Eminent English historian James Anthony Froude (1818-1894) had a particular interest in the progress of Ireland in the nineteenth century, and spent considerable time in County Kerry. In 1870 and 1871, he published a two-part essay entitled A Fortnight in Kerry in which he described his sojourns at Derreen House near Lauragh, a property of Lord Lansdowne’s on the Kenmare River.
In the course of his discourse, Froude remarks on the changes in the county since his earlier visits during the Famine and makes passing references to the locality such as Scariff Island, which was still inhabited at his time of writing. It is a useful comparison of the then (of 155 years ago) and now, and is reproduced here in its entirety.
A Fortnight in Kerry Part I (first published April 1870)
We have heard much of the wrongs of Ireland, the miseries of Ireland, the crimes of Ireland; every cloud has its sunny side, and when all is said, Ireland is still the most beautiful island in the world, and the Irish themselves, though their temperament is ill matched with ours, are still among the most interesting of peoples.
If the old type of character remains in many of its most unmanageable features, they are no longer the Paddies of our childhood. Wave after wave of convulsion has been rolling over them for hundreds of years past, distinct eras of social organization, with special elements of good and evil in them.
The last of these waves, the great famine of 1846, swept over the country like a destroying torrent, carrying away millions of its peasantry, clearing off the out-at-elbows duel-fighting squireens, and paralysing if it has not extinguished the humour and the fun which made the boy that carried your game-bag or fishing basket the most charming of companions.
The farmer, however seemingly prosperous, carries sadness in his eyes and care on his forehead. If he is thriving himself, his family is broken up: his sons or his brothers are beyond the Atlantic, and his heart was broken in parting with them. The evictions which followed the potato failure have left their marks in a feeling of injustice of which Fenianism is the fruit and the expression.
This, too, however, is passing away or will pass when the Administration recovers courage to combine firmness with justice; and meanwhile, in spite of outrages and assassinations, every one who has watched the Irish character during the last quarter of a century must have felt that it is fast altering, and altering immensely for the better.
‘We are all changed,’ said one of the people to me. ‘You know yourself the landlords are changed, and we are changed, too, if you would only believe it. We have all learnt our lesson together.’ Where the beneficial influences have been the strongest, that is to say, where there has been no cruelty and the tenants have been kindly used, there is growing up a life in all parts of Ireland, with more subdued grace about it, more human in its best features, than is to be found in any other part of these islands.
Journey from London to Kerry
I had an opportunity of seeing something of this, last summer, under its most favourable aspect. A friend who had taken a place for a season or two in the Kerry mountains, invited me to spend a fortnight with him; and careless of the warnings of acquaintances who feared that I should not come back alive, I took my place in the Holyhead mail. It was the second week in August. We left London at night. In the morning we were in Kingstown Harbour, and a few hours later I was deposited at the railway station at Killarney.
Derreen – so I will call the house to which I was bound – was still nearly forty miles distant. The train was late, but the evening promised well. I put myself in the hands of Spillane, the most accomplished of bugle-players, and the politest of hotel managers; and after a hasty dinner I was soon rattling along beside the lake in jaunting car, with a promise of being at my journey’s end if not before dark, yet at no unreasonable hour.
An exquisite drive of three hours brought me to Kenmare, a town at the head of one of the long fiords running up from the Atlantic, which readers of Macaulay will remember as the scene of a brilliant defence made by a small body of Protestant settlers against the Irish insurgents.[1]
The Old Chiefs of Berehaven
It was not my first visit to the place. Thirty years before I had passed through it from Glengariff in a long vacation holiday.[2] The Lansdowne Arms was still in its old place; but the generation which frequented it had passed away. The ‘boy’ who was then driving me called my attention, as I remember, to a group of gentlemen at the door. There were two O’Connells, cousins of the Liberator, at that time in the zenith of his glory. There was Morty O’Sullivan and another whose name I forget. The point about them was that each had killed his man in a duel, and Morty had killed two.
Morty was one of the old chiefs of Berehaven, ruling the wreck of his inheritance with an authority scarcely less despotic as far as it extended; like his ancestors, in perpetual feud with his neighbours, and settling his quarrels with them in the field or in the law courts. He had lived – I should say ‘reigned,’ for that is still the word – at Derreen itself. He had screwed his tenants, drunk whisky enough daily for ten degenerate mortals, such as now we know them, turned his house into a pigstye, and been loved and honoured throughout the valley.
Morty the Good he was called, the king of the golden age of Kerry, and unhappy only in the incapacity of one of his sons, whom he never could teach to handle a pistol like a gentleman. The young O’Sullivan took kindly to the ways of the family; quarreled with a companion before he was out of his teens, and went out to settle the dispute in legitimate fashion. But Morty augured ill for the result. He ordered the wake beforehand, and was disappointed, it was to be hoped agreeably, when the object of his care was brought home only shot through the foot.
Morty had been now long in his grave. Litigation had crippled his fortune and the famine finished it. His boys were scattered over the world and his place knew him no more. Morty was gone, and the fighting squirearchy to which he belonged was gone also, extinct like the dodo; and in the place of the group which I remembered, one or two harmless clerks belonging to the town stores were lounging at the porch in the summer gloaming comparing salmon flies, or talking about the cricket club which had been set on foot there by some neighbouring gentleman.
By Road or Water
Besides these were a couple of smart looking boatmen, one of whom, after ascertaining who I was, informed me that my friend had sent up his yacht, a smart cutter of twenty tons, and that if I preferred a sail to a longer drive they were ready to take charge of me. The wind was from the east, light but fair, and they believed that it would not drop till midnight. But we had still seventeen miles to go. I inquired what would happen if it did drop, and as the answer was vague I determined to stick to my car, and to lose no time, for it was growing dark.
