Sligo

“ We finally reached Sligo; and Sligo is quite a place, both historically and commercially. It has a population of 10,274, and is an important seaport town in close neighborhood to scenery such as falls to the lot of very few business towns. It is remarkably well situated in the centre of a richly wooded plain, encircled on all sides, save that of the sea, by high mountains, the ascent of which commences within three to four miles of the town, while on one side of it is Lough Gill, almost equal in beauty to any lake in Ireland, and on the other a wide and sheltered bay. ”

“ Sligo, with its well-built houses and bustling streets, has every appearance of being prosperous, and I have been told that it is one of the few towns in Ireland which is growing in population. It has had its share of battles and sieges, for Red Hugh O'Donnell captured it from the English, and then the English captured it from Red Hugh, and camped in the monastery and did what they could to destroy it ”

“ Some five miles southward of Sligo is a gloomy and tree-bordered pond, a great gathering-place of water-fowl, called, because of its form, the Heart Lake. It is haunted by stranger things than heron, snipe, or wild duck. Out of this lake, as from the white square stone in Ben Bulben, issues an unearthly troop. Once men began to drain it; suddenly one of them raised a cry that he saw his house in flames. They turned round, and every man there saw his own cottage burning. They hurried home to find it was but faery glamour. ”

“ Sligo, 1, a maritime county of North-West Ireland (98) , in the province of Connaught; fronts the Atlantic on the N. between Mayo (W.) and Leitrim (E.) , Roscommon forming the S. boundary; the land, sloping N. to the coast from the Ox Mountains, is chiefly under grass for cattle pasture, and divided into small holdings; Sligo Bay is a fine sheet of water, and in the S. and E. are the picturesque Loughs Arrow and Gill; the manufacture of coarse woollens and linens and fishing are the principal industries; the Moy, Owenmore, and Garvogue are navigable rivers. ”

“ Knocknarea, with its strange shape, dominates the whole landscape, and is in sight all the way to Sligo, for the train describes a half-circle around it. Sligo itself is a considerable town, with more bustle about its streets than is usual in western Ireland, and the proprietor of its principal hotel is a canny individual who follows the precept, once so popular with American railroads, of charging all the traffic will bear. ”

“ To have it said
out in Dublin that you are a class of man never has
clean boots but of a Sunday!
Conan: They'll do well enough without you
meddling!
Celia: Clean them yourself so! (Gives him a
rag and blacking and goes on dusting.)
(Sings.) (Air, "City of Sligo.")
"We may tramp the earth
For all that we're worth,
But what odds where you and I go,
We never shall meet
A spot so sweet
As the beautiful city of Sligo." ”

“ Sligo looks nice and clean. Belfast is large, prosperous, beautiful; but many of her fine buildings and public monuments look as if they required to have their faces washed, but Sligo buildings are fair and clean. We pass a rather nice building, suppose it a school, but we are informed it is the rent-office of the late Lord Palmerston. That astute nobleman showed his usual good sense, if it was his choice, to own lands in the sunny vales of Sligo instead of the hungry hills of Leitrim. If some have greatness thrust upon them, some in the same way inherit lands. ”

“ Within a few years, enterprises well directed, has transformed the district from being a "most distressful country" into a thriving, self-respecting, self-advancing locality. Killala, six miles from Ballina, is of interest as the point at which General Humbert and 1,100 Frenchmen invaded Ireland in 1798. Sligo is the most thriving town in the west of Ireland. Its public buildings, its commerce, and its picturesque position, are one and all notable. Sligo Abbey, a structure of the thirteenth century, is a very remarkable pile of ruins. ”

“ The gray cairn on the hill, when day sinks drowned in dew,
Being weary of the world’s empires, bow down to you,
Master of the still stars, and of the flaming door.”
{189}
Sligo itself, with its ten thousand souls and its important and matter-of-fact seafaring trades, is a centre for journeying afoot or awheel amid many charming scenes of lough and lake and sea and shore.
Southward is Carrick on Shannon, the gateway to the Shannon’s lakes and rivers; northward is the Bay of Donegal, backed by its famous rugged “Highlands;” ”

