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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 42958 ***
+
+[Illustration: MUCKROSS BAY, KILLYBEGS, DONEGAL]
+
+
+
+
+ULSTER
+
+Described by Stephen Gwynn
+Pictured by Alexander Williams
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+BLACKIE AND SON LIMITED
+LONDON GLASGOW AND BOMBAY
+1911
+
+
+
+
+Beautiful Ireland
+
+    LEINSTER
+    ULSTER
+    MUNSTER
+    CONNAUGHT
+
+
+_Uniform with this Series_
+
+Beautiful England
+
+    OXFORD
+    THE ENGLISH LAKES
+    CANTERBURY
+    SHAKESPEARE-LAND
+    THE THAMES
+    WINDSOR CASTLE
+    CAMBRIDGE
+    NORWICH AND THE BROADS
+    THE HEART OF WESSEX
+    THE PEAK DISTRICT
+    THE CORNISH RIVIERA
+    DICKENS-LAND
+    WINCHESTER
+    THE ISLE OF WIGHT
+    CHESTER AND THE DEE
+    YORK
+
+
+
+
+TABLE OF CONTENTS
+
+
+                                Page
+
+AT THE GAP OF THE NORTH            5
+
+"THE BLACK NORTH"                 13
+
+THE MAIDEN CITY                   28
+
+TIRCONNELL                        37
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+                                                        Page
+
+Muckross Bay, Killybegs, Donegal               _Frontispiece_
+
+Narrow Water Castle, Carlingford Lough                     8
+
+Cave Hill, Belfast                                        14
+
+Carrickfergus Castle, Belfast Lough                       20
+
+The Giants' Causeway                                      26
+
+Fair Head, Co. Antrim                                     32
+
+Londonderry from the Waterside                            36
+
+Tory Island from Falcarragh Hill, Donegal                 42
+
+Muckish and Ards from Rosapenna, Sheephaven, Donegal      46
+
+Mount Errigal from the Gweedore River, Donegal            50
+
+Glenveagh, Donegal                                        54
+
+The Entrance to Mulroy Bay, Donegal                       58
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: ULSTER]
+
+AT THE GAP OF THE NORTH
+
+
+Ulster is a province much talked of and little understood--a name
+about which controversy rages. But to those who know it and who love
+it, one thing is clear--Ulster is no less Ireland than Connaught
+itself. No better song has been written in our days than that which
+tells of an Irishman's longing in London to be back "where the
+mountains of Mourne sweep down to the sea"; nor indeed is the whole
+frame of mind which that song dramatises, with so pleasant a blending
+of humour and pathos, better expressed in any single way than in the
+phrase "thinking long"--an idiom common to all Ulster talk, whether
+in Down or Donegal. And when I who write these lines "think long"
+for Ireland, it is to Ulster that my thought goes back, back to the
+homely ways and the quaint speech of northern folk, hard yet kindly,
+with the genial welcome readier even in their rough accent than in
+smoothest Munster: for these things there rises in my mind the vague
+aching, half-remembrance, half-desire, which we call "thinking long".
+It is a far cry from Belfast, with its clang of riveters, to the vast
+loneliness of Slieve League or Dunlewy; and yet the great captain
+of industry, nurtured and proven in the keenest commerce, has upon
+his tongue, in his features, in the whole cast of his nature, these
+very traits which endear themselves to me in some Irish-speaking
+schoolmaster of western Donegal. Soil, climate, and common
+memories--these are what identify and what bind. No man gets his
+living too easily in Ulster, and need makes neighbourly. Protestant
+and Catholic have to fight the same battle with hard weather--of which
+perhaps even the summer traveller may form some judgment; they are
+rewarded by the same loveliness which makes a fine day in Ulster the
+most enchanting upon earth; and they fend against the stress of storm
+by the same warm shelter, the same glow of the turf-piled hearth.
+
+The Ulster of which I shall write in these few pages is the Ulster of
+four sea-bordering counties only, Donegal, Derry, Antrim, and Down,
+since beyond doubt these exceed the other five in attractions. Only
+let a word be said of two great lakes. Lough Erne, which belongs
+mainly to Fermanagh, though bordering Donegal in part, is to its
+champions the Cinderella of Irish waters, and some day it will come
+into its inheritance of fame. Lough Neagh, with its eighty miles of
+shore, divided among five counties, has never been seen by me but in
+tranquil loveliness, one vast sheet of shimmering blue; and whether at
+Antrim, where many memories have their monuments, or at Toomebridge,
+where the Bann flows out majestically, has seemed well worth a day's
+journey--the more because its beauty is set among lands not fertile,
+yet prosperously tilled and inhabited by people, not rich indeed, yet
+safely removed from the stress of poverty. Not far from it is Armagh,
+a cathedral city, richer in associations than any in Ireland. If I do
+not write of Armagh, it is because the oldest of these associations
+has its monument also at the southern gate of Ulster, where the
+division of the province is best marked.
+
+Carlingford Lough, according to modern geography, marks that division,
+but in truth the lough's southern shore, the rocky promontory of
+Cooley, belongs to Ulster by all titles, though it be included in
+the modern county of Louth. A steamer will carry you from Holyhead
+to Greenore (where is a hotel with the inevitable golf links) and
+land you nominally in Leinster. But all that mountainous headland is
+inhabited by folk who still keep the Gaelic speech alive among them,
+and whose remote forbears owned in far distant times the overlordship
+of Ireland's most famous champion, when Ulster had a pagan chivalry,
+the Red Branch Circle, which is to Irish legend what the story
+of Arthur's knighthood is to British romance, or the tale of the
+Nibelungs to Germany. Cooley (in Irish, _Cuailgne_) was the fief of
+Cuchulain; and the Brown Bull of Cooley was the object of that great
+foray made by the rest of Ireland upon Ulster, which is related in the
+oldest and finest of all Celtic hero tales.
+
+Cuchulain's dwelling was outside Cooley, outside Ulster proper; his
+stronghold was Dundealgan, the "Thorn Fort" which gives its name to
+Dundalk. It was an outpost guarding that pass in the hills, the gap of
+the north, through which the railway, leaving the plains of Leinster,
+winds into the mountainous and threatening regions of Armagh and Down.
+
+[Illustration: NARROW WATER CASTLE, CARLINGFORD LOUGH]
+
+All the story of Cuchulain's hero-feats can be read in Lady Gregory's
+admirable version, _Cuchulain of Muirthemne_; but Cuchulain's fort you
+can see for yourself. It stands close to the town of Dundalk, visible
+from the railway, a flat-topped mount, surrounded by a trench some
+thirty feet deep, with a steep outer rampart surrounding this in its
+turn. The whole is now tree-covered. Mr. Tempest, an antiquary of
+Dundalk, whose exertions have saved this monument from the spade and
+plough, thinks that he has identified, a couple of miles south of
+Dundalk, the place where Cuchulain died. Cloghafarmore, the "Big Man's
+Stone", at Ratheddy is one of the "standing stones" found through
+Ireland, as through other Celtic countries, and tradition identifies
+it with the pillar to which Cuchulain made his way from his last
+fight. For ninety days, he and his charioteer Laeg, and his pair of
+horses, Black Sanglain and the Grey of Macha, had harassed and held
+back the host of Ireland, destroying champion after champion, singly
+or by groups, in fights at each ford, and raining missiles upon the
+main body with marvellous sling-throwing; but at last, encompassed and
+at bay, he had got his death-wound with his own charmed spear, which
+passed through the bodies of nine men in its last flight from his
+hand. When, flung back at him by Lugaidh, last survivor of the sons
+whose father Cuchulain had slain, it had ripped his body open, the
+wounded warrior, holding his bowels together with one hand, staggered
+to this pillar stone, and bound himself to it by his scarf, so that
+even in death and defeat he might still stand upright. So he stood
+propped, while the Grey of Macha, loosed from its harness, defended
+him with teeth and hoof, letting none approach, till men saw that on
+the hero's shoulder a raven had lighted. "It is not on that pillar
+birds were used to settle", said one of his foemen. Then the grey
+horse knew that life had ebbed away, and she left the body to its
+despoilers. But the man who struck off Cuchulain's head, and took it
+with him, had his own head struck off by a comrade of the Red Branch
+before he reached the plains of Liffey.
+
+Such is the fierce temper of that old hero-cycle; but if its heroes
+are not to be outdone in fierceness neither are they in generosity.
+How much is legend, sheer invention, none can say: the great
+earthworks at Armagh, Cuchulain's fort at Dundealgan, and a hundred
+other things testify to a truth behind the tale. And it is fairly
+well established that the race which had its centre at Armagh was
+not the race which governed from Tara: the Red Branch was Pictish,
+Tara was Milesian. How distinct the racial types show where they have
+survived tolerably pure is hardly realized, save by some such chance
+as befell me, when, at an exhibition in Limerick, I was summoned to
+look at a strange foreign folk from the north. They were girls from
+an Irish-speaking district in Donegal--not far from Rosapenna--pretty
+girls, too, but among the big, buxom, oval-faced, soft-bodied
+Southerners their short profiles, their high cheek bones, and hard,
+bright colour showed as strange as if they had been from another
+quarter of the world.
+
+All the subsequent stages in Irish history meet you about the shores
+of Carlingford--Carline-fiord; its name tells of Danish settlements.