My driver declined a change of horses. The small well-bred Irish car horse does his forty miles a day through the season with only an occasional rest, and seems little the worse for it. Away we went again after a halt of three quarters of an hour, and three minutes brought us to the suspension bridge crossing the head of the fiord, one end of which rests on the peninsula where the Protestants were besieged. That, too, with its traditions was a thing of the past, and might have furnished a text at any other time for its appropriate meditations.
But the scene was too beautiful for moralizing. The pink evening light had faded off the mountains, but the tints which lingered in the western sky were reflected on the glimmering water. The cutter was clearing out of the harbour with her big gaff topsail set and her balloon jib, and as she slid away the men tauntingly hailed us and promised to tell my friends that we were coming. The mare received an intimation that she must put her best foot forward; we struck off to the right on crossing the bridge and entered a long fir wood which skirts the river, catching glimpses at intervals of the shining water through gaps in the trees.
By and by we emerged into open ground. The road was level, following the line of the bay for eight or nine miles, and crossing the mouths of valley after valley where the streams which drain the hills run into the sea. It was now dark so far as a summer night is ever dark. The cutter still kept ahead of us, shimmering ghost-like in the uncertain light. Sometimes we seemed to be gaining on her, – then as a fresh puff of air overtook her she stole away. At last our ways parted; she held on towards a headland far down the bay which she was obliged to round before she could enter Kilmakilloge, the harbour on which Derreen is situated.
The road, to avoid a long circuit, strikes upwards over a pass in the hills, to descend on the other side into the head of the valley. The ascent now became tedious: we had lost the cutter, and were climbing the broken side of an utterly barren mountain. The distant view was hidden by the darkness, and the forms immediately round us had nothing striking about them, beyond a solitary peak which shot up black and gloomy-looking into the sky. Two miles of walking ground made me impatient to be at my journey’s end, and I was unprepared for the scene which was immediately about to break upon me.
We reached the crest at last – rounded a corner of rock, and were at once in another world. The moon had risen, though concealed by the hill which we had been ascending, and burst upon us broad and full as we turned to descend. Below us was a long deep valley losing itself to the left in the shadows in the Glengariff Mountains; opening to the right in the harbour of Kilmakilloge, which lay out like a looking glass in the midst of the hills in which it is landlocked.
Across, immediately before us, was a gorge, black and narrow, the sides of which in the imperfect light appeared to fall precipitously two thousand feet. Beyond, at the head of the harbour, was a second group of mountains shaped in still wilder variety, while the bottom of the valley was traversed by a river divided into long shining pools suggestive of salmon and sea trout, and broken at intervals with cascades, the roar of which swayed up fitfully in the night air.
Supplantation: Fall of Desmond and Rise of Petty
These glens and precipices had been the retreat of the last Earl of Desmond in the closing summer of his life. The long peninsula shut in between the fiords of Bantry and Kenmare was then covered from end to end with forest, inaccessible except by water, or penetrated by a few scarce discoverable horsetracks; inhabited only by wolves, and by men who were almost as wild, and were human only in the ineffable fidelity with which they concealed and shielded their hunted chief.
The enormous trees which lie in the bogs, or the trunks which break on all sides out of the ground, prove that once these hills were as thickly wooded as those which have escaped the spoiler, and in their summer livery delight the tourist at Killarney. Now, the single fault of the landscape is its desolution.
Sir William Petty, who obtained the assignment of the principality of Kerry, on terms as easy as those on which the Colonial Office squandered millions of the best acres in Canada, considered the supply of fuel to be practically as inexhaustible as we now consider our coal measures. He set up refining works on the shore of the harbour, and tin and copper ore was brought over there, till the last available stick had been cut down to smelt it. Nature still struggles to repair the ruin, and young oaks and birches sprout of themselves, year after year, out of the soil, – but the cattle browse them off as they appear; and the wolves being destroyed which once scared the sheep out of the covers, and gave them time to renew their natural waste, civilization itself continues the work of the destroyer, and dooms the district to perpetual barrenness.
Of the forests of oak and arbutus and yew which once clothed the whole of Kerry, the woods at Killarney have alone escaped; those and some few other scattered spots, which for some special reason were spared in the general havoc. At one of these, the ‘domain’ as it is called of Derreen, I have by this time arrived.
Approach to Derreen
Two miles of descent balanced the climb on the other side. We are again in the midst of trees. Level meadows beside the river are dotted with sleeping cattle, we have passed a farm-house or two, and now a chapel handsome and new, at a meeting of cross roads. We turn into a gate, a gravel drive leads us to where lights are shining behind overhanging branches. The harbour is close below us; a four-oared boat is going out for a night’s fishing; the cutter is at this very moment picking up her moorings; we have not beaten her, but we are not disgraced ourselves. In another minute we are in the broad walk which leads to the house.
The night was hot, my friend’s party were on the lawn; some of them had been dining on board a yacht, the lights of which were visible as she lay at anchor, a mile from the windows. They had come on shore in the yacht’s gig, and were standing about reluctant to go in doors from the unusual loveliness of the evening. They proposed a stroll round the grounds, to which I was delighted to consent.
The house stood in the middle of a lawn, shut in on all sides by woods, though which however openings had been cut in various places, letting in the view of the water. The original building, which had been the residence of Morty and his sons, was little more than a cottage. It had been enlarged by a straggling wing better suited to the habits of modern times. Morty, who cared little for beauty, had let the trees grow close to the door. He might have shot wood-cocks from his window, and I dare say he did; while the close cover had served to shelter and conceal his considerable operations in the smuggling line. This more practical aspect of things had been superseded by the sentimental, and by lopping and clearing, full justice had been done to the beauty – I may say, the splendour – of the situation.