“ The sea was gray as a gull's back, with dark shadows under the cliffs and white tresses of foam along the headlands. At evening a cold wind brought the rain beating in from the ocean. Thus the Fomorians landed at the Cataract of the Oaks, and marched inland to the plain now called Tirerril in Sligo. The murky sky spread over the black and withered waste of the plain, hemmed in with gloomy hills, wild rocks and ravines, and with all the northern horizon broken by distant mountains. Here Indec and Balor, and Breas the cause of their coming, fixed their camp. ”

“ Sligo, by Anne, daughter of Alexander Carrol of Dublin, was born at Temple House on 10 Feb. 1787, and was educated at Trinity College, Dublin. He was very well read, of courteous manner, and full of Irish humour and anecdote. In early life he resided on his ample Irish estates, served the office of a justice of the peace, and held a commission in the Sligo militia, a regiment which in due time he rose to command. As a conservative he sat for the county of Sligo from 17 May 1831 to September 1841. ”

“ Most of our readers are aware that Sligo adjoins Mayo—nay, the barony of Tirawley, in which the murder was perpetrated, is only separated by the river Moy from the county of Sligo, so that one portion of the town of Ballina is in Mayo, and the other in Sligo; and yet, in all probability, were it not that Providence directed the steps of the woman to that stream for the first and last time in her life, he might have remained there undiscovered to the end of his natural life, which could not then be far distant, his head being completely silvered at the time of his apprehension. ”

“ The walk across the range, from Bundoran to Sligo, is full of interest to a mountaineer, and the descent into the valley north of Sligo from King's Mountain is one that will never be effaced from his memory. It is not easy to find the passages leading down. The valley is a vast amphitheatre almost enclosed by cliffs, sheer and, including talus, about 1,000 ft. high.
It is always a pleasant experience to follow the crest of a [Pg 156] line of limestone cliffs. Similar cliffs on a smaller scale are those of Moher and Aran, in the county Clare. ”

“ The streets are thronged with barefoot women and ragged lads with their threepenny loads of turf. The patient ass, with his straw harness and creels, is the prevailing beast of burden everywhere I have travelled since I entered Enniskillen with the exception of Sligo.
Sligo town, like Belfast in a lesser degree, has the appearance of having something to do and of paying the people something who do it. The traders who come to Ballina market seem to trade in a small way as at Manor Hamilton. ”

“ I found a supporter at Sligo in my elderly uncle, a man of fifty-three or fifty-four, with the habits of a much older man. He had never left the West of Ireland, except for a few days to London every year, and a single fortnight’s voyage to Spain on board a trading schooner, in his boyhood. He was in politics a Unionist and Tory of the most obstinate kind, and knew nothing of Irish literature or history. ”

“ Sligo.
Station—Sligo, thence by car or steamer. During the season public cars and a steamer run four times daily between Sligo and the course; fare, 6d. each way.
Hotels—In Sligo there are good hotels, and good accommodation at Ross's.
Visitors—1s. per day, 2s. 6d. per week (if introduced) ; not introduced 5s. per week, 15s. per month.
Number of holes, 9. Amateur record, 84.
The air and scenery at the Links are splendid. The grass is ideal turf. The distance round is 1-1/2 miles. The hazards are natural sand bunkers, broken ground, bent, walls, etc. The lies are good.
GALWAY Galway. ”

“ Sligo attained some importance as early as 1245 as the residence of Maurice Fitzgerald, Earl of Kildare, who there founded a castle and monastery. The castle played an important part in the struggles of the English against the Irish chiefs in the thirteenth century and subsequently, in which the rival O'Conors and O'Donnells were mainly concerned. Sligo suffered in the massacres of 1641, when it was taken by Sir Frederick Hamilton and the abbey burned. ”

“ Between Sligo and Rosses Point, there is a tongue of land covered with coarse grass that runs out into the sea or the mud according to the state of the tide. It is the place where dead horses are buried. ”

“ Everyone I knew well in Sligo despised Nationalists and Catholics, but all disliked England with a prejudice that had come down perhaps from the days of the Irish Parliament. I knew stories to the discredit of England, and took them all seriously. My mother had met some English woman who did not like Dublin because the legs of the men were too straight, and at Sligo, as everybody knew, an Englishman had once said to a car-driver, “if you [Pg 37] people were not so lazy, you would pull down the mountain and spread it out over the sand and that would give you acres of good fields.” ”