+The old castle in Carlingford town was erected by de Courcy at King
+John's bidding; the monastery was Norman built too, by Richard de
+Burgo, Earl of Ulster, but the Norman rule in Ulster was closely
+limited to a few strongholds on the coast. The Narrow Water Castle,
+which Mr. Williams has drawn against its background of the steep
+richly wooded slopes which make the chief beauty of this beautiful
+lough, is on the site of a thirteenth-century fortress, but that was
+destroyed in the Great War of 1641, and this building dates from
+Charles II's reign. At Warrenpoint a tall obelisk records the name of
+Ross of Bladensburg, one of the many brilliant officers whom Ireland
+gave to Wellington's armies--with how many thousands of the unnamed
+peasants to fill the ranks that they led! All those wooded hills
+behind Rostrevor, the little watering-place that nestles snug among
+them, looking south to the sun and the hills of Cooley, speak of
+comfortable days and territorial dominion. Behind those same wooded
+hills lies the southernmost point of industrial Ulster, Newry town,
+with its whirring looms.
+
+These are some of the stepping-stones to guide one through Irish
+history; yet how many more might be added! Where the road and rail
+strike north from Dundalk, as they rise to that pass which is the
+famous Gap, you reach Faughart, scene of the battle where Edward Bruce
+ended his disastrous adventure of conquest in Ireland. And on the
+plain below, William and Schomberg had their camp and mustered their
+army before it set out to march upon the Boyne.
+
+Memories of war--Pict and Connachtman contending for Cuchulain's head;
+the Dane plundering and trading; the Norman building his strongholds;
+the Scot heading Ireland's endeavour to shake off the Norman yoke;
+that other convulsion in 1641, and then new castles built; the
+Dutchman landing, and his triumphant march; and from the subdued
+Ireland, thousands, tens of thousands, of soldiers, gentle and simple,
+issuing forth to uphold the English name. Yes, but other memories are
+there too. Some maintain that here Patrick landed on his mission. But
+at all events at Faughart, in the fifth century, Brigid was born, the
+"Mary of the Gael", "mother of all the saints of Ireland". Her work
+was done in Leinster, but surely her birthplace here on the threshold
+of Ulster should not be overlooked.
+
+
+
+
+"THE BLACK NORTH"
+
+
+I shall assume that from Dundalk and its neighbouring beauty, that
+narrow lough winding among the hills, you go straight to Belfast,
+with the glorious range of Mourne Mountains on your right hand to
+make the journey attractive. At "Portadown upon the Bann", where the
+Pope has a bad name, you are not far from the focus of the industrial
+north--at all events of the great linen industry. From the train you
+will see fields white as snow with bleaching webs; and it is said
+that one cause of this trade's localization is a special suitability
+of climate, like that which makes Lancashire head of the world for
+cotton-spinning. Belgium can beat Ireland in producing flax--can get
+50 per cent more for the same weight of finished fibre--but in the
+spinning and weaving Ulster is unapproachable. Unhappily, as in all
+textile trades, the individual withers and the machine grows more
+and more: hand-loom damask weavers, who can still make a product
+marvellous for craftsmanship, find their occupation gone--the machine
+runs them too close.
+
+What the linen trade has been worth to Ulster can never be counted.
+It was the one industry which England's jealousy spared, and even
+(after long refusal) grudgingly fostered, in those very decades when
+her manufacturers were urging Parliament to stamp out and destroy the
+woollen trade. Its existence preserved in this corner of the country
+that industrial habit which means not only an inherited skill but the
+transmitted aptitude for factory work, with its regular hours and
+mechanical routine, so unlike the conditions of labour on the land, in
+which all the rest of Ireland has found--since 1800--its only resource.
+
+Even agriculture has been helped by the proximity of towns where
+all, down to the labouring classes, have money to buy with. The
+district which centres about Portadown is to-day foremost of all
+Ireland for the culture of fruit and flowers, though neither climate
+nor soil specially favours it. One beauty that Ulster has far more
+generally than any other province is the flower-bordered cottage. They
+grow orange lilies in fine profusion, but they grow other and less
+emblematic blossoms as well.
+
+[Illustration: CAVE HILL, BELFAST]
+
+Belfast--when you reach it--is not calculated to charm the eye. It has
+the features of any English manufacturing town so far as its buildings
+are concerned, and the finest structures it can show (without
+disparaging its handsome Town Hall) are the vast fabrics which rise
+in the dockyards, such ships as have never been built in the world
+before--marvels of symmetry and strength. To see them in the building
+up is to watch, perhaps, the most impressive exhibition of human
+skill and energy. Ireland, for all its defective development, can
+boast of heading the world in certain enterprises: Guinness's brewery,
+Harland and Wolff's engineering works, and Barbour's great net and
+rope factory at Lisburn are, each in its kind, the biggest and best in
+Europe, or out of it.
+
+Once you get down to the water in Belfast, beauty is abundant, and
+for my part I like best the view from the docks. But Mr. Williams has
+chosen a distant indication of the town under the bold headland, at
+whose foot it lies so well. This aspect of Cave Hill does not show
+its strange feature--the vast Napoleonic profile flung up against
+an eastern sky. Time was when Belfast must have been curiously
+divided about that portent; for in the Revolution period northern
+Ireland was fiercely republican. It was on Cave Hill that Wolfe Tone,
+most formidable of all Irish rebels, with a group of young Ulster
+democrats, founded the Society of United Irishmen.
+
+Belfast does not dwell much on these memories to-day, nor indeed on
+any memories; her interest is in the prosperous present, the growing
+future. And although it has its absurdities, notably in the claim to
+be more populous than Dublin (a result achieved by omitting Rathmines
+and Pembroke, townships separately governed, but as much part of
+Dublin as Kensington and Chelsea are of London), the strong pride
+of Belfast is amply justified. It is not its proximity to Scotch
+coalfields nor its moist climate (dear to spinners) which really makes
+its fortune, it is the hard-bitten, restless, courageous spirit of its
+people.
+
+Like Dublin, it has close access to places of great natural
+charm. Just beyond Cave Hill, on the north shore of the lough, is
+Carrickfergus Castle, whose grim strength Mr. Williams has excellently
+suggested. It was built within six years of the Norman invasion, by
+de Courcy, first grantee of Ulster; and here, as at Carlingford, the
+invaders managed to retain their grip. The Bruces wrested it, after a
+fierce siege, from de Lacy, who then held it, Robert Bruce aiding his
+brother; but on Edward Brace's defeat it fell back to the English. In
+the ultimate conquest of Ireland it marked a great moment, for here
+William of Orange landed, and pious care has recorded the flagstone on
+which he first set his foot.
+
+At Carrickfergus you are already well advanced on the prettiest road
+in all Ireland--that which skirts the northern shore of Belfast
+Lough, then, crossing the neck of Island Magee peninsula, carries
+you past Larne's inland water, and from Larne follows the cliffy
+shoreline up to where Fair Head marks the northern limit of Antrim's
+eastward-looking coast. Then, cutting in behind the Head, it emerges
+on the pleasant town of Ballycastle, sheltered in its bay, and so
+follows the coast again past the castles of Dunseverick and Dunluce,
+famous ruins, and past the Giant's Causeway, that still more famous
+piece of an older and more majestic architecture. Portrush ends
+your journey if you be a golfer; but dearer to me than the links at
+Portrush are the sandhills beyond Portstewart and the long strand at
+the entrance to Lough Foyle--ten miles of a stretch, but the Bann's
+outflow divides it. No other beach that I have known is rich in such
+a variety of shells; on no other sandhills do the little delicate
+sandflowers, ladies'-slipper, thyme, ladies'-bedstraw, and the rest,
+grow so charmingly.
+
+Now, in all that long coastline what to write about? First, perhaps,
+its geography. A line of high hills, or low mountains, runs north from
+Belfast, and beyond Larne they approach close to the sea. Westward
+of them is prosperous industrial country, draining into Lough Neagh
+or the Bann--a country of thriving towns, Ballymena and Ballymoney,
+with many factories. But east of this is the marginal land, running
+steeply down with short watercourses to the sea, and this is the
+country of the Glens of Antrim; lordship of the MacDonnells, who were
+also Lords of the Isles. The sea here--_Sruth na Maoile_, the Stream
+of the Moyle, is a link rather than a barrier; you could row across
+with no great danger in a skin-covered boat; and at this point the
+Gael of Alba and the Gael of Eire have been always one race. The
+Irish that I heard spoken by old men whom a Feis of the Glens had
+gathered together in Glen Ariff was few removes in sound and even in
+idiom from the Highland speech; and all tradition, whether Ossianic,
+in the stories of Finn and his companions, or that older cycle of the
+Red Branch, brings the Scotch islands and west coast into full touch
+with Irish legend. It was to the Isle of Skye that Cuchulain went for
+his training, to be taught by a woman warrior--whose name that island
+keeps as the Coolin Hills preserve his name; it was from the Scottish
+shore that Cuchulain's son by the daughter of this warrior-queen came
+over to contend with the Red Branch heroes, refusing his name in
+order--so the deserted witch designed it--that his father, the one man
+able to master him, might unknowingly slay his own son. I took down
+from the lips of an Ulster peasant, not able to read or write, and
+perhaps with ten generations behind him of folk who never used the
+pen, the carefully guarded text of a poem framed not later (from its
+language) than the fifteenth century, which told the tragedy of that
+slaying. There is a touch in that ballad fine as any I know, when the
+dying lad says to his vanquisher:
+
+     "Cuchulain, beloved father,
+     How is it you did not know me
+     When I flung my spear so sluggishly
+     Against your bristling blade?"