The harbour of Kilmakilloge forms a branch of the Kenmare River, from three to four miles deep, and pierced on both sides by long creeks, divided by wooded promontories. On the largest of these, some ninety acres in extent, the house had been placed. Two acres had been cleared to make a garden. Four or five more formed a field running down to the sea. The rest was as nature made it, the primeval forest, untouched save for the laurels and rhododendrons which were scattered under the trees where the ground was dry enough to let them grow. Two rivers fell into the harbour at the upper end, one of them that along which I had just been driving, the other, the larger, emerging out of a broad valley under a bridge which, with the water behind, showed clear and distinct in the moonlight.
All round us rose the wall of mountains, the broken outline being the more striking, because at night the surface details are lost and only the large forms are visible. The sky line on three sides was from two to six miles distant. On the fourth side, towards the mouth of the harbour, it was more remote; but here, too, the ruin of mountains continued to the eye unbroken. The ocean was shut off by the huge back-bone of hills which stretches from Macgillicuddy’s Reeks to the Atlantic.
To all appearance Derreen was cut off from the world as effectually as the valley of Rasselas; and, but for the intrusion of the postman, made evident by my friend’s inquiries as to the last division and the white-bait dinner, but for the croquet wires which I stumbled over on the lawn, we might have seemed divided as utterly from all connection with the world and its concerns.
We wandered through the woods and along the walks which followed the shore. The wind was gone; the last breath of it had brought the yacht to her moorings. The water was like a sheet of pale gold, lighted in the shadows by phosphorescent flashes where a seal was chasing a mullet for his supper. Far off we heard the cries of the fishermen as they were laying out their mackerel nets, a heron or two flew screaming out of some large trees beside the boat-house, resentful at the intrusion on their night’s rest; and from overhead came a rush of wings and the long wild whistle of the curlew.
One of the ladies observed that it was like a scene in a play. She was fond of theatres herself; she was a distinguished artist in that line – or would have been had she been bred to the trade; and her similes following her line of thought. It sounded absurd, but I remember having myself experienced once an exactly similar sensation.
I was going up Channel in a steamer. It was precisely such another warm, breathless moonlight summer night, save that there was a light mist over the water which prevented us from seeing very clearly objects that were at any distance from us. The watch on the forecastle called out, ‘A sail ahead!’ We shut off the steam, and passed slowly within a biscuit’s throw of an enormous China clipper, with all her canvas set, and every sail drooping flat from the yards. We heard the officers talking on the quarter-deck. The ship’s bell struck the hour as we went by. Why the recollections of the familiar sea moonlight of Drury Lane should have rushed over me at such a moment I know not, unless it be that those only who are rarely gifted feel natural beauty with real intensity. With the rest of us our high sensations are at best partly artificial. We make an effort to realise emotions which we imagine that we ought to experience, and are theatrical ourselves in making it.
Morning Ablutions
A glance out of the window in the morning showed that I had not overrated the general charm of the situation. The colours were unlike those of any mountain scenery to which I was accustomed elsewhere. The temperature is many degrees higher than that of the Scotch highlands. The Gulf Stream impinges full upon the mouths of its long bays. Every tide carries the flood of warm water forty miles inland, and the vegetation consequently is rarely or never checked by frost even two thousand feet about the sea-level. Thus the mountains have a greenness altogether peculiar, stretches of grass as rich as water-meadows reaching between the crags and precipices to the very summits. The rock, chiefly Old Red Sandstone, is purple. The heather, of which there are enormous masses, is in many places waist deep.
The sky was cloudless, and catching the chance of performing my morning’s ablutions in salt water, I slipped into the few indispensable garments, and hurried down to the front door. My host’s youngest boy, a brown-cheeked creature of six, who was playing with the dogs on the steps, undertook to pilot me to the bathing-place, a move not wholly disinterested on his part, as the banks on either side of the walks were covered with wild strawberries and whortleberries. Away we went through the woods again, among the gnarled and moss-clothed trunks of oaks hundreds of years old, and between huge boulders, draped with ferns and London pride, which here grows luxuriantly wild.
The walk ended at a jutting promontory of rock, where steps had been cut, leading to the water at a soft spot where a dike of slate had pierced a fault in the sandstone. The water itself was stainless as the Atlantic. I jumped in carefully, expecting to touch the bottom, yet I could scarcely reach it by diving. I tried to persuade my companion to take a swim upon my back, but he was too wary to be tempted. He was a philosopher, and was speculating on making a fortune out of the copper veins which were shining in the interstices of the slate.
Our friend the seal, whom we had seen at supper, seemed disposed to join me. A shiny black head popped up from under the surface thirty yards off, and looked me over to see if I was one of his relations; but after a careful scrutiny he disliked the looks of me, dropped under, and disappeared.
The seals once swarmed upon this coast under shelter of popular superstition. ‘The sowls of thim that were drowned at the flood,’ were supposed to be enchanted in their bodies, undergoing water purgatory. At times they were allowed to drop their skins, and play in human form upon the shore, and the mortal who was bold enough to steal the robe of some fishmaiden whom he could surprise, might win her and keep her for his bride. They are yielding slowly before what is called education and civilisation, and the last of them will soon be a thing of history like the last wolf; but the restriction upon firearms in Ireland still acts as a protection, and a few yet loiter about the quiet nooks where they find themselves unmolested.
Before I was dressed we heard a sound of oars; a boat came round the corner, rowed by the men belonging to the cutter. They had been out early to take up the fluke nets and overhaul the lobster pots, and were bringing in what they had caught to the house. A dozen plaice, two or three pairs of large soles, and a turbot twelve pounds weight, made up rather more than an average night’s haul, obtained by the rudest of methods. The nets are of fine twine with a large mesh. They are from fifty to a hundred fathoms long, five feet deep, and held perpendicularly on the sand at the bottom, by a line of leads, just sufficient to sink them, and a line of small corks to keep them in an upright position.
