Books: The Letters of Norah on her Tour Through Ireland

M >> Margaret Dixon McDougall >> The Letters of Norah on her Tour Through Ireland

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XXXVII.

CASTLEBAR--WASTING THE LAND--CASTLE BOURKE--BALLINTUBBER ABBEY.

Castlebar is not a large town at all. It is, like all other towns which
I have yet seen in Ireland, swarming with houses licensed to sell
liquors of different kinds to be drunk on the premises. In one street I
noticed on the side of the car on which I sat every house for quite a
little distance was a licensed whiskey shop.

The country people bring in ass-loads of what they have to sell. Very
few horses are to be seen in the hands of country people. Their trading
is on a decidedly small scale. The number of women who attend market
barefoot is the large majority. The ancient blue cloth cloak is the
prevailing hap. Upon a day my friend and I went out to see the glories
of Ballintubber Abbey. It was not possible for him to go in plain
clothes so soon again; so I had the appearance of an obnoxious lady of
the land, protected by a member of the force.

We drove out of Castlebar some seven or eight miles in the opposite
direction from where Pontoon Bridge lies. Our road lay for miles through
the country wasted of inhabitants by the Marquis of Sligo after the
great famine. Here and there a ruin where a cabin has been speaks that
it was once inhabited. The people tell that Lord Sligo's people were
rented the land in common by the settlement. All but two of one
settlement had paid; as those two could not pay, the whole were evicted.
My informant thought the settlement deserved eviction when they did not
subscribe and pay for the two who could not pay. He never seemed to
think they might not be able to do so, nor that it was cruel to evict
all for the sake of two.

Lord Lucan made a great wasting also at that time. Between the land near
the town devoted to private demesnes, laid out for glory and beauty, and
the lands wasted of inhabitants, you can travel miles and miles on more
than one side of Castlebar and see scarcely a tenant; a herd's cabin, a
police station, being the only houses. As soon as we come to barren land
over-run with stones, tenant houses become thicker.

We passed a cabin of indescribable wretchedness; a woman who might have
sat for a picture of famine stood at the door looking at us as we
passed. She had a number of little children, of the raggedest they were,
around her. Some time ago the father of these scarecrows was suspected
of having stolen some money, and a posse of the much enduring police
were sent out to search in the dead of the night. The family were in
bed. The bed was a few boards laid on stones, on which was spread a
little green hay, and among the loose hay they slept. The terror of the
little creatures pulled out of bed, while the wretched lair was searched
and they stood on the floor naked and shivering, was described to me by
one who assisted at the search. The bed was overturned, but the money
was not found. We drove on through the "stony streak" out to a clearer
grass country to Castle Bourke, a lonely looking ruin sitting among her
own desolations. It once covered a great deal of land, and there is
evidence of additions having been made to it at different times. This
Castle Bourke was one of the castles of the Queen of the West, the
celebrated Grace O'Malley. This castle is one of those given to Grace by
her husband of a year, Sir Richard Bourke.

There are still the remains of three buildings; one, said to be the
prison, was loopholed through the solid stone, some loopholes being
quite close to the ground, some straight through, some slanting, so as
to cover a man come from what direction he might, or what height soever,
even if he crept on the ground. Most of the castle, as well as these
buildings attached, had their roof on the floor, but in the square tower
of the castle proper still remains a stone staircase of the circular
kind.

As you go up this stair lit by narrow slits in the wall formed in hewn
stone you find an arched door at three different places admitting to
three arched galleries roofed and floored with stone. These have their
loophole slits to peep out of, or fire out of, stone spouts through
which molten lead or boiling water could be poured on the besiegers. In
one gallery a trap door let down to an underground passage which came
out at the lake some distance off. By this they could send a messenger
to raise the O'Malley clans, or by it could escape if necessary.

The goats of Mayo are inquisitive, and would persist in climbing the
circular stair and exploring the galleries. Whenever they found this
secret passage, for pure mischief they fell down and were killed, to the
great loss of their owners; so the secret passage is filled up, for
which I was very sorry.