+
+That was the only sign he could give. Knowing himself, knowing his
+antagonist, yet sworn not to reveal the secret, he could only make
+a cast so half-hearted that surely Cuchulain might pause to wonder
+whether it was indeed an enemy who threw the spear.
+
+These legends linking the coasts together suggest the charm of that
+eastern shore; not the magic of infinite distance, not the Atlantic's
+illimitable blue, but a continual tempting of the eye with that
+shore beyond the sea, sometimes not visible at all, often faint, an
+exquisite mirage, yet sometimes so vivid and distinct that you can
+discern even the whitewashed cabins on the farther side.
+
+The mountains of the glens have no marvel of beauty. Slemish, lying
+back from the rest, is best marked, with its flat top, which is
+indeed evidently the crater of some volcano, forced up in the wild
+convulsion that has left its other traces in the basalt of Fair Head
+and the Causeway. Marked, too, it is in history; for on its slopes
+Patrick in captivity herded his master Dichu's swine. Yet this was on
+the landward of the hills, in the valley of the Braid, which drains
+west into Lough Neagh, and stands outside the grouping of the glens.
+Tibullia, another peak easily discerned, is distinguished by having
+on its summit a formation of flints where man of the Stone Age had a
+regular factory; chipped and flaked implements, marred in the making,
+can be found there (by the knowing) in basketfuls.
+
+But the true distinction of these hills is that they have found their
+poet. Samuel Ferguson first in his ballad of "Willy Gilliland" (which
+has its climax by the walls of Carrickfergus) celebrated the stretch
+of green "from Slemish foot to Collon top". But it is a later singer,
+the poetess, "Moira O'Neill", who in her _Songs of the Glens of
+Antrim_, has made all their names resound: from "Slemish and Trostan,
+dark with heather", to "ould Lurgethan" where it "rises green by the
+sea". And not the hills only but the glens--Glenann, for which the
+emigrant "does be thinking long"; "lone Glen Dun and the wild glen
+flowers", with the little town at the outflow of its river, Cushendun,
+_Cois-an-duin_, Dun-foot. Her volume should be in the hands of every
+traveller in the glens, unless its verses are already written in his
+memory.
+
+[Illustration: CARRICKFERGUS CASTLE, BELFAST LOUGH]
+
+This Antrim coast has one charm distinguishing it above the rest of
+Ireland--its variety of geological formation. At the foot of Glen
+Ariff, Red Bay is called after the sandstone cliffs past which the
+road is cut, and in one place the rock makes an arch near an old
+castle. There is a cave, too, at various times inhabited. At Fair
+Head one reaches the basalt, and this huge promontory faces the sea
+with cliffs whose columnar formation gives that odd suggestion of
+human workmanship which reaches its climax at the Causeway. This black
+basalt with the numberless fissures is a good rock for birds to build
+in, but a very bad and treacherous dependence for those who climb to
+pry after their nests. Beyond the Causeway comes a line of white chalk
+cliff, such as is familiar to all in the south of England, but very
+strange to us in Ireland; though the sea off the Antrim coast is too
+deep to have that opaline appearance--as though milk were spilt into
+it--which the Margate tripper knows.
+
+I have never yet been able to bring myself to write about the
+Causeway, which is a geological freak very curious to look at, and
+quite worth the sixpence you have to pay for admission, since a
+company enclosed it some years ago. But in Ireland we expect to have
+our cliff scenery free. The guides there will tell visitors plenty of
+comic stories about Finn MacCool. But Finn, in authentic Irish legend,
+is not a comic figure: he is the centre of the Ossianic tales.
+
+That country north of the glens--which stop at Ballycastle, where
+Glen Shesk and Glen Tow have their meeting--is called the Route, and
+so keeps alive a memory of a period older than the Ossianic legends.
+Dal Riada, or Dal Reuda, that is, the "Portion of Reuda", was the
+name given to a principality established by one Reuda, who about the
+second century broke off with a body of followers from the kingdom of
+Ulster, and established rule on both sides of the narrow seas. Reuda
+was of the Pictish race, probably; and here in the north the Picts
+held out longest against the invading Milesians, who came (according
+to modern theories) drilled foot soldiers, to defeat the earlier
+chariot-fighting warriors. But the Milesians pushed their conquest
+here also in about the sixth century, and Fergus, an offshoot of the
+northern Hy-Neill (Sons of Niall), the dominant Milesian house, made
+a petty kingdom for himself on both shores; and from him the kings of
+Scotland traced their descent. This prince, Fergus Mac Erc, has left
+his name on the Irish coast, for Carrickfergus is shown as the rock
+on which he came to wreck, when sent adrift by tempest in one of his
+crossings between the two portions of his kingdom.
+
+Shortly after its establishment, this kingship, or chieftainship,
+lost its Irish character and centred in Scotland. But relations were
+constant--though by no means constantly friendly--and the Lords of the
+Isles held Rathlin Island for many centuries. However near the Irish
+coast this island lies--only divided by some five miles from the base
+of Fair Head--the sound between it and the mainland is so dangerous,
+with its racing tides, as to be an effectual barrier; and very often
+passage may be easier made from the Scotch coast than from the bay of
+Ballycastle. At all events, the Mac Donnells owned Rathlin when Robert
+Bruce needed a refuge, and the castle is still there in which the
+Bruce sheltered for seven years--and in which it was that he watched
+the spider's patience and drew the moral for his own far-off designs.
+
+The Mac Donnells were one of three great clans who divided a disputed
+lordship in Ulster before Ulster (last of the provinces) was finally
+subdued. The Mac Donnell lordship was the least authoritative and
+(although it traced descent to the sixth century) the latest in date.
+O'Neill and O'Donnell, the true Gaelic overlords of Ulster, sprang
+from two sons of Niall of the Nine Hostages, High King of Ireland
+from 379 to 405. Of their sons, Conall settled himself on Donegal
+Bay, and Eoghan (or Owen) on the Inishowen hills. Tyrconnell--_Tir
+Chonaill_--takes its name from the one son; Tyrone--_Tir
+Eoghain_--from the other. About these centres power grouped itself,
+each chief having sub-chiefs or _urraghts_ under him, each with his
+own sept. It was only in the tenth century when Brian Boru was High
+King that the hereditary surnames came to be adopted--O'Neill for the
+lord of Tyrone, O'Donnell for the princes of Tyrconnell.
+
+Their country was remote of access, difficult of passage for troops;
+their people were hardy; and so it happened that in the reign of Henry
+VIII, and even of Elizabeth, when all else in Ireland had been fairly
+brought within British sovereignty (even the O'Briens of Thomond
+submitting) O'Neill and O'Donnell could still hold their own. But
+mutual jealousies and border feuds weakened the Gael; the O'Neills
+were the strongest people, yet the O'Donnells on one flank and the
+Mac Donnells on the other often sought advantage by English alliance.
+Shane O'Neill, perhaps the most dangerous foe that Elizabeth had to
+meet in Ireland, of whom Sir Henry Sidney wrote that "this man could
+burn, if he liked, up to the gates of Dublin, and go away unfought",
+met his crushing defeat at the hand of Irish enemies, the O'Donnells,
+who routed him on the Swilly river near Letterkenny; and in his
+trouble he fled to unfriends on the other side, the Mac Donnells, in
+whose camp at Cushendun he was poniarded, and his head sold to the
+English.
+
+Yet after his day another O'Neill, Hugh the great Earl of Tyrone,
+levied desperate war on the English, in close league with a successor
+of the O'Donnell who defeated Shane; and though the Mac Donnells gave
+them no direct assistance, they also made an effort at that time to
+throw off the invader's yoke. The history of Ireland under Elizabeth
+is largely the history of war with these three clans--and a shameful
+history it is, full of horrible records of treachery and cruelty.
+
+Each of the three peoples threw up remarkable leaders in the
+final struggles under the Tudors, and no figure of those days is
+more notable than the MacDonnell chief, Somhairle Buidhe, "Yellow
+Charles", Sorley Boy, as the English wrote him: and often the State
+Papers had occasion to write his name between 1558, when he came to
+lordship of the North, and 1590, when he died (singularly enough)
+a natural death in his own castle of Duneynie and was buried among
+all the Mac Donnells in the Abbey at Bonamargy near Ballycastle. Two
+sayings of his are memorable. They showed him the head of his son
+impaled above the gate of Dublin Castle. "My son," he retorted, "has
+many heads." And in truth that stock sprung up like nettles after
+cutting.--Elizabeth, in one of the phases of her diplomacy, sought to
+enlist this warrior on her side, and sent him a patent for his estates
+and chieftaincy as Lord of the Pale, engrossed on parchment. They
+brought him the writing to his castle of Dunluce, and he hacked the
+scroll to shreds. "With the sword I won it," he said; "I will never
+keep it with the sheepskin."
+
+Nevertheless, time brought him counsel, and when Sir John Perrot,
+Henry VIII's bastard, came and battered Dunluce with cannon, Sorley,
+now eighty years of age, made his submission and travelled to Dublin,
+to pay his homage to the Queen's picture, going on his knees to kiss
+the embroidered pantoufle on the royal foot. After his death, his son
+Randal joined the rising of Hugh O'Neill and Hugh O'Donnell; but when
+that last great effort to throw off England's power was foiled by the
+defeat at Kinsale, the Mac Donnell made submission, and Elizabeth's
+successor, James, who after all had a natural kindness for the Mac
+Donnells (seeing that they were to the last Scotch rather than Irish)
+accepted his submission and endowed him with the whole territory from
+the Cutts of Coleraine to the Curran of Larne.
