County Wicklow

“ As late as the 17th century the mountainous country south of Dublin offered a retreat to the lawless, and it was not until 1606 that the boundaries of the county received definition in this direction, along with the formation of the county Wicklow. Although so near the seat of government 67,142 acres of profitable land were forfeited in the Rebellion of 1641 and 34,536 acres in the Revolution of 1688. ”

“ HERE and there in County Wicklow there are a number of little known places—places with curiously melodious names, such as Aughavanna, Glenmalure, Annamoe, or Lough Nahanagan—where the people have retained a peculiar simplicity, and speak a language in some ways more Elizabethan than the English of Connaught, where Irish was used till a much later date. In these glens many women still wear old-fashioned bonnets, with a frill round the face, and the old men, when they are going to the fair, or to Mass, are often seen in curiously-cut frock-coats, tall hats, and breeches buckled at the knee. ”

“ The older people in County Wicklow, as in the rest of Ireland, still show a curious affection for the landed classes wherever they have lived for a generation or two upon their property. I remember an old woman, who told me, with tears streaming on her face, how much more lonely the country had become since the 'quality' had gone away, and gave me a long story of how she had seen her landlord shutting up his house and leaving his property, and of the way he had died afterwards, when the 'grievance' of it broke his heart. ”

“ The chief river in the county is the Liffey, which rises in the Wicklow mountains about 12 m. S.W. of Dublin, and, after running about 50 m., empties itself into Dublin Bay. The course of the river is so tortuous that 40 m. may be traversed and only 10 gained in direction. The scenery along the banks of the Liffey is remarkably beautiful. The mountains which occupy the southern border of the county are the extremities of the great group belonging to the adjacent county Wicklow. The principal summits are the group containing Glendoo (1919 ft.) ”

“ To be quite plain, the tramp in real life, Hamlet and Faust in the arts, are variations; but the maniac in real life, and Des Esseintes and all his ugly crew in the arts, are freaks only.
The Oppression of the Hills
AMONG the cottages that are scattered through the hills of County Wicklow I have met with many people who show in a singular way the influence of a particular locality. These people live for the most part beside old roads and pathways where hardly one man passes in the day, and look out all the year on unbroken barriers of heath. ”

“ The county of Wicklow, with parts of Dublin, Kildare, and Carlow, was outside the new Pale and excluded from protection. All who resided within the doomed area after February 28 were to be treated as enemies, but permitted to live and graze their stock upon such waste or untenanted lands as might be assigned to them in the protected region. As soon as the appointed day had passed, Ludlow himself went to Talbotstown to plant a garrison, and then carefully searched Wicklow with horse and foot. ”

“ CARLOW, a county of Ireland in the province of Leinster, bounded N. by the counties Kildare and Wicklow, E. by Wicklow and Wexford, S. by Wexford, and W. by Queen’s county and Kilkenny. Excepting Louth, it is the smallest county in Ireland, having an area of 221,424 acres, or about 346 sq. m. The surface of the county is in general level or gently undulating, and of pleasing appearance, except the elevated tract of land known as the ridge of Old Leighlin (Gallows Hill Bog, 974 ft.) ”

“ Wicklow itself is a picturesque crescent-shaped coast town. Its name is borne by the Gap at Glendalough, the county, and that famous headland which juts out into St. George’s Channel, as only a few promontories do outside the school geographies.
The ancient Irish called it Gill-Mantain; but, when it fell before the onrush of the Danes, its name was changed to Wykinlo. The chief architectural remains are those of a Franciscan friary of the reign of Henry III., and an Anglo-Norman castle completed in the fourteenth century. ”

“ The Dublin and South-Eastern railway skirts the coast by way of Bray and the town of Wicklow, touching it again at Arklow, with a branch line from Woodenbridge junction to Shillelagh. A branch of the Great Southern & Western line from Sallins skirts the west of the county by Baltinglass.
Population and Administration.—The population (64,492 in 1891, 60,824 in 1901) decreases to a less extent than the average of the Irish counties, and emigration is considerable. Of the total about 80% are Roman Catholics, and 18% Protestant Episcopalians; about 80% forms the rural population. ”