We must take our car again and rattle back over the road to Ballintubber
Abbey. Ballintobar (town of the well) near this was one of the sacred
wells of St. Patrick. The abbey gates were locked, and it was some time
before the key was forthcoming. The church part of the abbey is entire
except the roof and the lofty bell tower. The arch that supported the
tower was forty-five feet in height, but I do not know how high the
tower was which it supported. At last the key was found and we were
admitted into the church. The chancel is still roofed, and here in these
solemn ruins, watched over by the crows and the jackdaws, the few
inhabitants still left assemble for mass. There is a rude wooden altar
and a few pine benches; the ivy waves from the walls; the jackdaws caw
querulously or derisively; the dead of the old race for centuries sleep
underneath, and now in a chancel the remnant gather on a Sabbath. I
cannot describe it as an architect or antiquarian, and these classes
know all about it better than I do, but I want to convey as far as I can
the impression it made upon me to others as delightfully ignorant on the
subject. The roof is made in the same way as all arched roofs of old
castles which I have yet seen, of thin stones laid edge-wise to form the
arch and cemented together. The country people tell me that a frame of
wood was made over which they formed the arch and then poured among the
stones thin mortar boiling hot. On the inside of the arch run along ribs
of hewn stone cemented into their places, running up to meet in a carved
point at the extreme top. These groinings spring from short pillars of
hewn stone that only reach part way down the wall to the floor and run
to a point. These consoles are highly ornamented with sculpture. The
mouldings round the doors, and the stone window frames and sashes, are
wonderfully well done, and would highly ornament a church of the
nineteenth century.

I think we undervalue the civilization of the far past of Connaught.
Those who erected such churches, such abbeys and such castles were both
intelligent and possessed of wealth in no small degree. The ingenuity of
the cut stone hinge on the stone that closes the tomb in the chancel,
the carving on the tomb of the Prince of the O'Connor line, the staunch
solidness of every wall, the immense strength of every arched roof, show
skilled builders, whether they worked under the direction, of the Gobhan
Saer or another man. The plans of the castles, for offence, defence or
escape, show them to have been built by men of skill for men of large
means and great power.

XXXVIII.

OVER-POPULATION OF THE WEST--HOW PEOPLE FORM THEIR OPINIONS--MR.
SMITHWICK AND JONATHAN PYM--A DEARTH OF FISH.

Left Castlebar with regret and went down to Westport. I find at every
step since I landed the information that in going round Ireland I should
have begun at Dublin. In Dublin I could have procured a guide book. I
have sought for one in every considerable town from Belfast round to the
edge of Galway without obtaining it. If I had started from Dublin I
should have taken a tourist's ticket there. Well, I am not sorry for
that, for it is rather hard on me when I get into the beaten track where
I encounter tourists--some of them are trying specimens of humanity.
However, I am made to feel as if I was patting the wrong foot, instead
of the best foot foremost.

I got into Westport in the fair sunlight in the early part of June.
Between Castlebar and Westport the land is part stony, part bog, part
better land under grass. Mountains with hard names, that one makes haste
to forget, are to be seen all round from whatever side of the car you
look. They are all over--a good deal over--one thousand feet high. A few
lakes are spread out here and there also. I am as ignorant of their
names as of those of the lakes I saw crossing Maine. Westport, like
Castlebar, has a mall. Castlebar mall is a square of grass with some
trees drawn up on one side. It is fenced in with chains looped up on
posts--a fence that nobody minds except to step over and they track the
grass with paths running in every direction. Westport's mall is a long
space with trees standing sentry by a river, walled in as if it were a
canal.

I had a wish to meet with a Mr. Smithwick, a land agent, from whom I
might receive a good deal of information. I had information from himself
that he should be at Newport upon the day after I arrived at Westport. I
fought successfully against myself, and got up at an uncomfortably early
hour and went to Newport by mail car. Newport, Mayo, is six Irish--seven
and a half English--miles from Westport and is at the head of Clew Bay.
The road lies through a nice rolling country, entirely desolate and
empty.

The only passenger by the car besides myself, was a gentleman, English I
presume, who, after he became tired of silence, began a conversation
with me, taking for his subject the over-population of the West. I
looked to the side of the car where we sat--it was a country of fine
grassy hills with not one wreath of smoke curling up from a solitary
chimney as far as the eye could reach. I leaned over the well of the car
and looked to the other side--to the limit of the horizon, behold, the
land was empty of house or home or human being. I looked over the
horses' ears--there was the same scene of utter desolation. I turned
round with difficulty and looked behind us--saw the same grassy hills
swelling up in green silence without man or beast. I said softly, "Lift
up thine eyes, sir stranger, and look northward and southward, eastward
and westward. Is not the land desolate without inhabitant, where then is
the over-population?" The strange gentleman looked, not at the empty
hills and the silent green valleys, but at his fellow-traveller with
emotions of fear. To doubt that this fair and desolate Mayo is over-
populated is to show signs of lunacy or worse. Fenianism, Communism, or
even Nihilism, is possible if there is no lunacy to account for such
strange ideas.