+
+Dunluce, which stands on a projecting rock, approached only by a
+narrow footway over a very deep natural trench, has to stand a battery
+more continuous than Perrot's cannon could bring to bear. The sea is
+under it, for a cave pierces the rock, and wind and wave are for ever
+straining at the old fortress. Part of it fell in 1639, and to-day
+they say the whole ruin is menaced with collapse; and, since it stands
+in private grounds, no public authority can intervene to save it.
+
+[Illustration: THE GIANTS' CAUSEWAY]
+
+For some heads the crossing of that wall into Dunluce has a danger;
+and a fall would be serious. But the real test of resistance to
+giddiness can be made at the famous hanging bridge which joins the
+mainland with the island rock of Carrickarede, near Port Ballintoy.
+The bridge consists of planks laid two abreast, and lashed to ropes;
+a single rope is the only handrail. The people use it to get out to
+their nets and boats for the salmon fishing, which are kept out here,
+and also, since there is grass on the island, for carrying sheep
+across on their backs. For my own part I stepped on to it readily
+enough; but when it bent down steeply under me, and inclined to swing,
+the surprise was not pleasant. And though I forced myself to cross it
+a second time, back and forward, to convince myself that there was no
+necessity for qualms, I cannot say that the qualms wholly disappeared.
+As for carrying a sheep over, or a bale of nets, heaven defend me! But
+I never heard that anyone, native or tourist, drunk or sober, came to
+grief there! The drop is about eighty feet into deep water between
+cliffs.
+
+
+
+
+THE MAIDEN CITY
+
+
+Adjoining the Route, and divided from it by the River Bann, is
+County Derry, which was once the territory of the O'Cahans, chief
+_urraghts_ or sub-chiefs of the O'Neills. When the O'Neill was by
+adoption of the clans installed after the Irish usage at Tullaghogue
+in County Tyrone, it was the O'Cahan who performed the ceremony of
+inauguration. With these facts two memories connect themselves for
+me. The first is that when the Gaelic League was established, to save
+the language of Ireland from oblivion and decay, amongst those who
+joined it was the Reverend Dr. Kane, a mighty orator on every Twelfth
+of July, when the anniversary of the Boyne is celebrated. "I may be
+an Orangeman," he wrote, "but I do not forget that I am an O'Cahan."
+Many of us who did not share his politics cherish his memory for that
+saying. The other associated idea for me is that, once setting out
+with other nationalist speakers, I was followed by a strong body of
+police. Asking why, I was told they were to prevent an attack on us in
+Tullaghogue, which is now a strong Orange centre!
+
+Coleraine is where you join the train to get to Derry, and the rail
+skirts the shore of Lough Foyle--easternmost of the great succession
+of sea loughs which make the distinctive beauty of Donegal.
+Inishowen, its western shore, is included in that county by English
+geography, though this peninsula never formed part of Tyrconnell.
+Its lordship was always disputed between O'Neill and O'Donnell, and
+the best evidence of its separateness is given by the ecclesiastical
+boundary, which here, as always, follows the old tribal demarcation.
+All the rest of Donegal is comprised in the diocese of Raphoe, but
+Inishowen falls under the see of Derry. One result of that was
+traceable in the fact that _poteen_ (illicit whisky) was freely
+procurable in Inishowen long after its manufacture had ceased in
+any other part of Donegal; for the austere decree which the present
+bishop of Raphoe--an O'Donnell and a ruler of men--proclaimed against
+this "smuggling" had no effect east of the Swilly, though throughout
+Tyrconnel it was heard and obeyed, to the great advantage of his
+people, whom the old traffic (which I remember flourishing in spite
+of law and police, fines, seizures, and imprisonments) had seriously
+demoralized.
+
+Derry and Raphoe have for a century been in the Protestant Church one
+united see, and in the days before disestablishments, made a princely
+preferment. You can see the proof of it at Castlerock, where the line
+from Coleraine strikes out on the shore of Lough Foyle by the long
+Magilligan strand. Here is Downhill, the seat built in the eighteenth
+century by that amazing prelate Lord Augustus Adolphus Hervey, Earl of
+Bristol and Bishop of Derry, who took a leading and not a very pacific
+part in organizing the volunteers and in winning Ireland's legislative
+independence.
+
+"He appeared always", says Sir Jonah Barrington, "dressed with
+peculiar care and neatness, generally entirely in purple, and he wore
+diamond knee and shoe buckles; but what I most observed was that he
+wore white gloves with gold fringe round the wrists and large gold
+tassels hanging from them." A troop of horse headed by his nephew
+used to escort him everywhere and to mount guard at his door. Later,
+growing tired of Ireland, he migrated to Italy on the plea of ill
+health; and though many of his costly purchases were sent home to
+Downhill, where unhappily a fire destroyed the most valuable, he
+never came back, but remained abroad (says the austere Lecky, himself
+born on the shore of Lough Foyle), "adopting the lax moral habits of
+Neapolitan society", and in extreme old age writing letters to Emma,
+Lady Hamilton, "in a strain of most unepiscopal fervour".
+
+There are no such bishops nowadays, but my childhood was familiar
+with the last of Lord Bristol's successors under the old order--the
+late Bishop Alexander, most eloquent of divines, afterwards Primate
+of Ireland. His talents brought him to the episcopate, while still
+a young man, only a year or two before disestablishment, and the
+life-interest in his £12,000 a year came to be compounded, not only
+for his own benefit, but for that of the Church. While the financial
+negotiation was still in progress, my father, then rector of a parish
+in Donegal, and financier-in-chief to the diocese, sent his bishop out
+for a day's driving in charge of a young curate, and trysted to meet
+them on Mulroy Bay. Arrived there, he saw with dismay the bishop, not
+on land but afloat, being sculled by the curate through the numberless
+rocks and swirling currents of Mulroy in a battered curragh--a hundred
+thousand pounds of ecclesiastical capital divided from submersion by
+a piece of tarred calico. And the famous orator, even at that period
+of his life, could not have weighed less than eighteen stone. Long
+years after, the curate, become venerable in his turn, remembered and
+recalled for me the rating which he received when at last he landed
+his passenger.
+
+Another memory from the same source may be worth recalling. Downhill
+is the house which Charles Lever describes in his novel, _The
+Bramleighs of Bishop's Folly_, though the story has no historic
+connection with the house or any of its inmates. But Lever knew this
+"Bishop's Folly" in the days when he was a dispensary doctor at
+Portstewart, and my father remembers well how _Harry Lorrequer_ came
+out by instalments in the _Dublin Morning Magazine_, with what delight
+he heard them read aloud, and how sudden was the addition of interest
+when one day the news came in that the anonymous author was no other
+than their own dispensary doctor--the brilliant young collegian for
+whom a place had been suddenly created in this outlying village during
+one of the visitations of cholera. After that, whenever the doctor
+came to call, a shy boy used to creep into the drawing-room and
+ensconce himself, apparently with a book, out of sight behind a sofa,
+where, undisturbed by apprehensions, he could be all ears for the
+rattling talk of that wonderful tale-teller.
+
+Lever learnt a good deal in Portstewart from a neighbour, W. H.
+Maxwell, author of _Wild Sport of the West_, who lived in those days
+at Portrush. But it was the west and south of Ireland that always
+drew Lever--his florid taste in incident and humour found its choice
+elsewhere than in the discreet greys and browns of Ulster character.
+And east of Lough Foyle he was still in the Ulster which politicians
+mean--the country of the plantations. Derry is in reality its frontier
+town, though the Scotch strain and the Protestant element ramify out
+from Derry a certain distance into Donegal.
+
+[Illustration: FAIR HEAD, CO. ANTRIM]
+
+But the frontier town, like all frontier towns in a country
+that has been much fought over, keeps an intense, militant, and
+aggressive character. Derry stands for the extreme type of Protestant
+assertion--oddly enough, for in the beginning of its history, it
+was the monastic seat, Doire Coluimchille, "Columba's Oakgrove", to
+which that great apostle of Christianity looked back from his mission
+overseas--"thinking long" in Iona for--
+
+     "Derry mine, my own oakgrove,
+     Little cell, my home, my love".
+
+There is no reason to doubt the authenticity of that Irish poem,
+transmitted in ancient manuscript, which a scholar has thus
+translated--Columba's lyric cry towards the Ireland which he had left.