“ Longford and Wicklow. Wexford and Ferns are given as separate counties, and Tipperary, reverting to ancient custom, is divided into the County and the Cross. Ards disappears as a separate county. All the shires named appear to have made returns. Thirty-six cities and boroughs are enumerated instead of twenty-nine, only Carrickfergus and Downpatrick neglecting to make returns. Athy is omitted, and Cashel, Inistioge, Dingle, Callan, Philipstown, Maryborough, Swords, and Downpatrick are added. For some unexplained reason the counties of Cork and Sligo returned three knights each. ”

“ Sheriffs were to be regularly appointed for Leix, Offaly, and for what is now the county of Wicklow. The Celtic countries between the Shannon and the Pale were, if possible, to be joined to Meath, or to the King’s and Queen’s Counties. Besides the five shires of the Pale, Carlow, Wexford, Kilkenny, Waterford, Tipperary, Cork, Kerry, and Limerick were, as a matter of course, to be considered under the law; and Desmond and Ormonde were to protect sheriffs and coroners in the execution of their duties. A Presidency would be established for Munster, and perhaps another for Connaught ”

“ NE. of Inverness, is the chief seat of the herring fishery in Scotland; Wick proper, with its suburbs Louisburgh and Boathaven, is on the N. of the river, and Pultneytown on the S.; has a few manufactures, with distilleries and breweries.
Wicked Bible, an edition of the Bible with the word not omitted from the Seventh Commandment, for issuing which in 1632 the printers were fined and the impression destroyed.
Wicklow (61) , a maritime county, with a capital of the name in Leinster, Ireland; is in great part mountainous and barren; has mines and quarries, and some fertile parts. ”

“ The thick line of trees that are near Rathnew makes the way intensely dark even on clear nights, and when one is riding quickly, the contrast, when one reaches the lights of Wicklow, is singularly abrupt. The town itself after nightfall is gloomy and squalid. Half-drunken men and women stand about, wrangling and disputing in the dull light from the windows, which is only strong enough to show the wretchedness of the figures which pass continually across them. ”

“ The county returns one member to parliament. Wick is the only royal burgh and one of the northern group of parliamentary burghs which includes Cromarty, Dingwall, Dornoch, Kirkwall and Tain. Caithness unites with Orkney and Shetland to form a sheriffdom, and there is a resident sheriff-substitute at Wick, who sits also at Thurso and Lybster. The county is under school-board jurisdiction, and there are academies at Wick and Thurso. The county council subsidizes elementary schools and cookery classes and provides apparatus for technical classes. ”

“ Gaol, and Market-house; ruins of Black Castle, on a huge rock rising from the sea; and some curious limestone caves at the base of Wicklow-head. Some remains still exist of the Abbey of Franciscan Friars, founded in the reign of Henry III. Little more is left than masses of broken walls with some fine arches; but being seated in private garden-ground, they have of late years escaped dilapidation. Wicklow ale is excellent. Ballybeg is a house and demesne near Wicklow, which to the lovers of mountain scenery cannot fail to afford gratification. ”

“ When they meet a wanderer on foot, these old people are glad to stop and talk to him for hours, telling him stories of the Rebellion, or of the fallen angels that ride across the hills, or alluding to the three shadowy countries that are never forgotten in Wicklow—America (their El Dorado) , the Union and the Madhouse.
'I had a power of children,' an old man who was born in Glenmalure said to me once; 'I had a power of children, and they all went to California, with what I could give them, and bought a bit of a field. Then, when they put in the plough, it stuck fast on them. ”

“ After much observation and thought I came to the conclusion that Sheriff Cunningham wanted his prisoner to go away; he would not like to hang the man; the citizens would not take Wilkins off his hands; if two fools chose to get up a little difficulty and one was killed, it was their own look-out; and anyway they were only foreigners. The fact was Wilkins was waiting for someone to purchase his farm.
The court-house for Will County was within view of the gaol, at the other side of the street, and one day I went over to look at it. ”

