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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Returning to my abiding place, I asked the hostess if the town contained
many Catholics. "Oh, dear no," she replied, "there are few Catholics.
The people are nearly all Protestants." In this neighborhood the
celebrated John George Adair, of Derryveigh celebrity, has a magnificent
residence called Belgrove Park. He has the name of being a very wealthy
man. He is not praised here, but has the reputation of being hard-
hearted, exacting and merciless. I doubted a little whether it was
really the same man, as they called him, irreverently enough, Jack
Adair, but to convince me they immediately began repeating the verses
with their burden of five hundred thousand curses on cruel John Adair,
which they could repeat readily with variations.

The railway facilities are very slow and conservative in their motions.
I could not get on to Limerick the same day, but had to remain over
night in Portarlington.

At Limerick Junction there was another wait of two hours, and at last we
steamed into Limerick. It is a large city of tall houses, large churches
and high monuments. The inhabitants say it was celebrated for its tall
houses five or six hundred years ago.

L.

THE CITY ON THE SHANNON.

The Shannon is a mighty river running here between low green banks. The
tide comes up to Limerick and rises sometimes to the top of the sea
wall. A fine flourishing busy town is Limerick with its shipping. I have
discovered the post-office, found out the magnificent Redemptorist
Church. Noticing this church and the swarm of other grand churches with
the same emblems and the five convents as well as other buildings for
different fraternities, noticing also the queer by-places where
dissenting places of worship are hidden away, one concludes that they
are in a Catholic city, and so they are. On Sunday found out a little
Presbyterian Church hid away behind some houses and joined its handful
of worshippers.

In the afternoon walked along the streets for some way and found myself
all at once in what is called the English part of the town, but which
looked more foreign than any place I have yet seen on my own green isle.
The houses were tall, and had been grand in King Donagh O'Brien's time,
I suppose. The streets were very narrow. The last week's wash, that
looked as if the Shannon was further away than it is, fluttered from the
broken windows of the fifth story. All the shops were open; there did
not seem to be any buyers, but if there were, they might get supplied.
The very old huckster women sat by their baskets of very small and very
wizened apples, and infinitesimal pears that had forgotten to grow. Two
women, one in a third-story window and one on the street, were
exchanging strong compliments. In fact, as our cousins would say, "there
was no Sunday in that English quarter worth a cent." I made my escape
with a sick longing for some one to carry a gospel of good tidings of
great joy in there.

Next morning I found out the English Cathedral, which is at the very
border, so to speak, of that forgotten place. It stands in pretty
grounds. The elderly gentleman who has the care of it, and who shows it
off like a pet child, happened to be there, and took charge of me. He
was determined I should conscientiously see and hear all about that
church. This church was built in 1194 by Donagh O'Brien, King of
Munster. It was not new even then, for King Donagh made his new church
out of an old palace of his.

I followed that old man while he pointed out the relics of the old and
the glories of the new, the magnificent painted windows, the velvet of
the costliest that covered the altar, the carvings of price, the
cushions and the carpets, and, a few steps away, the fluttering rags,
the horrible poverty, the hopeless lives of the English quarter. Truly
the fat and the wool are in one place, and the flock on the dark
mountains in another. Outside are various stone cupboards, called
vaults, where highbred dust moulders in state free from any beggarly
admixture.

That old man wished to delude me up unknown steps to the battlements and
up to other battlements on the top of the church tower--it was raining
heavily, and the gray clouds lying on the house tops, you could hardly
have seen across two streets--to see the view forsooth; then he
volunteered to set the bells ringing in my honor, but I declined. He
then told me of the bells--it was new to me; it may not be new to
others. They were--well--taken without leave from Italy. The Italian
who cast them pilgrimed over the world in search of them. Sailing up the
Shannon he heard his long-lost bells, and it killed him, the joy did.