+
+Yet, after all, the new is more to us than the old, and Derrymen have
+good right to be proud of Derry walls. The famous siege was a great
+event, the resistance was indeed heroic, though I think that popular
+fame has selected the wrong man to be the centre of hero-worship. A
+tall column which rises from the walls behind the bishop's palace
+is Walker's monument, and Walker was no soldier but an elderly,
+loquacious, and somewhat vain, preacher. If contemporary records
+are any safe guide, the true organizer and inspirer of that long
+resistance was Murray--whose fame, I am glad to say, is kept alive
+by a Murray club. Yet the man who best of all, perhaps, deserves
+commemoration has no memorial in Derry. The siege had lasted from
+April 18, and on June 13 the town was already starving when a fleet
+was sighted in Lough Foyle. Kirke, who commanded it, lay outside,
+intimidated by the defences of the narrow channel. So it went on for
+six weeks; but there was at least one Derry man with the fleet who
+could brook the delay no longer. This was Captain Browning, of the
+_Mountjoy_, and he insisted that attempts should be made to run the
+batteries and to break the boom, whose site is still preserved in the
+name "Boom Hall". The _Mountjoy_ was a merchant-man, and another, the
+_Phoenix_, of Coleraine, joined the venture, and a frigate was sent
+with them to help in drawing the enemy's fire. The _Mountjoy_, with
+Browning himself at the helm, headed straight for the boom under full
+sail, struck it, and with the impact the boom gave. But the shock
+caused a rebound which flung the ship back on a mudbank, and at the
+same moment Browning was shot down at his post. The _Phoenix_ had
+slipped already through the gap and was away with her full cargo of
+meal. Boats were out from the forts to seize the _Mountjoy_; but she
+fired a broadside, and the recoil lifted her off the bank, and she too
+slipped through, carrying the body of her dying skipper to the wharf
+of the city which his courage and determination had rescued from
+famine and from enforced surrender. Life stayed in him long enough to
+let him hear the cries of welcome, to know that the goal was reached,
+the blockade broken, and his city saved, before the rush of blood from
+his pierced lungs finally choked him: and surely no man ever died a
+more enviable death.
+
+Yet in truth it was the people who had rescued themselves. In the
+previous month of December, before hostilities were really declared,
+King James had been imbecile enough to withdraw the troops which held
+the city. A fresh garrison under Lord Antrim was marching in, and was
+seen actually outside the walls. The city fathers deliberated; it was
+thirteen prentice boys of the town who armed themselves, rushed to
+the Ferryquay gate, seized the keys, and locked it in the teeth of
+Antrim's men, when they were within sixty yards of the entrance.
+
+This deed is commemorated annually on December 18th, when Lundy, the
+officer who commanded in James's interest, is duly burnt in effigy--or
+used to be. Nowadays Catholic and Protestant are so evenly balanced in
+the "Maiden City" that such demonstrations risk a formidable riot, and
+are accordingly kept in check.
+
+But the embers are always hot, and crave wary walking. Once a concert
+was being held, "strictly non-sectarian", and it had been decided
+to omit "God save the King", which in Ireland is made into a party
+tune. All went off smoothly, and the building was being emptied, when
+suddenly war rose. The organist, a stranger, had thought it would be
+proper to play the people out with "Auld Lang Syne"--not knowing that
+to this tune is sung "Derry Walls", most aggressive of Protestant
+melodies.
+
+Derry walls are there, broad and solid--you can drive a coach on them.
+But, what is more important, you can there find the best entertainment
+that I know in Ireland. A little hotel, whose doorway gives on to the
+east wall, is kept by Mrs. MacMahon, and all persons of understanding
+go there to get the kind of meal which you may hope for in the
+pleasantest north of Ireland country home: the fruits of the earth,
+the fowl of the air, the fish of the sea, each according to his kind
+(not omitting Lough Swilly oysters), with the home-made bread, which
+is one of Ulster's greatest charms. It is not an elaborate modern
+hotel. If it were, you would not get the sort of entertainment that
+I describe; but to stay there is to get an insight, and a most happy
+insight, into the homeliness, the hospitality, the shrewdness, and the
+good housewifery of Ulster.
+
+[Illustration: LONDONDERRY FROM THE WATERSIDE]
+
+
+
+
+TIRCONNELL
+
+
+Donegal has become to-day the best pleasure ground in Ireland. Second
+only to Kerry in natural beauty, and superior to it in grandeur,
+for Kerry has no cliff scenery to compare with Slieve League and
+Horn Head, it has far more variety of resource than the southern
+county--or, in two words, it has golf and Kerry has not; and it has
+much more free fishing. It is equipped as a playground, and as a
+playground I shall write of it--with this preface. When I was a boy,
+between thirty and forty years ago, there were only two passable
+hotels west of Lough Swilly, Lord George Hill's at Gweedore, and Mr.
+Connolly's at Carrick. Both of these were built for men who wanted
+to fish and shoot; and to reach them meant in literal truth a day's
+journey into the wilderness. There was no railway in the county except
+the little line from Derry to Buncrana; and it was the regular usage
+for strangers to bring introductions which got them hospitality from
+the resident gentry. I remember scores of such casual visitors at the
+big, old rectory where I was brought up.
+
+To-day there is hardly any point in the county more than ten miles
+distant from a rail--Irish miles of course, and hilly ones. But when
+the train takes you from Derry to Burtonport, curving in behind Lough
+Swilly, and following all the northern coast to its extreme remotest
+corner, you may fume, as I have often fumed, at the vagaries of that
+wonderful organization; you may think it amazing to be a matter of
+three hours late in a journey of four hours, as has happened to me;
+still, it is well to remember how you might have had to drive the
+same distance on an outside car in such wind and rain as Donegal can
+furnish.
+
+And of course the delays I speak of are probably not so usual as at
+the first wild beginnings of that traffic. No longer, probably, will
+you see the engine driver getting out to replenish his supply of fuel
+from a wayside turf stack; no longer will you need to scour the whole
+countryside for a truckload of luggage casually mislaid. It is only
+fair to add that where I finally unearthed our possessions was at a
+mountain siding near two excellent salmon pools, with which I then
+became acquainted and where I subsequently caught fish. If the engine
+does break down anywhere on that run there is sure to be a little
+river within a mile or so, and it is quite worth putting up your rod
+and going out to have a try; at least one man to my knowledge returned
+triumphantly with a good salmon--the messenger sent to fetch him
+having come in handy to gaff it.
+
+But in all seriousness tourists have got to remember that these
+lines are not there for holiday traffic. Goods and passengers travel
+together, and the real purpose of the whole is to give a market
+to the thousands of cottagers along that wild yet populous shore.
+What it means is that the coast fisherman who nets a salmon now can
+sell it for perhaps twopence a pound less than it will fetch in
+Billingsgate--tenpence, a shilling even, for summer fish. In the old
+days there was no one to give him more than perhaps a shilling for
+his whole fish. And in truth in the old days a Donegal peasant hardly
+conceived that he could be the legitimate possessor of a salmon.
+
+That is the real change. In the days that I remember, the country was
+owned by the landlords, was governed by them and by their agents, with
+assistance from the Church of Ireland clergy. To-day a great part of
+the land is owned by the people who till it; it is all governed by
+them. And in increasing measure they own even the game, most jealously
+guarded of seigniorial rights.
+
+Take, for example, the little town of Milford. I remember it a
+miserable line of hovels, with only two decent buildings, the
+agent's house and the always imposing police barrack. To-day it has
+an excellent hotel, and every look of prosperity. I remember when
+every soul in it and for ten miles round was in the grip of a really
+tyrannical landlord, whose murder, when it ultimately came, was indeed
+an act of what Bacon calls "wild justice". Much of the improvement
+visible here is due to the able and courageous man who succeeded the
+"old lord". But, good landlord or bad landlord, no man can ever again
+hold that countryside at his pleasure, cowering under the threat of
+eviction. Rent is fixed by a court, and while a man pays his rent he
+is irremovable. And within a short period every man will be paying,
+not rent, but instalments of purchase for the land which he and his
+predecessors have worked--which in nine cases out of ten they have
+reclaimed from bog and barren moor. With the ownership of the land the
+game rights must ultimately go, and in many cases already they have
+gone. The hotel proprietor at Milford, an enterprising man, had, I
+found, bargained with not a few tenant purchasers for the exclusive
+fishing of little lakes in their property and for the shooting over
+their moors and bogs. That is the attraction which he has to offer to
+visitors, who, now that the country is opened up, come in shoals. On
+Lough Fern, the big lake adjoining, it was unusual to see two boats
+fishing, three made a rarity. Now, in summer, there will be fifteen or
+sixteen out. And not only that, but boats have been put on seven or
+eight of the numberless smaller lakes and bogholes which nobody ever
+fished at all, except once in a blue moon, when a curragh would be
+carted over. Some of them breed good trout, and now these are being
+stocked with a new strain of fish. All this means the circulation
+of money in the country where poverty before was universal, where
+famine even was not unknown. A failure of the potato crop to-day is a
+grievous loss: thirty years ago it meant something like starvation.
+
+What took me to Milford the other day was significant of the new
+order. I was with a departmental committee appointed to consider how
+the fisheries of Ireland would be affected by the substitution of
+peasant proprietary for landlord ownership; and our main purpose was
+to emphasize the value of the interests involved, the possibility
+of increasing that value, and the necessity for combination unless
+the whole were to be destroyed. And here was no question merely of
+providing an attraction for the summer visitor: it meant conserving a
+mainstay of livelihood for hundreds of labouring men.
+
+When I was a boy a regular feature in that countryside was the fish
+pedlar--some old man or old woman with a donkey and two creels,
+hawking round fish that had been carted up from the coast by
+Sheephaven. Along the prosperous settled shores of Lough Swilly, by
+Ramelton and Letterkenny, these poor folk found a market at the end
+of a day's journey. It was a poor market and a small one. But since
+the railroad was instituted, the fish pedlar takes a back place. Fish
+goes straight to the great towns, and it has been worth men's while to
+organize for catching the summer run of salmon which skirt the coast
+in June and July. From Malin Head to Arranmore, and from Arranmore
+into Donegal Bay, scores of thousands of pounds must have been earned
+in this way during the past seven or eight years by the coast-dwelling
+folk, half-farmers, half-fishermen, working through the short nights
+in their four-oared yawls. A lucky crew will earn ten pounds a man in
+two months' fishing--in a country from which each year thousands go
+across to Scotland or Lancashire for field labour and are content if
+they bring home ten pounds for their season's toil. It is easy to see
+how great an added source of prosperity this fishing means. Yet if
+the fish are killed out in the breeding streams, it ends the fishing;
+and when a river is divided into a hundred interests instead of one,
+no individual has a sufficient inducement to preserve the stock of
+salmon. A lesson in citizenship has to be learnt; public opinion
+has to be created. Donegal is leading in the attempt to develop
+co-operative preservation of game and fish, and whoever helps that
+endeavour is doing a good turn, not only to the interests of sport,
+but to the interests of Ireland.