Mildly, but with resolution like Samantha's, I urged on the gentleman to
look at the prospect, and he was like one awakening from a dream, for
the country from Newport to Westport, seven and a half miles, is without
inhabitants. I believe Lord Lucan was chief exterminator over this
stretch of country. Brought up at the little inn at Newport, and the
stranger and I had breakfast together. We conversed about over-
population. He had travelled much, and when he recollected what his eyes
saw instead of what his ears heard of a false cry, he admitted that a
loneliness had fallen upon this part of the west.

After breakfast he went his way, with a new subject for thought, and I,
deserted in a wilderness of a commercial room, took out some paper and
began to write. There was no sound but the steel scratch of a pen that
grew monotonous. After a long time--some hours--of solitude, the door
opened and a gentleman entered with some luggage and a young woman
followed him. I gathered up my scribblings and put them away. The
gentleman took off his overcoat, and shining out of the breast pocket
was a bright revolver. I grew afraid, though, generally speaking, I am
too busy to think of being afraid. There was a trans-Atlantic look about
the gentleman, a Mississippi appearance about the too conspicuous
revolver, and, I admit, I thought of some Fenian leader and wondered
what Stephens was like. I heard the gentleman order lunch and afterward
he left the room.

When he returned he introduced himself as Mr. Smithwick. He was not at
all the kind of gentleman I had expected to see. By some perversity he
had become fixed in my imagination as a very tall gentleman with fair
curled hair. Now this was sheer foolishness, but it had a disastrous
effect on the interview. My mind, instead of gathering itself up into an
attitude for receiving information about the land question, would go off
wool-gathering in speculation whether this was the very Mr. Smithwick or
not. The gentleman said with all politeness that he was willing to give
me all the information in his power on any subject on which I wanted
information.

There is something not canny in the west. I had felt it before, but
never as I did then. I could not possibly disentangle my ideas enough to
be clear as to what information I did want. I was under some spell. I
could only look at Mr. Smithwick, wondering if he was he, and smile at
my own stupidity. Time passes quickly; the gentleman remained but about
an hour and a half at most, and he had to have luncheon out of that and
attend to some little business in town besides. Before I got to be
myself he was gone. We did talk a little about reclaiming bog land. He
put the cost per acre for trenching, laying stones in the drains, sand
and manure, at L21 per acre. Reclaiming bog land has been done by tenant
farmers all over the country, who were evicted afterward when they fell
behind in rent in the bad years, and did not get any compensation for
the land so reclaimed. Mr. Smithwick did not think the relief money in
all cases reached those for whom it was intended; believed it was partly
intercepted on the way. Did not have a high opinion of his countrymen of
the poorer class. Thought them a useless set who did not do the work of
their farms properly; did not even make a drain properly if done for
themselves; made it in a proper manner if made on another man's land,
because there he was overseen, and if he slighted his work he would not
get paid for it. In short, "Paddy anywhere but at home is a splendid
man, but at home he is worthless."

Mr. Smithwick deplored the present agitation among the people; deplored
it as an agitation got up, not for people's benefit, but to feather the
nests and fill the pockets of agitators. He informed me that he himself
had to carry a pistol wherever he went. In speaking of rents Mr.
Smithwick informed me that the lands were really rented low; that the
people could pay, and were quite able to pay, were it not for the advice
of agitators; said he was getting no rent at all these years. The total
cessation of rent coming in was a great deprivation to landlords, who
depended on their rents for the means of living.