The puritan soldiers destroyed the profusion of statues that decorated
this church. Noticed one simple monument to one Dan Hayes, an honest man
and a lover of his country. Near this cathedral is the house where
Ireton died, tall and smoky, battered and fallen into age, but very
high. Its broken windows showed several poverty-stricken faces looking
down on the cathedral grounds, which, of course, are kept locked. King
John's castle, very strong, very tall, very grim, seems mostly composed
of three great towers, but there are really seven. Inside the walls is a
barrack that could lodge 400 men. Limerick is full of old memorials of
present magnificence and of past and present need. The inhabitants
proudly tell you that it never was conquered, not considering
capitulation conquest. The city raised the first monument to O'Connell.
Of course I saw it, and thought it a good likeness. There is a square of
grass and trees near it, where is a monument of Spring Rice, he who,
when O'Connell was sick once, a political sickness, was said to be in
despair:

"Poor Spring Rice, with his phiz all gloom,
Kept noiselessly creeping about the room;
His innocent nose in anguish blowing,
Murmuring forth, 'He's going, going.'"

I did not hear the sweet bells that charmed the life out of the poor
wandering Italian, still I think I have perhaps told enough about the
ancient city of Limerick on the Shannon.

From Limerick up through Clare, the railway passes along by the river
Fergus, a big tributary of the Shannon. A Clare man informed me that
Clare returned Dan O'Connell to Parliament. He sank his voice into an
emphatic whisper to inform us that Dan was the first Catholic who ever
got into Parliament.

I have been taken for this one and that one since I came to Ireland, and
have been amused or annoyed, as the case may be, but I am totally at a
loss to know whom I resembled or was taken for in the County Clare. A
decent-looking countrywoman shook hands with me, telling me she had seen
me in some part of Clare a month ago, and I had never set foot into the
county until to-day. "You remember me, my lady, I saw you when you
stopped at ----" some whispered name with an O to it. The woman's face
was strangely familiar, but I was on entirely new ground.

There is enchantment in this western country. I was completely
bewildered when a frieze-coated farmer told me, "That was a grand speech
you made at Tuam, and true every word of it." It was a little confusing,
seeing that I have never been in Tuam, or very near it at all. This old
gentleman enquired coaxingly if I were going to speak at Ennis, and
assured me of a grand welcome to be got up in a hurry. Then he and the
farmer's wife exchanged thoughts--that "I did not want anybody to know I
was in it"--in aggravating whispers as I looked steadily out of the
windows to assure myself that I was I. My friend in frieze then began to
draw my attention to certain landmarks, the ruins of this abbey and that
castle, and the other graveyard as points of interest with which I was
supposed to be familiar.

Truly this part of Clare seemed to have any amount of square castles in
ruined grandeur scattered along the line of rail. We stopped at a
station and saw Ennis lying below us, and O'Connell's statue rising up
between us and the sky. My two friends parted from me here to my immense
relief. I felt as if I were obtaining admiration on false pretences. The
woman took my hand, and, with a long fond look, began to bless me in
English, but her feelings compelled her to slide off into fervent Irish.
The frieze-coated gentleman stood, hat in hand, and bowed and bowed, and
"his life was at my service, and if I wished to pass unnoticed sure he
could whisht, and good-by and God bless you." and away they went. For
whom did they take me?

Clare is pretty stony. Again I saw fields from which stones had been
gathered to form fences like ramparts. Again I saw fields crusted with
stone like the fields of Cong, with the same waterworn appearance, but
not so extensive. The little, pretty station of Cusheen seemed an oasis
in a stony wilderness.

Past many a little field hemmed in with stony barricades, past many an
ancient ruin, sitting in desolation, into Athenry, the ancient Ath-an-
righ, the fortress of kings. It was pouring rain, it often is pouring
rain. I took shelter in the hotel whose steps rise from the railway
station. There, in a quaint little corner room with a broad strip of
window, I settled myself to write with the light of a poor candle, and
the rain fell outside. Athenry bristles with ruins.

King John has another castle here all in ruins. There is a part of a
wall here and there, and the arch of a gate which has been patched up
and has some fearful hovels leaning up against it. It has the ruins of
an abbey and of a priory. The names of Clanricarde and De Birmingham
linger among these ruins; the modern cabins, without window pane or any
chimney at all, but a hole in the roof, are mixed up with the ruins
also.

The well-fed maid at the hotel informed me that they were very poor.
There is no work and no tillage, the land being in grass for sheep. "I
do not believe any of them know what a full meal means. No one knows how
they manage to live, the creatures," said the maid, comfortably. So the
night and the morning passed at Athenry, and we passed on to the village
of Oranmore.