+
+[Illustration: TORY ISLAND FROM FALCARRAGH HILL, DONEGAL]
+
+Golf, which for the present is even a greater attraction than
+sport, does not extend into the wilder parts of the country; though,
+indeed, twenty years ago Port Salon and Rosapenna, where the most
+famous links are, were outlandish enough: it is golf that has brought
+them well into the pale of civilization--over-civilization, some of us
+grumble, when we see smart frocks among the sandhills by Downings Bay.
+Yet anyone who goes to Rosapenna, and has curiosity enough to enquire,
+can learn the whole history of a great industry's development within
+a score of years--for Downings is the centre of a most prosperous
+herring fishery, and the girls and boys from that outlying region are
+fetched at high wages to do skilled work in curing herring wherever
+herring are being caught, as far south as Dublin Bay, and very likely
+beyond.
+
+And if I had any choice of all the fine places in Ireland to spend
+a holiday in, I would choose the one which makes the centre of Mr.
+Williams's sketch from Rosapenna--the low headland of Ards, jutting
+into Sheephaven, with wood of oak, and fir, and beech, and ash, so
+exquisitely blended, spread for a covering over ground so beautifully
+diversified; with little bays and creeks of blue water over the
+cleanest and tawniest sand running up into the heart of wooded or
+heathery slopes. Nowhere else is the scent of the brine so clean and
+strong across the other pungencies of heath, and bog-myrtle, of oak,
+and of bracken; nowhere else that I know does a perfect day give such
+fulfilment of desire.
+
+Rosapenna shore and the village of Carrigart are too much dominated
+by the hotel and by foreign ways for my liking; but on the opposite
+shore, where Portnablah gives a harbour (not safe, alas!) to the boats
+of my friends, is the place of all my affections. This rocky little
+townland is set thick with whitewashed cottages, and here it has been
+an old custom for Irish folk from Derry and Letterkenny to come to
+the salt water and find homely quarters. The "bathers", as they are
+called, have of late years grown to be a multitude: if you want rooms
+in a farmhouse there you must bespeak them far in advance, and no
+wonder. If my ghost haunts any place it will be there, where the white
+road to Dunfanaghy (white, for this is a limestone tract), leaving the
+wall of Ards demesne, rises to a crest with a few houses (filled with
+bathers) on the right; and on your left is Sessiagh Lake, prosperously
+stocked with trout, and watched over by an old herring fisher, still
+able to pull a stout oar when the strong gale catches that high-lying
+water, but for the most part happy to drift contentedly and spin yarns
+about the men and the things and the fish that he has known. Quick
+with his tongue, too, in a leisurely way. "I suppose people very
+seldom die here," said a stranger, commenting on the healthiness of
+the situation. "Never more nor once," said old Tom.
+
+Beyond the houses and the limekiln and the glimpse of Sessiagh's
+delusive waters (Heaven knows how many blank days I fished there!)
+is a line of grassy hillocks--the mass of Horn Head blocks the view
+beyond them to the west, but full north, suddenly, held in the curve
+between two of these little summits, you catch sight of the Atlantic
+blue. Blue, it may be, or purple, or greyish green, or black almost,
+with white spray flying; but there it is, held as if in a cup--the
+very quintessence of the saltness, the strength, and the freedom of
+the sea. When the herring are in, you shall see it dotted over with
+smacks and yawls, and here and there a curragh crawling slowly on the
+water like some black insect; or at night all a-twinkle with lights,
+till you rub your eyes and wonder if a town has not suddenly sprung
+into being. And all about, the steep shores of the bay are patched
+and striped with careful tillage, crops, well-tended, nestling in for
+shelter under every rocky hummock; and nestled, too, into the folds of
+the ground, are the white-fronted houses, with stone pegs across their
+eaves for cording to lash the roof secure against their terrible gales.
+
+It is worth while being there in bad weather, to watch the run of
+sea on those cliffs; sometimes, in a sinister calm, rolling in
+mountain-high, tearing itself to whiteness on the long black spines of
+rock; and then, after this forerunner, comes the storm itself. It is
+then, when you see the smacks running in for shelter, or when, after a
+night of this, you see them put out to pick up costly nets that have
+been cut adrift to save men's lives, and that still must be recovered
+even at grave peril--it is then you will realize how these people take
+a grip of their country and cling to the foothold for which all life
+is a struggle.
+
+Yet life goes merrily there. In the winter through some parishes there
+will be dancing almost every night in one cottage or another, and the
+crowd is thick on the floor and about the big turf fire.
+
+[Illustration: MUCKISH AND ARDS FROM ROSAPENNA, SHEEPHAVEN, DONEGAL]
+
+These people are for the most part pure Irish, and west of Dunfanaghy
+all are Irish speakers. Under Irish rule it was the territory of the
+M'Swineys, chief urraghts of the O'Donnell, and Doe Castle, at the
+outfall of the Lackagh, was the fortress of the chief of the name.
+Owen Roe O'Neill made his landing here, Cromwell's most formidable
+opponent in Ireland--removed at last either by sickness or poison.
+Here Red Hugh O'Donnell was fostered by Owen M'Swiney of the Battle
+Axes before the treacherous kidnapping at Rathmullen. There were three
+M'Swiney clans--M'Swiney Doe, M'Swiney Banaght in the west of the
+county, and M'Swiney Fanad in the peninsula that divides Mulroy
+from Swilly. Each had its own war tune, and a schoolmaster friend of
+mine--himself a Sweeny--who collected native airs, had got two of the
+three, but not the third; until at last he heard of an old bedridden
+man in Fanad who might have it. He rode the twenty miles from his home
+at Gartan, with fiddle on his back, and found the old peasant wavering
+on the brink of death, yet still able to frame feebly the whistle or
+lilt, which my friend picked up on the strings of the fiddle bit by
+bit, till gradually he had it all, and, there and then, by the dying
+man's bedside, set the cabin ringing with the oldtime war march of his
+clan.
+
+Another M'Sweeny that I have known was Turlough, the famous piper of
+Gweedore, whose repute has travelled far overseas. Aristocrat he is to
+the finger tips--saddened indeed because those fine finger tips have
+been coarsened by spade labour. "Look," he said to me; "can there be
+any music in these hands?" He told me his own generations, connecting
+him back with the hereditary bards of the M'Swineys, and I said that
+he must know the history of the county better than most. "No," he
+answered; "I was never curious of these things, except just as they
+concerned myself and my own people."
+
+Mr. Williams's picture shows Errigal where it rises by Gweedore over
+Dunlewy Lake--one of the grandest among Ireland's mountains. But the
+most striking view of it is east of Gweedore, where the little river
+flows out by Gortahork; and here is a thing of much interest, the
+Cloghaneely College, where folk go to study Ulster Irish amongst those
+who have it for their native speech. Still farther east is Falcarragh,
+and the view which Mr. Williams has given adds less than due emphasis
+to the astonishing castellated outline of Tory where it rises out of a
+tremendous depth of water. I never landed there, though I often talked
+with the Tory fishers, including one who had made his fortune at the
+goldfields and come back to the place of his birth among the rocks
+and the fish heads. There is one sheltered spot, one growing bush,
+and one only, on Tory. There, of course, Irish is the language, and
+they maintain the practice of verse, chiefly for purposes of satire;
+quarrels are revenged in rhyme. I talked to a red-bearded mountainy
+man near Gortahork about this, but he said it was a peevish thing to
+do; he would rather have a skelp at a man. In truth there is an old
+feud between Tory and the shore, and fierce battles have been waged.
+I do not know why so few people stop at Falcarragh: there is a good
+little hotel, the views are beautiful, there are three little rivers,
+all holding salmon, and, at the point where the longest of them flows
+out across the long range of sand beach west of Horn Head, there is
+a view of Tory and of Horn Head that passes all I know. Running water
+across sand, clean sand dunes and grey bent, pure illimitable sea and
+high cliffs, sunsmitten or in shadow--there is landscape reduced to
+the simplest terms of a broad elemental beauty.
+
+Also at Falcarragh there must be the makings of a links equal to any
+in Ireland. The line of dunes runs for several miles along the sea,
+ending in one of the strangest natural features I know, the huge
+mountain of clean sand which centuries of westerly gales have piled up
+against the rocky mass of Horn Head. That famous head is in truth an
+island, the counterpart of Tory on its seaward face, yet in the gap
+between it and Dunfanaghy such a deposit of sand has accumulated that
+only a small causeway has been needed to give access from the mainland
+to the tiny farms and the one demesne.
+
+If in Donegal you want to buy Donegal homespun, Falcarragh is a good
+market for the product, since some weaving is done about there with
+an eye to local wear; and what the Donegal man means to wear, the
+Donegal housewife "tramps" in soapsuds and water till the web thickens
+into a fabric fit to turn weather. On the western shore, by Carrick
+and Ardara, where is now the headquarters of this industry, cloth is
+produced solely for export, and the English ladies and gentlemen for
+whom it is designed seek softness and fineness rather than solidity.
