shore of Clare, where, in the limestone district called Burren, Ireton (down there on some errand of mercy) reported that there was not water enough to drown a man, soil enough to bury him, nor wood enough to hang him. ”

“ Killary is the deep narrow cleft which strikes far in past the base of Mweelrea, the highest mountain in all Connaught, and runs up to where the flank of the Devil's Mother divides the village of Leenane from the outflow of the Erriff river, plunging over the fall at Aasleigh. I recite a litany of names well known to every angler in the west—and to more than anglers, for the hotel at Leenane is a halting place on the coachroad which follows the coast from Clifden to Westport; and no sea lough in all Ireland is more beautiful than Killary on its own day. ”

“ It is perhaps well to remember such facts in visiting a country where poverty stares you in the face, where, at least in certain parts, it has become a disease. Courtesy in the poor is apt to seem obsequious; yet courtesy is of all things most native to Connaught, and it is finest shown where the folk have acquired some stable security. I fished one afternoon with an old man in a lake in the mountains behind Leenane, a poor man but evidently not needy; he and his wife pressed on us the best they had to give, and because our fishing had been unsuccessful, wanted to refuse all payment. ”

“ Here was the boundary and pass between Connaught and Munster, the country of the O'Kellys, Hy Many; and no place in Ireland was so often fought over. As you go south from Athenry to Ennis, the whole landscape is studded with old castles and peel-towers, set for the most part in pairs, every one watching his neighbour, like players lined up at football. ”

“ It is a tragic memory: most of the memories in Connaught have a tragic cast. This windy, western province has always had its double dose of the sorrows in a sorrowful land; and the Connaughtman's gaiety wears a touch of the recklessness which knows some kinship with despair. Yet to make holiday in, to hunt or shoot or fish in, no part of all Ireland is better, nor is there any where the country folk have more enchanting and endearing ways. Famine, the gaunt spectre which haunted them, has been banished from their ken ”

“ Yet the population of Aran is by no means the little dark type; many fair-haired women, many a red-headed man are among them, and not a few of almost giant stature. It is not surprising, since for many centuries the O'Briens of Clare were overlords of the islands, and the Clan Dalcais were Milesian, if any ever could claim that title.
Generally speaking, too, Aran is more in touch with Clare than with Connemara; though it serves as an intermediate centre for the traffic in poteen—illicit whisky—distilled in creeks and bogs along Galway Bay. ”

“ Westport town has, what is rare in western Ireland, the look of being cared for: trees planted in a Mall by the little river make a pleasant feature, due to the fact that Lord Sligo's demesne adjoins the town, and that the lords territorial have here always been resident and always capable and executive persons. Wooded slopes, planted with an eye to beauty as well as to shelter, tell the same story and enrich the landscape, which is best seen from a low hill above the parsonage. ”

“ Yet, oddly enough, these men whose daily life is one long risk of drowning, who endanger themselves times innumerable in the mere act of entering or leaving a curragh when a sea runs, are more frightened than women by the unknown adventure of sailing in a strong vessel clear away to sea, and when they first lose sight of land and see only water round them, they will lie down and give themselves over for lost. ”

“ Life is not so difficult here as it was formerly: for nowadays the trade in lobster fishing becomes very profitable on this unexploited coast, with its profusion of kelp-covered rocks and islands, and they have learnt in late years to take their toll of the salmon droves that pass this headland, making for Galway or the Shannon. What they have to sell, what they win at risk of life in the tremendous sea that runs among their rocks, they can sell now at a fair price. ”

“ The people have changed very little in themselves since Lever wrote of them: where food has always been too scarce, as at the extremity of the Mullet peninsula curving about Blacksod Bay, famine and famine fever have weakened the stock terribly, and in such places you can see that looped and windowed raggedness and that squalor of hovels which go to make up the Englishman's conception of the sister island. ”

“ Galway Bay oysters, from Red Bank on the Clare side, to Ardfry where the Department of Agriculture controls a spawning ground a few miles from Galway itself, are not only the best in flavour but the freest from any suspicion of pollution of all oysters in the world, and in Galway at the proper season they should always be demanded by every visitor while it is still time: for the English market will almost certainly engross them, when it becomes really aware of their existence. ”

“ The men's clothes, however, keep to antique and excellent fashions: throughout Galway, east of the Corrib, almost everyone wears the cut-away skirted coat of dark heavy frieze, and for the most part its wearers hold to the custom of clean-shaven face with a narrow strip of close-cropped whisker past the cheekbones. ”

“ Its long street of thatched houses, its marketplace crowded with Irish-speaking men and women all in characteristic western dress, make it more typically Irish than any town in Connaught except only Galway—and Galway is a thing apart. The modern cathedral, too, is of interest for the sake of sculptured heads wrought by a local craftsman who was a kind of Cruickshank in stone—preserving in his craft a glorious tradition of the place. ”

“ Apart from this the road is over flat land, little raised above the level of Lough Corrib, till you near Galway, when it rises over low hills of limestone rock, in springtime blue with gentian, at all times singular enough with their flooring of stone. At the last rise you reach a view point, looking west from which the city comes suddenly into sight with its bay beyond, and beyond the bay the hills of Burren. ”