LI.

GALWAY AND THE MEN OF GALWAY.

From Athenry and its ruins went to Oranmore and its ruins. The poverty
of Athenry deepens into still greater poverty in Oranmore. The country
is under grass, hay is the staple crop, so there being little tillage,
little labor is required. They depend on chance employment to procure
the foreign meal on which they live. Some depend for help to a great
extent on the friends in America.

There is a new pier being built here, for an arm of the sea runs up to
Oranmore. They told me that this pier was being built by the Canadian
money. It will be a harbor of refuge for fishing craft and better days
of work and food may yet dawn upon the West.

Behind the pier are the ruins of a large castle which belonged to the
Blakes, one of the Galway tribes. It was inhabited by the last Blake who
held any of the broad acres of his ancestors within the memory of the
old people. I stood in the roofless upper room which had been the
dancing saloon, penetrated into galleries built for defence lit only by
loop holes, went down the little dark stair into the dungeon, tried to
peer into the underground passage that connected with the seashore,
ascended to the battlements and looked over the lonely land and explored
multitudes of small rooms reached by many different flights of stone
steps.

These people are largely of the Norman blood. Oh, for the time when
peace and plenty, law and order shall reign here; when the peasant shall
not consider law as an oppressor to be defied or evaded, an engine of
oppression in the hands of the rich, but an impartial and inflexible
protector of the rights of rich and poor alike!

A young priest told me here that the clergy about this place were
opposed to the teachings of the Land League--did not countenance it
among their people. A Catholic gentleman in Roscommon told me the same
concerning the bishop and clergy of his own locality.

The tillage about Galway is careful and good, what there is of it. I saw
great fields of wheat that had been cleared of stones, by generations of
labor I should say. I had this fact brought to my mind by some peasants
in the neighborhood of Athenry, in this way: "A man works and his family
works on a bit of ground fencing it, improving it, gathering off the
stones; as he improves his rent is raised; he clings to the little home;
he gets evicted and disappears into the grave or the workhouse, and
another takes the land at the higher rent; improves from that point; has
the rent raised, till he too falls behind and is evicted; and so it goes
on till the lands are fit for meadowing and grass, and the holdings are
run together and the homes blotted out." Of course I do not give the
man's words exactly, but I give his thoughts exactly.

Galway was something of a disappointment to me at first, it had not such
a foreign look as I expected. It is a very busy town, has every
appearance of being a thriving town, every one you meet walks with
purpose as of one who has business to attend to. It is refreshing to see
this after looking at the hopeless faces and lounging gait of the people
of many places in the west. Wherever the tall chimneys rise the people
have a quick step and an all-alive look.

I wandered about Galway, and to my great delight had a guide to point
out what was most worth looking at. Of course I heard of the bravery of
the thirteen tribes of Galway, who snapped up Galway from the
O'Flaherties and assimilated themselves to the natives as more Irish
than themselves. After walking about a little I did notice the arched
gateways and the highly ornamented entrance doors which they concealed.

The first place of interest pointed out to me was Lynch castle. From one
of the windows of this castle Warder Lynch, in 1493, hung his own son.
It is said from this act the name Lynch Law arose. The Lynch family,
originally Lintz, came from Lintz in Austria.

This mayor or Warder Lynch was a wealthy merchant trading with Spain. He
trusted his son to go thither and purchase a cargo of wine. The young
man fell into dissipation, and spent the money, buying the cargo on
credit. The nephew of the Spanish merchant accompanied the ship to
obtain the money, and arrange for further business. The devil tempted
the young Lynch to hide his folly by committing crime. Near the Galway
coast the young Spaniard was thrown overboard. All the friends of the
family and his father received the young merchant after his successful
voyage with great joy. The father consented to his son's marriage with
his early love, the daughter of a neighbor, who gladly consented to
accept the successful young merchant for his son-in-law. All went merry
as a marriage bell. Just before the marriage a confessor was sent for to
a sick seaman, who revealed young Lynch's crime. The Warder of Galway
stood at the bed of this dying man, and heard of the villany of his
beloved son. Young Lynch was arrested, tried, found guilty, and
sentenced. The mother of young Lynch, having exhausted all efforts to
obtain mercy for her son, flew in distraction to the Blake tribe--she
was a Blake--and raised the whole clan for a rescue. When the hour of
execution dawned, the castle was surrounded by the armed clan of the
Blakes, demanding that the prisoner be spared for the honor of the
family. The Warder addressed the crowd, entreating them to submit to the
majesty of the law, but in vain. He led his son--who, when he had borne
the shame, and came to feel the guilt of his deeds, had no desire to
live--up the winding stair in the building to that very arched window
that overlooks the street, and there, to that iron staple that is fixed
in the wall, he hung him with his own hands, after embracing him, in
sight of all the people. The father expected to die by the hands of the
angry crowd below, but they, awed, went home at a dead march. The mother
died of the shock, and the sternly just old man lived on. I looked at
his house in Lombard street. Over the entrance is a skull and cross
bones in relief on black marble, with this motto, which I copied,