In these the flat fish entangle themselves – such of them as are stupid enough to persevere in endeavouring to push through, and are without the strength, like the conger and dog-fish, to break the net, and tear a way for themselves. Huge rents showed where creatures of this kind had escaped capture, but the holes are easily mended; and so many fish can be taken with so much ease, that the people do not care to improve on their traditionary ways.
It is not for want of ingenuity or industry. The Pat of Kerry is either unlike his kindred in the rest of the island, or they are a calumniated race altogether. On Kilmakilloge, he makes his own boats, he makes his own nets, he twists his own ropes and cables out of the fibre of the bog pine which he digs out of the peat. He wants but a market to change his skiff into a trawler, and to establish a second Brixham at the splendid bay of Ballinskelligs.
Half a dozen skate were lying on the bottom boards among the nobler fish, here used only to be cut up for bait; these, and a monster called an angel shark, begotten long ago, it would appear, from some unlawful concubinage between a dog-fish and a ray. There were three enormous lobsters besides, better in my experience to look at than to eat. On these coasts it seems as if the young vigorous lobsters kill their own prey without trouble in finding it, and the bait in the wicker pots tempts only the overgrown and aged, whose active powers are failing them.
Yachting in Kenmare River
I was to make the best use of my time, and at breakfast we talked over our plans for the day. Picnics, mountain walks, antiquarianising expeditions, fishing, salt or fresh, were alternately proposed. The weather luckily came to the assistance of our irresolution. It was still intensely hot. The rivers were low and clear as crystal, so it was vain to think of the salmon. The boatmen reported that this easterly wind was still blowing, but that from the look of the sky, and the breaking of the swell outside the harbour, they expected a shift in the evening, so we agreed to run down the bay in the yacht as long as the land breeze held, and trust to the promised change to bring us back.
The ladies declined to accompany us, the ocean roll and a hot sun being a trying combination even to seasoned stomachs. So my friend and I started alone with the boys, with a packed hamper to be prepared against emergencies. The cutter was large enough for its purpose, and not too large. Though we did not intend to court bad weather, we could encounter it without alarm if it overtook us. We had a main cabin, with two sofas and a swing table; a small inner cabin with a single berth, with a kitchen forward, where the men slung their hammocks.
We slipped our moorings and ran out of the harbour, passing the Cowes schooner, which lay lazily at anchor. Her owner and his party were scattered in her various boats, some had gone up to Kenmare marketing, some were Pollock fishing, others were engaged in the so-called amusement of shooting the guillemots and the puffins, which unused to firearms, sat confidingly on the water to be destroyed: beautiful in their living motion, worse than useless when dead. We flung our half uttered maledictions at the idiots, who were bringing dishonour on the name of sportsmen. For a week after the bay was covered with wounded birds, which were dying slowly from being unable to procure food.
Spanish Island
Before we turned into the main river we passed an island on which was a singular bank of earth, wasting year by year by the action of the tide, and almost gone to nothing: it was the last remains of a moraine, deposited who can guess when, by a glacier which has left its scorings everywhere on the hillsides. The people call it Spanish Island, and have a legend that one of the ships of the Armada was wrecked there. It is an unlikely story. No galleon which had doubled the Blaskets would have turned out of its course into the Kenmare river, nor if it had wandered into such a place could easily have been wrecked there. More likely it was a fishing station at a time when Newfoundland was undiscovered, and fleets came annually to these seas from Coruna and Bllbao, for their bacalao – their Lenten cod and ling. As many as two hundred Spanish smacks were then sometimes seen together in the harbour at Valencia.
The breeze freshened as we cleared out of Kilmakilloge. The main bay is here four miles broad, and widens rapidly as it approaches the mouth. We saw the open Atlantic twenty miles from us, and we met the swell with which we had been threatened, but so long and easy that we rose over the waves, scarcely conscious of motion, and rattled along with a three-quarter breeze and every sail drawing, seven knots through the water.
Destination Scariff Rock
We were heading straight for Scarriff (Scariff), a rock eleven hundred feet high, which, though several miles from the mainland, forms the extreme point of the chain which divides Kenmare river from Ballinskelligs bay.
Thousands of sea birds wheeling and screaming over the water showed that the great shoals of small fish which frequent these bays in the autumn had already begun to appear. Gannets, towering like falcons, shot down three hundred feet sheer, disappeared a moment, and rose with shiny sprats struggling in their beaks. Half a dozen herring hogs were having a pleasant time of it, and besides these, two enormous grampuses were showing their sharp black fins at intervals, one thirty feet long, the other evidently larger, how much we could not tell, for he never showed his full length, though he rolled near us, and we could judge his dimensions only from the width across the shoulders. The sprats were in cruel case. The whales and porpoises hunted them up out of the deep water. The gurnet caught them midway. The sea birds swooped on them as they splashed in terror on the surface. They too had doubtless fattened in their turn on smaller victims. Our boys avenged the shades of some of them on one set at least of their persecutors. They threw over their fishing lines, and six or seven big gurnet were flapping in the basket before we had cleared the edge of the shoal.
Creeks and bays opened on either side of us, and closed again as we ran on. As we neared the mouth of the river we saw the waves breaking furiously on a line of rocks some little distance from the north shore. We edged away towards them for a nearer view, when it appeared that the rocks formed a natural breakwater to a still cove, a mile long and half a mile deep, which lay inside. There was a narrow opening at either extremity of the reef. The entrance looked ugly enough, for the line of foam extended from shore to shore, and black jagged points showed themselves in the hollow of the boiling surge, which would have made quick work with us had we grazed them; but my friend knew the soundings to a foot, and as the place was curious he carried me inside.