+Indeed the countryfolk themselves treat this merchandise with frank
+scorn: they fancy something far less flimsy for their own use, and in
+old days, when nothing but homespun was worn, it used to be sent to a
+tacking mill and battered till the cloth had the thickness of felt.
+But the tacking mill at Bunlin, whose big wooden mallets rising and
+falling used to interest us children, is a ruin now; and the homespun
+of to-day, with its multitude of pleasant colours, is very different
+from the massive greys or heavy indigo-dyed frieze which used to come
+from that mill.
+
+The industry has been a godsend to that country, and one wet day in
+the little village of Carrick was redeemed to me by the chance of
+seeing all these folk, men and women, come marching over the hills
+with the baled cloth on their backs, and then watching the bargaining
+that proceeded among the various buyers. I bought, too, but I believe
+the merchants will not allow the people to sell to tourists any more.
+
+[Illustration: MOUNT ERRIGAL FROM THE GWEEDORE RIVER, DONEGAL]
+
+I have not written yet of that western shore which stretches southward
+from Dungloe (much haunted by sea-trout fishers) to Glenties, Ardara,
+Carrick, and Killybegs. The most beautiful place that I know on it
+is at the mouth of the Gweebarra River where it flows out due west
+between a line of sandhills which shine dazzling white in the sun
+against the immensity of blue. No place is less known; but you can
+reach it easily from Portnoo, where is a hotel. And off Portnoo is an
+island where on certain days in summer a pilgrimage takes place, at
+spring tides, for it is essential to walk barefoot to the island. The
+ceremonies performed with certain stones are Christianized in form,
+but evidently had an origin long before Christianity. Glenties, some
+eight or ten miles farther south, is at a point where several glens
+converge (_na Gleantai_, the Glens) in the valley of the Ownea River,
+famous for its salmon fishing, which is now vested in purchasing
+tenants who have attempted to introduce co-operative preservation.
+If the experiment succeeds it will mean better preservation than has
+ever been known before; if it fail, I fear that one great source of
+the salmon supply will be wiped out, with loss to sport, and with loss
+much graver to all the labouring fishers who live by that industry.
+But, as things stand, the man who wants good fishing is more likely to
+get it cheap at Glenties or Ardara than any other place known to me.
+In both towns there is a decent hotel. Ardara stands near the outfall
+of the Ownea but actually on a smaller river, the Owentogher, which
+is not only very picturesque, but a good stream for salmon and sea
+trout, if only it could be preserved. And one of the most pleasant
+bits of fishing I ever had was on a tiny stream, the Brocky, which
+comes down a mile farther on and was fishable before the tearing flood
+had subsided in the bigger rivers.
+
+Glenties and Ardara are places where you go for sport, though the
+beauty of mountain and river is all about you. But for scenery Carrick
+and Killybegs are your destination. Killybegs is the terminus of that
+light railway which runs from Donegal town along the north shore
+of Donegal bay, past the Marquis of Cunningham's wooded demesne at
+first, but gradually getting into wilder country, till at last it
+reaches this trim little town on its magnificent harbour. Warships use
+that harbour, and there is nowadays a good fishing fleet operating
+from it for the herring and mackerel; but of other commerce it knows
+little. Yet for the lover of boating and bathing it would be hard to
+discover a more attractive spot. There, too, you can see the parent
+factory of the Donegal carpet trade; and pretty it is to see the big
+looms, with a row of six or seven little girls bareheaded (and often
+barefooted) in front of each, with nimble fingers knotting on the
+tufts of richly coloured wool, or driving them down into their place
+in the solid fabric, while the pattern grows slowly before you on
+the wide warp. It is odd that so rare a merchandise should come out
+of these impoverished regions, for no costlier carpets are made; but
+labour is cheap, and willing, and skilful, and nowhere else is factory
+work done under more wholesome or happy conditions. All the big room
+seemed to be a-ripple and a-play with the young faces and the swift,
+graceful movements of these children, for most of them are no more
+than children; and small though the wage they earn, it is a big thing
+in that countryside, where the old-age pensioner with five shillings
+a week seemed at first to himself or herself rich beyond imagination.
+There is another of the factories at Kilcar, halfway to Carrick, built
+in a sheltered nook almost by the sea; and another in the wild tract
+between Gweedore and Falcarragh.
+
+To the west of Killybegs begins that wonderful line of cliff
+stretching away past Carrick and Glen Columbkille, and girdling all
+the projecting headland till it runs back to Loughros Bay, near
+Ardara. For wildness and for majesty this region has no equal, except
+in Achill; and it has what Achill lacks, the charm of rivers. Mr.
+Williams's pictures illustrate well the coastline, which even when
+it is low runs out with huge flag stones and giant boulders into
+the deep--fit buttress against such waves as roll in there even on
+a day of calm. Everything is big there; distances are long, and a
+mile never seems to get you far in any direction. It is a country to
+walk, the finest of all the countries known to me; but I would gladly
+supplement my walking with a bicycle, travelling one of the roads as
+far as it will carry me and then leaving it simply by the ditch at
+the roadside, among the osmunda fern which grows everywhere free as
+the heather. It commits you to return that way; but what you leave
+by the roadside is as safe as if Argus watched it--unless, indeed,
+some mountainy heifer should pass that way and eat it: they will
+chew anything from a fishing rod to a suit of clothes. I have seen
+embarrassed bathers pursuing an active cow, who carried essential
+garments in her mouth, still masticating them even while she pranced
+in her clumsy gallop.--Carrick is the centre for this country and
+Slieve League the great excursion; it is a fine walk down by the
+little port of Teelin and then up the track which winds along the
+cliff edge of the mountain--perhaps the finest view of all is when you
+are halfway, with seven or eight hundred feet of sheer cliff below you
+and the steep face towering up another thousand above. At the somewhat
+overrated hazard of the One Man's Pass you would fall, I dare say,
+sixteen hundred feet before you reached the water; but from the top a
+pebble may be dropped two thousand feet plumb into the sea.
+
+[Illustration: GLENVEAGH, DONEGAL]
+
+Horn Head is only seven or eight hundred feet; yet because the cliff
+face there is undercut, and the Horns themselves project so oddly,
+it always seemed to me a dizzier place than the greater cliff. The
+really marvellous thing at Slieve League is that view across Donegal
+Bay to the mountains of Sligo, Benbulbin of magic fame, and along the
+wild Mayo coast that stretches out and out to the west till the long
+promontory is finished off by island rocks, the Stags of Broadhaven.
+
+Yet, since I scorn to deceive, what endears Carrick to me is not its
+cliff scenery, but its little rivers and its people. I know the rivers
+are too small: you cannot seriously hope to kill salmon there except
+in a raging flood, and then your flood runs off in a couple of hours:
+I hooked four fish there inside the first hour after breakfast, killed
+two of them, and never touched another all day. But for sheer beauty;
+for infinite variety in the shape and colour of flowing water (the
+most beautiful thing to me on God's earth); for pools where the eddy
+swirls past clean rock with glossy ferns in every crevice; for banks
+where the scent of bog-myrtle is all about as you brush through the
+heather; for anything that can entice the eye of an angler, I never
+saw the equal of that main stream. The little Owen Buidhe, too, in its
+boggy glen, has attractions of its own, deeper pools and seductive
+corners; but it is the Glen River, flowing down from Meenaneary, that
+haunts my vision when in London I crave for the things that I desired
+in boyhood, and love more in middle age.
+
+And of all the human beings whom I have known among the peasant folk
+of Ireland, none had ever quite the charm of old Charlie Carr, the
+gillie who fished with me at Carrick. By an odd chance, he was no
+sportsman. He would want you to be pleased, and to catch fish, if
+so you fancied it; but I remember how my vanity was hurt when, on a
+difficult day, I had hooked and landed a fine sea trout, the first
+that anyone had seen for a long time. "Them O'Hagans was great people
+too", he said as he shook the fish out of the net, calmly pursuing his
+discourse about the ancient days and the generations of old, and the
+lore of those few books which he had, and studied with passion. He
+was no true shanachie; what of Irish legend and song his memory kept
+had no real value. He was a lover of knowledge, not for vanity, not
+for the sense of power, but simply because it added to the richness
+of life--one of God's gifts that he welcomed as the sunshine. If
+ever I met a happy nature, a soul without spot, it was this Irish
+peasant; if ever I have seen letters full of grace and simplicity
+they were those that reached me once in a rare while from that lonely
+glen, asking, never for himself, but perhaps that I would give a
+prize to some school children, or the like, and always full of an
+affection that knew no difference between man and man. I can see now
+the wonderful blue eyes in that kind face, a handsome peasant face
+with its fringe of grey close-cropped whisker. If I remember a word
+of complaint from him, it was when he saw his neighbour go by on a
+car--a man no soberer, no more industrious, no better educated than
+himself, yet one who had had the instinct for buying and selling, for
+putting penny to penny and pound to pound. The neighbour was a good
+man too, in his way; kindly and friendly, prompt to do a service, yet
+not to be reckoned amongst those elect upon earth whom everyone using
+discernment will have recognized on his way through life, of whom not
+a few that I have known have been Donegal peasants. But none had quite
+the grace, the simplicity, and the distinction of this old dreamer and
+student who carries net and basket by the Glen River without repute
+among men.