“ Carrowmore is more easily accessible than Carnac. The inns at Sligo are better than those at Auray, the remains arc within three miles of the town, and the scenery near Sligo is far more beautiful than that of the Morbihan; yet hundreds of our countrymen rush annually to the French megaliths, and bring home sketch-books full of views and measurements, but no one thinks of the Irish monuments, and no views of them exist that are in any way accessible to the public. ”

“ That lake—Lough na Fooey—lies midway, beautiful itself but unutterably wild, between the two most beautiful centres in Connaught: between Killary Bay and the upper end of Lough Corrib. With Lough na Fooey for centre, a radius of twenty miles would take in all or almost all the scenic beauty of County Galway—and a good deal of what is finest in Mayo. North of that again is fine scenery about Westport: then comes the superb cliff-front of Achill: then after a long interval, you come again to Sligo with yet another noble grouping of mountain, lake, river, and sea. ”

“ The Earl of Clanricarde cannot expect to live a great while longer. He is already an infirm old man and his heir, Lord Sligo of Westport, a nephew, is almost as old as he. Lord Sligo is one of the largest land holders in Ireland. He owns 114,000 acres in the north, which is mostly grazing land, and his tenants are miserably poor, living in squalid hovels scattered over the estate. He does nothing for them, and exacts the last halfpenny of his rent. His heir, who will soon come into both the Clanricarde and Sligo estates, is his son, Lord Henry Ulick Browne, of whom very little is known. ”

“ Thus on referring to a recent history of the County Sligo in two volumes by a distinguished author to see how far Irish prevailed in a certain barony, I find the fact that any other language than English either was or is spoken in Sligo, so far as I could see, quietly ignored. It is the same with most authors of local and county histories.
[33] I published this with a translation in the "Journal of Ulster Archæology."
[34] "Das Englische wird vom gemeinen Volke entweder gar nicht oder sehr unvolkommen erlernt" ("Briefe Aus Irland," Leipzig, 1785, p. 214) . ”

“ There is more waste land to the acre in Connemara than in any other part of the United Kingdom, and the Marquis of Sligo owns the largest share of it.
The Marquis of Sligo owns the town of Westport, and it is built around the entrance to his beautiful park. He is more generous than most of the earls, because he allows the public free of charge and without restriction to enjoy it with him. The gates are always open to young and old, rich and poor,—on foot, on bicycle, or in vehicles, except automobiles. ”

“ The live stock consists chiefly of cattle, pigs and poultry. Coarse linens for domestic purposes are manufactured and coarse pottery is also made. The Sligo, Leitrim and Northern Counties railway, connecting Sligo with Enniskillen, crosses the northern part of the county, by way of Manor Hamilton; the Mullingar and Sligo line of the Midland Great Western touches the south-western boundary of the county, with a station at Carrick-on-Shannon; while connecting with this line at Dromod is the Cavan and Leitrim railway to Ballinamore and Arigna, and to Belturbet in county Cavan. ”

“ Sligo to Belmullet, calling at Rosses Point, Ballycastle, and Belderrig, to land and embark passengers. It is a favourite tourist route in summer, affording a splendid view of the wild coast scenery of the West of Ireland. The distance run is about 70 miles, and the time occupied about six hours. The steamers of the Sligo Steam Navigation Company, sailing between Liverpool and Sligo, are exposed to all the force and fury of the Atlantic gales, as they steam along the north and north-west coasts of Ireland. ”

“ In a glow of sunshine after the rain— smiles after tears—we enter Sligo.
We draw up in the open street, everyone alights from our elevation as they can. No one takes notice of any other by way of help. Each gets off and goes his several way. The land agent, who has sat in high-bred silence all the way, pays his fare and goes off on the car that awaits him. The rest disperse. I pay my fare. The driver asks to be remembered. I mentally wonder what for. I paid a porter to place my bag on the car. I got up as I could, I scramble down as I may. I will pay another porter to take me to a hotel. ”