Bunaneer Castle
Instantly that we were behind the reef we were in still water three fathoms deep, with a clear sandy bottom. We ran along for a quarter of a mile, and then found ourselves suddenly in front of one of the wicked-looking castles of which so many ruins are to be seen on the coasts of Cork and Kerry. They were all built in the wild times of the sixteenth century, when the anarchy of the land was extended to the ocean, and swarms of outlawed English pirates had their nests in these dangerous creeks. They formed alliances with the O’Sullivans and the M’Carties, married their daughters, and shared the plunder with them which they levied indiscriminately on their own and all other nations.
While the kingdom of Kerry retained its privileges under the house of Desmond, the Irish Deputies were unable to meddle with them by land, while no cruiser could have ventured to follow them by water through channels guarded so perilously as that by which we had entered. If the walls of that old tower could have spoken it could have told us many a strange tale, of which every vestige of a legend has now disappeared.[3]
We know from contemporary records that the pirates were established in these places. The situation of the castle which we were looking at told unmistakably the occupation of its owner. A second deep creek inside the larger one, sheltered by a natural pier, led directly to the door-step. A couple of miles inland there are traces of a still earlier stratification of sea rovers – in one of the largest and most remarkable of the surviving Danish forts.[4] The Danes, too, had been doubtless guided there by the natural advantages of the situation.
I would gladly have landed and looked at it, but time pressed. We left the little bay at the far end of the reef, and half an hour later we were rising and falling on the great waves of the open ocean. Having been dosed with hard eggs at breakfast I found sickness impossible. They act like wadding in a gun, keeping the charge hard and tight in its place; and after a qualm or two, my stomach finding further contention would lead to no satisfactory result was satisfied to leave me to enjoy myself.
The mainland ends on the north side at the Lamb’s Head, so called perhaps because it is one of the most savage-looking crags on which stranded ship was ever shattered. Outside it are a series of small islands from a few acres to as many square miles in extent, divided from each other by deep channels, a quarter or half a mile in width. It is a place to keep clear of in hazy weather. Irish boatmen may be trusted while they can see their landmarks, but my friend told me that he was caught by a fog in this very place the first time that he had ever been near it. He had a chart and a compass, and had turned in as it was night leaving the tiller to his captain. Luckily he was not asleep. The roar of the breakers becoming louder he went on deck to look about him, and he found that the fellow knew no more of a compass than of a steam engine, and that he was steering dead upon the rocks.
Today however we ran in and out with absolute confidence, and we threaded our way to the splendid cliffs of Scarriff, the last of the group, which towered up towards the sea a thousand feet out of the water. On the land side the slope was more gradual; it was covered with grass and dotted with cattle; in a hollow we saw the smoke of a solitary house; we heard a cock crow and the clacking of a hen, and wild and lonely and dreary as the island seemed the people living there are very reasonably happy and have not the slightest wish to leave it.
A Legend of Scarriff Island
From the description given of the scene by Walsingham the historian, Scarriff is not improbably the place where a Cornish knight in the time of the second Richard came to a deserved and terrible end. It was a very bad time in England. Religion and society were disorganised; and the savage passions of men released from their natural restraints boiled over in lawlessness and crime. Sir John Arundel, a gentleman of some distinction, had gathered together a party of wild youths to make an expedition to Ireland. He was windbound either at Penzance or St Ives; and being in uneasy quarters, or the time hanging heavy on his hands, he requested hospitality from the abbess of a neighbouring nunnery. The abbess, horrified at the prospect of entertaining such unruly guests, begged him to excuse her.
But neither excuses nor prayers availed. Arundel and his companions took possession of the convent, which they made the scene of unrestrained and frightful debauchery. The sisters were sacrificed to their appetites, and when the weather changed were carried off to the ship and compelled to accompany their violators. As they neared the Irish coast the gale returned in its fury. Superstition is the inseparable companion of cowardice and cruelty, and the wretched women were flung overboard to propitiate the demon of the storm. ‘Approbatum est non esse curae Deis securitatem nostrum, esse ultionem.’
If providence did not interfere to save the honour or the lives of the poor nuns, at least it revenged their fate. The ship drove before the south-wester, helpless as a disabled wreck. She was hurled on Scarriff or possibly on Cape Clear, and was broken instantly to pieces. A handful of half-drowned wretches were saved by the inhabitants to relate their horrible tale. Arundel himself being a powerful swimmer had struggled upon the rocks alive, but he was caught by a returning wave before he could climb beyond its reach, and he was whirled away in the boiling foam.
Skellig Rocks Abandoned
With us too the sea was rising heavily. The wind had shifted to the west as the boatmen had foretold, and though as yet there was but little of it, the mercury was falling rapidly. A dark bank of clouds lay along the seaward horizon, and the huge waves which were rolling home and flying in long green sheets up the side of the cliff implied that it was blowing heavily outside. My friend had intended to take me on to the Skelligs, two other islands lying ten miles to the north-west of us, on the larger of which are the remains of a church and of three or four beehive houses which tradition says were once occupied by hermits.
The Irish hermits as we know located themselves in many strange places round the coast, and may as well have chosen a home for themselves on the Skelligs as anywhere else. But it is to be noticed also, that even hermits unless supported like Elijah by the ravens must have found food somewhere. During the winter communication with the mainland must have been often impossible for weeks together, and as there is scarcely a square yard of grass on the whole place, they could have kept neither sheep nor cattle. Whoever dwelt in those houses must have lived by fishing. The cod fishing round the rocks is the very best on the whole coast, and remembering how indispensable the dried cod had been made by the fasting rules to the catholic population of Europe, I cannot help fancying, however unromantic the suggestion may sound, that something more practical than devotion was connected with the community that resided there.