Mr. Smithwick thought emigration was the remedy for the undeniable
poverty of the country, for if the people got their farms for nothing
they could not make a living out of them, owing to their shiftless
method of farming. I objected that it would be scarcely fair to send
their people, who were so useless and helpless, over to be a burden on
us, but Mr. Smithwick thought that they would soon come in to our ways,
and help themselves, and be not a burden but a help to the community. I
found out in conversation with this gentleman that to reach Ballycroy,
where he lives, I should have come from Ballina. I seem perversely to
take the long way round. Mr. Smithwick kindly explained to me the way I
should go to reach Ballycroy by private car. He thought there was so
little of interest in that direction that it would hardly repay me for a
long tiresome journey, and that Connemara direction was much more full
of interest. After his croydon had driven off I began to remember
various points on which I should have liked to obtain his opinion that I
had never thought of once when I had the opportunity. Perhaps it was the
very early drive that had wearied me, but I was dreadfully stupid all
through the interview. I had counted a great deal on seeing this man,
and I seemed to myself to have gained nothing of facts to which one
could refer triumphantly in support of an opinion in consequence of it.

To wake myself up I enquired of the civil landlady if there were any
wonderful sights to be seen in the neighborhood within an easy drive.
Yes, there was Borrishoole Monastery (the place of owls) and Carrig a
Owlagh (rock of the fleet) Castle, one of the strongholds of Granna
Uisle Well, got a car and driver and drove off to see these ruins. I was
told that no tourist ever visited Newport without going to see them.

As we rattled and jolted over the roughest bit of road which I have yet
seen in Ireland, the driver, a dark, keen-eyed man, began to talk of
landlords, of the wasting and exterminating Lords Lucan and Sligo. I
asked him whom did he think a good landlord. He answered immediately,
"Jonathan Pym." "If you think him so good you might say Mr. Pym." "When
a man is the best in any way he's too big for Mr.," said the man
readily. "I dare say," I remarked, "that this Jonathan Pym is very
little better than the rest." "But I say he is," retorted the man
fiercely. "Where inside of the four seas of Ireland will you get his
aiquil? He bought the land, coming among us a stranger, and he did not
raise the rents. The people live under the rents their fathers paid."
"Well, that's not much?" "If you were a tenant you would think
differently. He took off the thatch of the cabins and put on slates at
his own expense: There is not a broken roof on the land that he owns.
Every tenant he has owns a decent house, with byre and barn, shed and
stable, and he done it all out of the money he had, that never was
lifted out of the land, and after all left them in at the ould rents.
There has never been wan eviction on his place yet." "Has he been shot
at yet?" I enquired innocently. "Arrah, what would he be shot for?"
demanded the man, turning his swarthy face and black eyes full on me. "I
thought maybe some one might shoot him for fun," I explained, feebly.
"Fun!" growled the car-man, "quare fun! If a man is shot or shot at he
deserves it richly. He's not a rale gentleman, word and deed, like
Jonathan Pym."

The driver continued to praise the wonderful landlord, Jonathan Pym, in
a growling kind of tone as if, were I his spouse, he would thwack me
well to cure my unbelief, as we jolted over the stones to the ruins of
the monastery of owls.

There is a lake, the lake of owls, near this ruin, and in it, it is
said, gentlemen anglers can readily obtain leave to fish. I have heard
that amateur anglers give the fish they catch to the person who gives
the permit, retaining the sport of catching as their share; or if they
want the fish paying for them at market price. I think this unlikely,
but it may be so nevertheless.

The monastery was once a splendid place, to judge by the remains of the
carving on window and arched door. One of the skulls of Grace O'Malley
used to be kept here as a precious relic. There was another at Clare
Island and I think I also heard of another. It seems some speculative
and sacrilegious Scotchman brought a ship round the west coast of
Ireland to gather up the bones lying in the abbeys to crush them for
manure, and they took the brave sea queen's bones and skull with the
rest.

Returned to Newport in a very undecided frame of mind whether to go to
Ballycroy or not. There was a Land League meeting to be held there, and
I might see that; but then I had been at two Land League meetings, and
they are pretty much alike. Of course it is well to see a great
assemblage of people, for they always are of interest as showing what
condition the people are in, and what sentiments find an echo in their
hearts. But the length of the way, the uncertainty of a place to stop at
had some weight, and I found myself unable to decide. To clear up my
brain I asked for a bit of fish for dinner, but such a thing could not
be obtained at Newport. The fish caught there are exported. They might
get a fish by going down to the boat for it, and paying dearer for it
than the Dublin price. I asked for fish at Westport with the same
result. If you mention salmon they will say, "Oh, yes," and if not
stopped, rush off and buy a can of American salmon for you. I got
something to eat--not fish, and not very eatable--and wrote a little
while, with the same stupid sensation bothering me that I had felt
during my interview with Mr. Smithwick, and decided to put off all
decision and go to bed, which I did.