“ There is much talk of a Spanish strain on this coast, and undoubtedly commerce was constant between Galway Bay and the Iberian peninsula: but the truth is that you have in western Ireland, as in western Spain, survivals of a race which the red-haired people pushed off the good lands towards the limit of the sea. On the Claddagh at Galway I have seen a man at work in his cottage mending a net, who might have posed for the model of a Basque peasant ”

“ The red sandstone of which it is wrought lent itself freely to carving, and the unknown and unnamed workers bestowed a wealth of detail upon it, blending, after the Celtic fashion, shapes of man, bird, and beast, into the interlaced scroll of the design. ”

“ Striking in, then, behind Kilbreedy Mountain, which sunders upper Lough Mask from the main water, you soon come out on the shore of the lake, and I wish you the luck to see two as pretty girls as met me just where the counties join at the little Owenbrin river. A few miles of tolerable road will bring you to the prosperous-looking little village of Tourmakeady, where is a hotel. Here is fishing to be had for pike and for big trout, and here much that is pleasant and profitable can be studied. ”

“ Here, still, most of the people wear not boots but pampooties—moccasins of raw hide: and men and women alike have the free forward rising gait of those who walk as nature designed man to walk, springing off the ball of the toe. ”

“ Nearly all are in homespun homewoven cloth, grey or dyed with indigo and madder: the women wear grey shawls, the men frequently a tam-o'-shanter, but oftener the black corded caubeen which is the most picturesque of headgear. Inishmaan is the place to see Aran in its most characteristic aspect and community, hardly touched by the modern world—though many a man and woman there knows well the great cities of eastern America. ”

“ Now, you hardly buy a lobster along that coast; a company has contracted for the whole take, fishermen bring them in their curraghs to a depot where they are put into anchored crates, until the steamer comes up to collect and direct them into that vast maw which has its tentacles exploring the very shores of Iceland and Russia for daily supply. ”

“ From Dugort on the north shore there is boating to be had, which in fine weather may bring you into seal-haunted caves, under cliffs where the wild goats scramble in herds; and you may see readily enough strange creatures of the deep, sunfish, huge basking sharks, with every seabird that frequents these islands. Once it was my luck to effect a landing on a flat island rock some ten miles out, called the Bills of Achill, where I suppose not once in three years man sets his foot. ”

“ All these things you can see from Cong by easy pleasant excursions, to be combined if you so choose with fishing in waters where trout if caught are worth the catching; and when you have had your fill of Cong, the steamer will take you to Galway, down that long narrow lake with rick-shaped Benlevi steep above Cong and Leckavrea making a cliff on the southwest. To the east all is flat plain, the long level tract of limestone which stretches out to the Shannon, and which on this side of Tuam is for the most part stone and nothing else. ”

“ Work on the whaling station is jealously guarded for southern Inishkee; woe betide the man even of the northern island who should try to get a share of it. As for the folk of the mainland, Inishkee employs them (at a very modest wage) to attend to its potato patches and oat fields in the summer, while the privileged folk are at a special wage on the whaler's work. So far as I can learn, protection has never been more rigorously employed than by this energetic community. ”

“ I would not say that it is of all provinces the most Irish; nobody has better rights to stand for Ireland than the "boys of Wexford", and at a Wexford fair or meeting you will see scores of big farmers the very picture of Mr. Punch's John Bull, only not so round about the abdomen. But Connaught, Connaughtmen, and Connaught ways certainly come nearest to an Englishman's traditional conception of Ireland and its inhabitants; the stage Irishman is based upon Connaught characteristics. In West Mayo people do say "shtruck" (or in moments of emotion "shhtrruck") ”

“ But you can see also in markets in north Mayo many a handsome old man, springy and active even in his extreme age, who wears the blue tail coat, with its complement of brass buttons, which perhaps his father handed down to him—and a fine figure he makes in it, especially if he still keeps to the tight knee breeches and buckled shoes which were universal in his boyhood. ”

“ For the great sculptured arch which can be seen in the ancient cathedral, restored more than a quarter of a century ago for Protestant worship, is the finest example of native Irish decorative architecture, before Continental influences came in. ”

“ The result is that whereas old-time whalers could only kill the "right" whale which is fat and leisurely, and stays long on the surface, your modern captain makes prey of everything, manœuvring his steamer so as to get on to the whale's line, and fire the harpoon into him when he rises porpoise fashion for one swift tumble. ”

“ Land on Inishturk or Inishark, and the headman of the island will receive you with majestic courtesy—and he is still in some cases called the "king". But if you go there to collect rates for the county, I cannot promise you so kind a hospitality: there is unending though intermittent war, the islanders affirming (not unreasonably) that it is no business of theirs to pay for maintaining roads and bridges on the mainland.
CROAGH PATRICK, FROM OLDHEAD, CLEW BAY
Clare Island is somewhat unlike the rest, its people having always depended on agriculture rather than on fishing ”

“ At the Franciscan monastery, a civil-spoken stranger will always find a welcome, and, at least while Brother Leo is still living, one of the best of talkers to instruct him in the history of all that countryside. ”