We were obliged, however, to abandon all idea of going there for the present. Could we have reached the islands we could not have landed. The cutter was already pitching so heavily that the top of Scarriff, though immediately over us, was occasionally hidden by the waves. If we ventured further we might have found it impossible to recover Kenmare bay and might have been obliged to run for Valencia; so we hauled our wind, went about, and turned our bows homewards. The motion became more easy as we fell off before the rollers. My friend gave up the tiller to one of the men, and we got out our hamper and stretched ourselves on deck to eat our dinner, for which the tossing, strange to say, had sharpened our appetite. There is no medium at sea. You are either dead sick or ravenous, and we, not excluding the two boys, were the latter.
Among human pleasures there are few more agreeable than that of the cigar which follows a repast of this kind, the cold chicken and the claret having been disposed of, when St Emilion has tasted like the choicest Lafitte, the sun warm and not too warm, the wind at our backs, and the spring cushions from the cabin tossed about in the confusion which suits the posture in which we are most at ease.
Derrynane Abbey
As we lay lazily enjoying ourselves, my host pointed out to me one more of the interesting features of the coast. Round the Lamb Head to the north, facing the islands among which we had been dodging, was another small bay, cut out by the action of the waves, at the bottom of which we saw the water breaking on a white line of sand. Behind the sand two valleys met, the slopes of which were covered prettily with wood; and among the trees we could see the smoke and the slated roof of the once famous Derrynane Abbey. There was the ancestral home of the world-celebrated Daniel O’Connell, the last of the old Irish.
Dan the First, the Liberator’s father, had laid the foundation of the fortune of the family by a handsome smuggling trade. Cargoes of tea and tobacco run on those sands were enclosed in butter casks and sent over the hills on horses’ backs to Cork to the store of a confederate merchant, and thence shipped for London as Irish produce. On those moors, Dan the Great hunted his harriers. In the halls of that abbey he feasted friend or foe like an ancient chieftain, and entertained visitors from every corner of Europe.
All is gone now. The famine which broke O’Connell’s heart lies like an act of oblivion between the Old Ireland and the New, and his own memory is fading like the memory of the age which he represented. Some few local anecdotes of trifling interest hang about the mountains. They say of Dan, as they said of Charles II: he was the father of his people, and by the powers ‘twas a fine family he had of them.
But Ireland has ceased to care for him. His fame blazed like a straw bonfire, and has left behind it scarce a shovelful of ashes. Never any public man had it in his power to do so much real good for his country, nor was there ever one who accomplished so little.
The Lamb Head once more closes in. The wind is fast rising; the crests of the rollers are beginning to break; the yacht flies down the slopes, and steers hard as the pursuing wave overtakes and lifts her. Down comes the topsail; we do not need it now; more than once we have plunged into the wave in front of us, and shipped green water over our bows. The clouds come up with occasional heavy drops of rain. Macgillicuddy’s Reeks are already covered; and on the lower mountains the mist is beginning to form. It will be a wet night, and the rivers will fish tomorrow. The harbour has been alive with salmon for the last fortnight waiting for a fresh to take them up.
Return to Derreen
We have still an hour’s daylight when we recover the mouth of Kilmakilloge, and are in sight of the woods of Derreen again. As we turn into the harbour the wind is broken off by the land. We are almost becalmed, and the yacht drags slowly through the water. Towards evening the whiting Pollock take freely, so the lines are laid out again, and we trail a couple of spinners. One is instantly taken. A small fellow – three pounds weight – comes in unresistingly, and is basketed. A minute after the second line is snatched out of the hands of my young bathing companion, who had hold of it. One of the boatmen catches it, but is unused to light tackle, and drags as if he was hauling up an anchor. He gathers in a yard or two, and then comes a convulsive struggle. Each side pulls his best. One moment of uncertainty, and plunge and a splash at the end of the line in our wake, and then all is over; and we can imagine, without fear of contradiction, that we had hold of a conger eel at least, if not the sea-serpent himself.
The rain came down as we expected; rain like the torrents of the tropics, such as we rarely see in these islands outside Kerry. The mountains arrest the wet-laden currents as they come in from the Atlantic, condensing the moisture into masses of cloud, which at once discharge themselves in cataracts. We spend the evening hunting out our fishing-boxes, sorting flies, and trying casting-lines.
Salmon Fishing Expedition
The sky clears soon after sunrise. The keeper has been down early to examine the condition of the water, and is waiting for us with his report on the rock outside the hall door after breakfast. There is no haste. The rivers are still coming down brown and thick, and though the floods run off rapidly there will be no fishing till towards noon.
A Story of Morty’s Rock
We look about us, and the rock on which we are standing is itself a curiosity. The surface of it has been ground as smooth as a table. In the direction of the valley, and crossing the lines of cleavage, it is grooved by the ice-plane which has passed over it. The pebbles brought down from the hills and bedded in the under surface of the glacier have cut into the stone like chisels, and have left marks which the rain of unnumbered years has failed to erase. Such is the modern theory, which is accepted as absolutely proved because we are at present unable to conceive any other agency by which the effect could have been brought about. Yet the inability to form another hypothesis may arise, it is at least possible, from limitations in ourselves, and attends as a matter of course every generally received scientific conjecture.
The theory of epicycles was once considered to be proved, because no other explanation would them be offered of the retrogression of the planets; and when we consider the fate of so many past philosophies, accepted in their time as certain, and made the ridicule of later generations, misgivings obtrude themselves that even the glacier theory a hundred years hence may have gone the way of its predecessors, and that the ice may have become as mythical as the footprints of the fairies.