"REMEMBER DEATH
Vanitie of vanities, and all is but vanitie."

There is a fine museum in Queen's College, Galway, which I did not see.
Of course there are many things I did not see, although my eyes were on
hard duty while there. I did see specimens of that most beautiful marble
of Connemara. It is worked up into ornaments, in some cases mounted with
silver. As soon as any one enquires for it they are known to be from
America. A book shaped specimen that I coveted was priced at twelve and
sixpence. It is there yet for me. It is of every shade and tint of
green, and is really very lovely. I saw many specimens of it
manufactured into harps stringed and set in silver, with a silver
scroll, and the name of Davitt or Parnell on them in green enamel. There
were brooches and scarf pins of this kind. I did not notice the name of
the great Liberator among these ornaments.

The Claddagh was a great disappointment to me. I heard that it was not
safe to venture into it alone. I got up early and had sunshine with me
when I strolled through the Claddagh. I saw no extreme poverty there.
Most of the houses were neatly whitewashed; all were superior to the
huts among the ruins at Athenry. The people were very busy, very
comfortably clothed, and, in a way, well-to-do looking. Some of the
houses were small and windowless, something the shape of a beehive, but
not at all forlornly squalid. They make celebrated fleecy flannel here
in Claddagh. They make and mend nets. They fish. I saw some swarthy men
of foreign look, in seamen's clothes, standing about. You will see
beauty here of the swarthy type, accompanied by flashing black eyes and
blue black hair, but I saw lasses with lint white locks also in the
Claddagh. The testimony of all here is that the Claddagh people are a
quiet, industrious, temperate and honest race of people. I am inclined
to believe that myself. It is a pretty large district and I wandered
through it without hearing one loud or one profane word. I was agreeably
disappointed in the Claddagh. Claddagh has a church and large school of
its own.

They told me that the Galway coast has the same flowers as the coast of
Spain. I can testify that flowers abound in little front gardens, and
window panes, and in boxes on every window ledge. I did not go to see
the iodine works, where this substance is manufactured from sea weed. I
saw people burning kelp--and smelled them too--on the Larne and
Carnlough coast and in Mayo. They burn the dried sea weed in long narrow
places built of stone. They are not kilns, but are more like them than
anything else I know of. You see stacks and ropes of the sea weed put up
to dry. Kelp burning is not a fragrant occupation, and its manufacture
is not specially attractive.

I think Galway is a very prosperous thriving town. I went to the bathing
place of Salt Hill, a long suburb of pretty cottages, mostly to be let
furnished to sea bathers. I should have gone on to Cushla Bay and to the
islands of Arran, but I did not. I looked round me and returned to
Galway.

There is difference perceptible to me, but hardly describable between
the Galway men and the rest of the West. The expression of face among
the Donegal peasantry is a patience that waits. The Mayo men seem
dispirited as the Leitrim men also do, but are capable of flashing up
into desperation. The Galway men seem never to have been tamed. The
ferocious O'Flaherties, the fierce tribes of Galway, the dark Spanish
blood, have all left their marks on and bequeathed their spirit to the
men of Galway. I met one or two who, like some of the Puritans, believed
that killing was not murder, who urged that if the law would not deter
great men from wrong-doing it should not protect them.

When trade revives and prosperity dawns upon the West the fierce blood,
like the Norman blood elsewhere, will go out in enterprise and spend
itself in improvements.