In the morning, having found that Newport was the nearest point by which
to reach Achill Island, I determined to go there, and if I thought I
could endure the journey to diverge at Mulrany and drive to Ballycroy on
my return from Achill Island.

XXXIX.

BY THE SHORE OF CLEW BAY--ACROSS ACHILL ISLAND--A LONELY LOVELY
RETREAT.

The drive from Newport, Mayo, to Mulrany was very pleasant. The roads
winds along Clew Bay, that bay of many islands, for quite a distance.
Clew Bay was resting, calm as a mirror, blue and bright, not a lap of
the wave washed up on the shore of Green island or Rocky Point the day
we drove past. No fisher's boat divided the water with hopeful keel. The
intense solitude of bays and inlets as well as the loughs looks like
enchantment. It reminds one of the drowsy do-nothingness of "Thompson's
Castle of Indolence," only here the indolence is not the indolence of
luxurious ease but of hunger and rags. If the knight of arts and
industry will ever destroy monopoly, and these silent waters will be
alive with enterprise:

"When many fishing barks put out to fish along the coast."

there will be a happy change in the comfortless cabins that dot the
shores of Clew Bay.

The islands of Clew Bay, being treeless and green, have a new look, as
if they had just heaved up their backs above the waters and were waiting
for the fiat that shall pronounce them good. I looked with longing eyes
in the direction of Clare Island, that has one side to the bay and one
side to the broad Atlantic which lies between me and home. On Clare
Island is the remains of Doona Castle, the principal stronghold, of the
heroic Grace, where she held the heir of Howth captive till ransomed,
and till his father learned to understand what _Cead mille failte_
means at dinner time.

Here, by Tulloghan Bay, I was told to look across the bay, where the
heather-clad mountains rise above the broad heather-clad bog, where the
road to Ballycroy winds along between the bay and the mountains, past
houses of mortarless stone, hard to be distinguished from the heath; for
over there in a certain spot occurred the shooting affray which has made
young Mr. Smith, the son of the then agent for the Marquis of Sligo, a
man of renown.

The hard feeling between the exterminating Marquis, the agent who
executed his will and the tenantry was intense. Four men were lying in
wait here with the intention of shooting Mr. Smith, who was expected to
pass that way. He drove along accompanied by his son. The would-be
assassins fired; they were concealed above the road; the shots passed
harmlessly over the heads of the two Smiths. Young Mr. Smith, who is an
exceptionally good shot--can hit a small coin at an immense distance--
saw the men run and fired after them, killing one, fired again, wounding
another, and would have fired again, but was prevented by his father.

Young Mr. Smith is quite a hero among the people on this account. There
is an expressed regret that Mr. Smith the elder interfered to prevent
the young marksman from shooting them all; very few would blame him if
he did, as the men, though too nervous to do harm, lay in wait for the
purpose of murder. Still it is revolting to hear people in cold blood
regret so heartily that there was not more bloodshed.

The scenery--as scenery--was as grand as bare heathery mountains and
wide desolate waters could make an almost treeless solitude, but viewed
as a home for human beings, viewed as land that has rent and taxes and
existence to be carved out of it, it has a hopeless look.

The houses are something dreadful, to consider them in the light of
human habitations. Limestone does not abound here, and therefore the
houses of the poorer sort are built like a cairn or a fence of loose
stones without mortar. When the Atlantic winds sweep in here in winter
time, the crevices in these houses will be so many chinks to whistle
through. God pity the poor!

The people along the road here had a thrifty look; the men wore homespun
coats; the pinned-up dresses of the women showed petticoats which were
homespun of warm madder red, well dyed, good and comfortable looking. Of
course the majority of the women were barefoot, but they were used to
it.

At Molraney we stopped to deliver mails. In these cases the passengers
sit on the car in the street, while the driver hands in the mail,
gossips awhile, goes into the convenient "licensed to sell" for a taste
of something, and the police saunter down for the mail and look you
over, judiciously but not offensively, and at last you make another
start.

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