But the rock has a later and more human interest. The fortunate Englishman to whom at the close of the seventeenth century these vast estates passed by confiscation, was contented to leave the heads of the old families shorn of the independence, but still ruling as his representatives on the scene of their ancient dominions. So matters continued for more than a century. The O’s and the Mac’s retained their place even under the penal laws; and the absentee landlord was contented with his rent and asked no questions. A change came after the Union. The noble owner of the Kenmare mountains awoke to the value and perhaps to the responsibilities of his inheritance. He prepared to draw his connection closer with it and to resume the privileges which had been too long spared.
Macfinnan Dhu, the black Macfinnan, the predecessor of Morty, was then ruling at Derreen. The lord of the soil, to soften the blow which he was about to administer, sent Macfinnan a present of wine, which arrived duly from London in a large hamper. Macfinnan carried it to the top of the rock on which we were standing, called up every Irish curse which hung in song or prose in the recollection of the valley, on the intruding stranger who was robbing the Celt of the land of his fathers.
At each imprecation he smashed a bottle on the stone, and only ceased his litany of vengeance when the last drop had been spilt of his infernal libation. Such is the story on the spot; true or false, who can tell? My host said that in the unusual heat of the summer before last the turf which covers the side of the rock had shrunk a foot or two beyond its usual limits, and that fragments of broken bottles were indisputably found there; but whether they were the remains of Macfinnan’s solemnity or were the more vulgar relics of a later drinking bout, we are left to our own conjecture.
Jack Harper, the Gamekeeper
But I must introduce my readers to the keeper, who is a prominent person at Derreen. He is a Scot from Aberdeen, by name Jack Harper, descendant it may be of the Harper who called ‘time’ over the witches’ caldron, but himself as healthy a piece of humanity as ever stood six feet in his stockings, or stalked a stag upon the Grampians. He was imported as a person not to be influenced by the ways and customs of the country. The agent, however, forgot to import a wife along with him. It was not in nature that a handsome young fellow of twenty-five should remain the solitary occupant of his lodge, and he soon found an Irish lassie who was not unwilling to share it with him.
Jack was a Protestant and obstinate in his way, and declined the chapel ceremonial, but the registrar at Kenmare settled the legal part of the business. The priest arranged the rest with the wife, and a couple of children clinging to the skirts of Jack’s kilt showed in face and figure the double race from which they had sprung; the boy thick-limbed, yellow-haired, with blue eyes and a strong Scotch accent, which he had caught from his father, while the girl with dark skin, soft brown curls, and features of refined and exquisite delicacy, showed the blood the pure Celt of Kerry, unspoilt by infiltration from Dane or Norman.
Being alone in his creed in the valley, Jack attends chapel, though holding the proceedings there in some disdain. He does not trouble himself about confession, but he pays the priest his dues, and the priest in turn he tells me is worth a dozen watchers to him. If his traps are stolen on the mountains, or a salmon is made away with on the spawning beds, he reports his grievances at the chapel, and the curses of the church are at his service. Religion down here means right and wrong, and materially, perhaps, not much besides.
Rod and Net Ready
But the morning is growing on. I am left in Jack’s hands for the day, my host having business elsewhere. He takes charge of rod and landing net, slings a big basket on his back, and whistling his dogs about him, and with a short pipe in his mouth he leads the way down the drive to the gate. We halt on the bridge of the little river, but a glance at the bridge pool shows that we shall do no good there. The water is still muddy and thick, and not a fish will move in it for two hours at least. We must go to the second river where the mountain floods are first intercepted by a lake: in this the dirt settles, and leaves the stream that runs out of it to the sea comparatively clear.
We have a mile and a half to walk, and I hear on the way what Jack has to tell about the place and people. Before the famine the glen had been densely inhabited, and had suffered terribly in consequence. Ruined cottages in all directions showed where human creatures had once multiplied like rabbits in a warren. Miles upon miles on unfinished roads, now overgrown with gorse, were monuments to the efforts which had been made to find them in work and food. But the disaster was too great and too sudden and too universal to be so encountered. Hundreds died, and hundreds more were provided with free passages to America, and the valley contains but a fourth of its old inhabitants. Its present occupants are now doing well. There are no signs of poverty among them. They are tenants at will, but so secure is the custom of the country that they have no fear of dispossession.
An English political economist had once suggested that they should be all got rid of, and the glen be turned into a deer forest. But the much-abused Irish proprietors are less inhuman than the Scotch, and here at least there is no disposition to outrage the affection with which the people cling to their homes. There is, however, no wish among them to return to the old state of things. When a tenant dies his eldest son succeeds him. The brothers emigrate where friends are waiting for them in America, and they carry with them a hope, not always disappointed, of returning when they have a balance at the bank, and can stock a farm in the old country on their own account.
Stone Circles and Fairy Forts
We pass a singular mound covered with trees at the road side, with a secluded field behind it sprinkled over with hawthorns. The field is the burying-place of the babies that die unbaptized, unconsecrated by the church but hallowed by sentiment, and treated seemingly with more reverence than the neglected graveyard.[5] The mound is circular, with sloping sides twenty feet high, and sixty feet in diameter at the top. It is a rath of which there are ten or twelve in the glen, and many more in other parts of Kerry. This once has never been opened, being called the Fairy’s house, and is protected by superstition; another like it at the back of Derreen has been cleared out, and can be entered without difficulty.
The outer wall must have been first built of stone. The interior was then divided into narrow compartments, ten or twelve feet long by five feet broad, each with an air-hole through the wall, and communicating with one another by low but firmly constructed doors. Massive slabs were laid at the top to form a roof, and the whole structure was finally covered in with turf. They were evidently houses of some kind, though when they were built or by whom is a mystery. Human remains are rarely found in any of them, and whether these chambers were themselves occupied, or whether they were merely the cellars of some lighter building of timber and wicker-work raised above them, is a point on which the antiquarians are undecided.