+
+For all my love of Carrick I could hardly conceive of living there.
+It is too bare, too vast. And though there is no frost, though every
+second bush you see in summer is crimson fuchsia full of blossoms, yet
+winter must be of a terrible loneliness. But the Donegal that I was
+brought up in--Donegal of more inhabited and habitable shores by Lough
+Swilly and Sheephaven and Mulroy--does seem to me a place not for
+summer visitants only. However, this book concerns itself with summer,
+and nowhere is summer more delightful. Of course it rains often, and
+sometimes hard. "Did it rain ony wi' ye?" "It didna tak time to rain;
+it just cam doun buckets," is a fragment of descriptive dialogue. But
+take the country as I saw it in mid-July, when London was stewing
+on a griddle of asphalt and flags, and when English country was all
+one monotonous deadened green with heavy haze dimming the blueness.
+Out at Bunlin, beyond Milford, all was green too; I looked from the
+steep road across a glen breast-deep in bracken, with the curve of
+Cratlagh wood beyond, and nearer me trim fields of green oats and
+turnips. There was beauty of line there in Mulroy with its score of
+scattered islands, in the hills, not very high, but very mountainous,
+bold, and jagged, falling from the peak of Lough Salt to the glen, and
+to the Mulroy water, crest by crest, sharp to the last little rocky
+hillock. There was beauty of colour too, for the green of the bracken
+was broken by silvery grey stone, with glint of mica in it, showing
+up through the fern, and crowned or set about with purple cushions
+of heath, here and there a foxglove adding another and a brighter
+purple. There was wonderful beauty of detail in the wooding nestled
+into the hills--wild growth, scrub oak, light, feathery ash and
+birch, with the gleam of silvery stems, Scotch fir and larch--planted
+trees, yet falling naturally into forestation which had none of the
+heaviness, the citizen look of elm and sycamore. All was light, hardy
+and strong--not a wilderness, but a cared-for country where the eye
+wandered over a fair expanse of varied beauty, lying there in full
+summer without summer's drowsiness or blowsiness. Lightness, airiness,
+was the note of it all--light air, breath of bog-myrtle across the
+salt of the sea; and even the decent homely people, lacking the graces
+of Cork and Kerry, had yet in their motion and in their eye just the
+dash of wildness which marks the Celtic strain.
+
+[Illustration: THE ENTRANCE TO MULROY BAY, DONEGAL]
+
+Next day was Donegal all over--fresh breeze, clouds driving swiftly,
+and then bright sun, lighting up a lovely blueness. We were out on
+small lakes up among the hills, two of us who fancied ourselves not
+a little as fishermen, and got no encouragement for that faith; but
+after all what could be pleasanter, airier, or more resting and more
+bracing at once? and how good one's lunch is on the stones by a reedy
+shore! I had to go back to London, and the car took me to Rathmullen
+on the Swilly shore; and when the little steamer put out from the pier
+it seemed to me that of these lovely loughs this is after all the
+most beautiful. All was grey and green in the westering light; the
+hills on the Inishowen shore opposite showed softer than the crags by
+Mulroy. They were green now, with the olive green of young heather; in
+another month they would be glowing purple. The lough as we crossed it
+was a great round lake throwing arms west and south-west to Ramelton
+and Letterkenny, beyond which all was bathed in a sunny haze. As we
+ran farther out, the western mountains of Inishowen came in sight,
+then suddenly beyond Dunree the sea gap opened, letting the eye out
+to limitless ocean; and soon the sheer crag of the Binn of Fanad was
+disclosed flanking that portal on the west. Looking back to the shore
+we left, the Devil's Backbone writhed sinister and jagged along the
+crest of the Knockalla range behind Rathmullen; and away to the west
+in the sun haze, accustomed eyes could make out the faint shapes of
+Errigal and Dooish.
+
+History was all about us, evident in actual landmarks. On the hills
+which divide the lough from Derry stood out boldly the ring of stone,
+the great circular fort, which was the Grianan of Aileach, chief
+seat of the northern Hy Niall, whose kinsfolk reigned in Tara. Here
+Patrick preached about 450 A.D., baptized Eoghan, founder of
+the great Tyrone clan, the O'Neills. Here, in a later age, came an
+O'Brien of Thomond, one of Brian Boru's earliest successors, to avenge
+a raid of these Northerners on Clare, and the stones of Aileach were
+carried away to be built into the cathedral at Limerick. Over at
+Rathmullen is the beach from which the boy Hugh O'Donnell was rowed
+out to see the English ship which lay at anchor, offering hospitality
+with black treachery behind; for the crew cut their cables while the
+young chief and his company were below seeing the vessel's stores, and
+sailed off with the prisoner so dishonourably made, to the Castle of
+Dublin, where Hugh lay for years immured, captured but not submissive;
+attempting escape after escape with unfailing heart till at last he
+got loose, and after bare deliverance from death in the snow-covered
+hills was free to exact a reckoning for the wrongs he had suffered.
+
+On a low hill beyond Inch Island rises the square town of Birt, which
+has memories of another chief, Cahir O'Dogherty, lord of Inishowen.
+Cahir was fostered by the M'Devitts of Birt, and when Red Hugh claimed
+lordship over Inishowen, the M'Devitts sought English protection
+for their foster-brother and got it. The O'Dogherty became the
+Englishmen's ally and helped to pronounce forfeiture on O'Donnell and
+O'Neill after the two great earls took their flight in 1607--setting
+out from this same ill-omened port of Rathmullen. But a new governor
+of Derry arrived, quarrelled with Cahir O'Dogherty and struck him.
+The blow was dearly paid for. Cahir went back to Birt, called out
+the M'Devitts, and sacked and burnt Derry. But the Irish power had
+been broken beyond retrieving when the earls fled, and O'Dogherty was
+soon a mere outlaw on his keeping. They ran him to earth finally by
+Doon Well, near Kilmacrenan, where he was shot dead in the encounter.
+Doon Well is famous to-day, but I doubt if many there remember Cahir
+O'Dogherty's fate, or even that on the Rock of Doon took place the
+installation of each O'Donnell prince. What is remembered is the
+sanctity of the holy well, whose water still draws thousands of
+pilgrims and still works miracles of healing.
+
+History more modern is in view at Lough Swilly, for here the English
+fleet brought in their prizes after the action with Bonaparte in 1798,
+and brought more than they knew, for they had captured Theobald Wolfe
+Tone, the most dangerous enemy to England that Ireland had in those
+or perhaps any other days. To-day there is a strong guard on Lough
+Swilly. Dunree--_Dun Riogh_--means the King's Fort and the king has
+his fort there, of the most modern type, commanding the entrance to
+this great haven, with an armament very unlike that of the martello
+towers which are dotted about, marking another of England's recurring
+scares--the scare of the "French colonels" under the lesser Napoleon.
+
+All these things came into my mind as I sat on the beach by Fahan and
+watched the colour fade out and new colour take its place--masses
+of dark green where there had been shimmers of grey and blue. Other
+memories came there too--less historical: it was there that somewhere
+in the 'seventies I had my first sight of a real railway train.
+I carry away from Lough Swilly my earliest as well as my latest
+impression of pleasant, beautiful Ulster, enhanced by a grateful
+thought of the dinner which Mrs. MacMahon provided for one about to
+take a long night journey. And whoever leaves the north of Ireland
+with such impressions on his mind will have no cause to quarrel with
+the close of his holiday.
+
+Yet it is not well to depart leaving unexplored the mountainous
+peninsula of Inishowen which separates Lough Swilly from Lough Foyle.
+This great ridge of land is dominated by the graceful shape of Slieve
+Snacht ("Snow Mountain"), a model of what mountains should be: bold
+and peaked, yet with swelling curves that balance on either flank,
+it fills the centre of a distance more impressively than far loftier
+hills.
+
+Inishowen was owned by the O'Doghertys, a clan who, tossed between
+Tyrone and Tirconnell, had at least great staying power, for the
+saying is--you cannot beat a bush in Inishowen without "rising" an
+O'Dogherty. Their castles remain, and at Green Castle, on Lough
+Foyle, is the work of greater men, Norman-planned, Richard de Burgo's
+fortress. Many traces, too, of a far older period are to be seen.
+At Carrowmore, not far from Culdaff, is a "souterrain" with five
+chambers--a great mansion, in short, for these burrowers. Rivers and
+lakes, too, are there with fair fishing, though I believe that a
+certain old professor in Derry has skimmed the cream of it all in his
+learned leisure, any time this fifty years. But the Castle River at
+Buncrana is a fine salmon stream still, and the links there constitute
+an attraction for very capable golfers--though not equal to those at
+Port Salon on the opposite shore. In a word, if you cannot get to the
+west of Lough Swilly you may be very well content with the east of it;
+and though much of infinite beauty and interest lies beyond, when you
+have seen and known Lough Swilly and its shores, and the people who
+live on them--that mixed race, Scot and Irish, lowland and highland,
+Protestant and Catholic, all neighbourly together--why, at least you
+will have had a very fair chance to know and love, not the Ulster that
+people rant about or rail at, but Ulster as it really is.
+
+
+PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
+
+_At the Villafield Press, Glasgow, Scotland_
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Notes
+
+
+The Table of Contents has been added for convenience.
+
+Illustrations have been moved to paragraph breaks.
+
+Page 34: Replaced the oe ligature with oe in the two instances of
+"Phoenix."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Ulster, by Stephen Lucius Gwynn
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 42958 ***