“ If we could leave this Poor Farm, having seen so [Pg 267] much and no more, we could think of it again only with feelings of pleasure that the county’s unfortunates were provided for so comfortably; but standing alone is an old brick building in which the insane are kept and this must be visited too. It is a gloomy place, coming out of the bright October sun, but when your eyes become accustomed to the shadows, you see what this county has provided for the insane who are neglected by the great mother state. ”

“ After a while I stopped at a lonely public-house to get a drink and rest for a moment before I came to the hills. Six or seven men were talking drearily at one end of the room, and a woman I knew, who had been marketing in Wicklow, was resting nearer the door. When I had been given a glass of beer, I sat down on a barrel near her, and we began to talk.
'Ah, your honour,' she said, 'I hear you're going off in a short time to Dublin, or to France, and maybe we won't be in the place at all when you come back. There's no fences to the bit of farm I have, the way I'm destroyed running. ”

“ In America and Australia, and on the Atlantic Ocean, you have all sorts, good people and bad people, and murderers and thieves, and pickpockets; but in this place there isn't a being isn't as good and decent as yourself or me.'
I saw he was one of the old people one sometimes meets with who emigrated when the people were simpler than they are at present, and who often come back, after a lifetime in the States, as Irish as any old man who has never been twenty miles from the town of Wicklow. ”

“ Chief Justice Keating and Baron Lynch, one of the new judges, presided at Wicklow. John Price, lately Receiver-General, but dismissed since Clarendon’s departure, was under his successor’s protection. When the new levies were in progress ‘the Merryboys,’ urged on by some of their clergy, made a general attack on the Protestants. Plunder was the order of the day. Price lived at Ballinderry in the Wicklow hills, and his neighbours gathered round him for mutual safety. ”

“ Again Garwood answered “Yes.”
“Very good,” the great man said. “How large [Pg 53] a town is Lincoln—we stop there this afternoon, do we not, Colonel?”
The colonel, too, said “Yes.”
“Agricultural community principally, I suppose? Are the farmers fairly prosperous in the county?”
“Oh, yes,” said Garwood, “they’ve had good crops this year.”
“Let me see, General Bancroft used to represent your district in Congress, did he not?” ”

“ Always they are the product either of some personal initiative or some organized effort. Does any county clearly lack that element of citizen leadership? Then the obvious need of the county is to bridge that gap. The rural population of America suffers (the word is all too weak) for the lack of a public community sense. Every “average” rural citizen is a unit, he does not travel in droves—so much for his independence. ”

“ This particular Poor Farm is in one of the richest counties of the state. The taxable property of that county is assessed at more than $45,000,000. It contains no large cities (the largest has a population of 15,000) , all but two per cent. of the people are native-born and the proportion of negroes is much less than in the state as a whole. ”

“ Wickson leaned forward on his table-desk intently.
"We have put the fear of God into them," Harris assured him. "They are prepared to nominate a ticket of good men."
Wickson waited, watching him, silent. (Harris remembers that silence well—as a justification.)
"We are to name them," he went on, "practically all. They reserve a few of the minor offices—as, for instance, the sheriff and the county clerk and recorder."
"If they nominate those three officers," Wickson said, in his high, unpleasant voice, "they'll have control of the local machinery of elections." ”

“ Will any man presume to affirm that Colonel Luttrell is the free choice of the electors of Middlesex? We all know the contrary. We all know that Mr Wilkes - whom I mention without either praise or censure - was the favorite of the county, and chosen by a very great and acknowledged majority to represent them in Parliament. ”

“ It would be difficult indeed to find in this wide land a county more prosperous, more pleasant to live in or more truly American than this one.
Four miles west of the county-seat is the Poor Farm. There is a substantial brick building for the poor and infirm which is heated by steam and lighted by acetylene gas. Scattered around the main building are some small wooden cabins, cheap in construction and not in very good repair, but, on the whole, comfortable for the old people, the paralytics and the epileptics who live in them. ”