Land was pointed out to me in Galway for which L4 an acre was paid by
village people to plant potatoes in. This is called conacre. In going
through Galway City, even in the suburbs, I did not see great appealing
poverty such as I saw elsewhere. There was the bustle of work and the
independence of work everywhere, but in the country, there seems poverty
mixed with the fierce impatience of seeing no better way to mend
matters. I heard of evictions having taken place here and there, but saw
none.

LII.

THE LAKES OF KILLARNEY.

There is a good deal of disturbance about Limerick, according to the
papers. A traveller would never discover it. It does not appear on the
surface. I have been a little here and there in the environs of
Limerick, and have seen no sign of any mob or any disturbance. Police go
out unexpectedly to do eviction service and it is only known when the
report comes in the papers.

I did not hear in Limerick town or county, in any place where I happened
to be, of any landlord who had got renown for any special hardness.
There was a person boycotted quite near to the city who was getting help
from neighboring landowners to gather in his crops. What his offence was
I did not learn.

In Limerick I met with an old and very dear friend who gave me a few
facts about boycotting as seen in personal experience. An outlying farm
was taken by my friend from which a widow lady had been evicted before
the present agitation commenced. A premium of L100 was paid for
possession. My friends had congratulated themselves on this transaction
having occurred before the organization of the Land League; but one
night an armed and masked party took the widow lady and reinstated her
in her place. My friends were startled a little by a visit from this
party, who informed them that they were returning from reinstating the
lady in her place. Had they any objection? No, they had no objection.
Would they disturb her in possession? No, they would not disturb her in
possession. If they had only the L100 which they had invested they were
quite willing to surrender the farm. Three cheers were given for my
friends, three cheers for the widow lady, a gun was fired off, there was
a wild cheer for Rory of the Hills, and they disappeared. The widow lady
after some time quietly left the place of her own accord, and everything
was as it had been before. They, the armed party, found out that they
were not doing the lady a kindness by reinstating her, and so the matter
ended.

Limerick, though an old city, is not a very large one. Going down the
principal street--George's street--you can look down any of the cross
streets beyond the masts on Shannon and see on the other side of the
river oats, waving yellow and in stocks, up the slope. Standing on the
Wellesley Bridge, where young Fitzgibbon in bronze stands on a granite
pedestal, perpetually endeavoring to draw his sword--which he succeeded
in drawing to some purpose at Alma and Inkerman, if we are to credit the
pedestal, which we do--you can look down the Shannon, over the boats and
among the steamboat chimneys and the ships' masts, and see the green
banks of the Shannon, broad and wide, with cattle standing ankle deep in
the rich pasture. You can see them as they extend far away, widening as
they go, till the horizon shuts out any farther view. The constant rain
of these two last months, I am afraid, will damage the ripening crop. It
is near the close of August and there is hay yet uncut, there is hay
lying out in every form of bleached windrow, or lap, or spread, under
the rain. Some of it looks quite spoiled.

No one, I suppose, leaves Limerick without gazing at and perhaps wishing
for some of the beautiful specimens of Limerick lace that are displayed
in the shop-windows.

From Limerick to Killarney in the rain through a country gradually
growing poorer. At the junction there was a detention which enabled me
to walk about a little. There was a detachment of police that filled a
couple of car passing on their way to eviction in one direction; a large
detachment returning from eviction got out of the cars here. Eviction in
this part of Ireland is feverishly active, and on every hand you hear of
Mr. Clifford Lloyd. A person with whom I had some conversation told me I
could have no idea of the state of the country without penetrating
through it away from the line of rail. Of course this is so.

As we neared Killarney the waters were out over the low lying lands and
the hay looked pitiful. In a pelting rain we steamed into Killarney,
passed through the army of cabmen and their allies and were whirled away
to Lakeview House on the banks of the lower Killarney lake, a pretty
place standing in its own grounds. Killarney is a nice little town with
some astonishing buildings. I have heard it styled as a dirty town; it
struck me as both clean and rather stylish in its general appearance. It
seems to depend almost entirely on tourists. Unlike Limerick, unlike
Galway, but very like other western towns the number of people standing
idly at the corners, or leaning against a tree to shelter from the rain,
strikes a stranger painfully. The lounging gait and alert eyes mark
people who have no settled industry, but are watching their chance.

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