Whatever they were, however, they are monuments of some past age of Irish history; and the stone circles and gigantic pillars standing wild and weird in the gorges of the mountains, are perhaps the tombs of the race who lived in them. No one knows at present, for Derreen lies out of the line of tourists. By and by, when the feeling of respect for burial places however ancient, which still clings to Kerry, has been civilised away, the tombs will be broken into and searched, and then as elsewhere the curious antiquary will find golden torques and armlets among the crumbling bones of the chiefs of the age of Ossian.
Arrival at the River
But here we are at the river; we have passed two salt lagoons surrounded with banks of reeds, which are the haunts in winter of innumerable wild fowl, and even now are dotted over the broods of flappers which have been hatched among the flags. At the top of the farther of these we cross a bridge where the river enters it, for the wind is coming from the other side and is blowing three quarters of a gale. We follow the bank for half a mile, where the water is broken and shallow, and the salmon pass through without resting. Then turning the angle of a rock, we come to a pool a quarter of a mile long, terminating in a circular basin eighty yards across, out of which the water plunges through a narrow gorge.
The pool has been cut through a peat bog, and the greater part of it is twenty feet deep. A broad fringe of water-lilies lines the banks, leaving, however, an available space for throwing a fly upon between them. This is the great resting-place of the fish on their way to the lake and the upper river. The water is high, and almost flowing over on the bog. The wind catches it fairly, tearing along the surface and sweeping up the crisp waves in white clouds of spray. The party from the yacht was before us, but they are on the wrong side, trying vainly to send their flies in the face of the south-wester, which whirls their casting lines back over their heads. They have caught a peal or two, and one of them reports that he was broken by a tremendous fish at the end of the round pool. Jack directs them to a bend higher up, where they will find a second pool as good as this one, with a more favourable slant of wind, while I put my rod together and turn over the leaves of my fly-book.
Among the marvels of art and nature I know nothing equal to a salmon-fly. It resembles no insect, winged or unwinged, which the fish can have seen. A shrimp, perhaps, is the most like it, if there are degrees in utter dissimilarity. Yet every river is supposed to have its favourite flies. Size, colour, shape, all are peculiar. Here vain tastes prevail for golden pheasant and blue and crimson parroqueet. There the salmon are as sober as Quakers, and will look at nothing but drabs and browns. Nine parts of this are fancy, but there is still a portion of truth in it. Bold hungry fish will take anything in any river; shy fish will undoubtedly rise and splash at a stranger’s fly, while they will swallow what is offered them by anyone who knows their ways. It may be something in the colour of the water; it may be something in the colour of the banks; experience is too uniform to allow the fact itself to be questioned.
Under Jack’s direction, I select small flies about the size of green drakes: one a somber grey, with silver twist about him, a claret hackle, a mallard wing, streaked faintly on the lower side with red and blue. The drop fly is still darker, with purple legs and olive green wings and body.
We move to the head of the pool and begin to cast in the gravelly shallows, on which the fish lie to feed in a flood, a few yards above the deep water. A white trout or two rise, and presently I am fast in something which excites momentary hopes. The heavy rod bends to the butt. A yard of two of line runs out, but a few seconds show that it is only a large trout which has struck at the fly with his tail, and has been hooked foul. He cannot break me, and I do not care if he escapes, so I bear hard upon him and drag him by main force to the side, where Harper slips the net under his head, and the next moment he is on the bank. Two pounds within an ounce or so, but clean run from the sea, brought up by last night’s flood, and without a stain of the bog-water on the pure silver of his scales. He has disturbed the shallow, so we move a few steps down.
There is an alder bush on the opposite side, where the strength of the river is running. It is a long cast. The wind is blowing so hard that I can scarcely keep my footing, and the gusts whirl so unsteadily that I cannot hit the exact spot, where if there is a salmon in the neighbourhood he is lying.
The line flies out straight at last, but I have now thrown a few inches too far; my tail fly is in the bush dangling across an overhanging bough. An impatient movement, a jerk, or a straight pull, and I am ‘hung up’ as the phrase is, and delayed for half an hour at least. Happily there is a lull in the storm. I shake the point of the rod. The vibration runs along the line; the fly drops softly like a leaf upon the water – and as it floats away something turns heavily, and a huge brown back is visible for an instant through a rift in the surface. But the line comes home.
He was an old stager, as we could see by his colour, no longer ravenous as when fresh from the salt water. He was either lazy and missed the fly, or it was not entirely to his mind. He was not touched, and we drew back to consider. ‘Over him again while he is angry,’ is the saying in some rivers, and I have known it to answer where the fish feed greedily. But it will not do here; we must give him time; and we turn again to the fly book. When a salmon rises at a small fly as if he meant business yet fails to take it, the rule is to try another of the same pattern a size larger. This too however just now Jack thinks unfavourably of.
The salmon is evidently a very large one, and will give us enough to do if we hook him. He therefore as one precaution takes off the drop fly lest it catch in the water-lilies. He next puts the knots of the casting line through a severe trial; replaces an unsound joint with a fresh link of gut, and finally produces out of his hat a ‘hook’ – he will not call it a fly – of his own dressing. It is like a particoloured father-long-legs, a thing which only some frantic specimen of orchid ever seriously approached, a creature whose wings were two strips of the fringe of a peacock’s tail, whose legs descended from blue jay through red to brown, and terminated in a pair of pink trailers two inches long. Jack had found it do and he believed it would do for me.
And so it did. I began to throw again six feet above the bush, for a salmon often shifts his ground after rising. One cast – a second – another trout rises which we receive with an anathema, and drag the fly out of his reach. The fourth throw there is a swirl like the wav which arises under the blade of an oar, a sharp sense of hard resistance, a pause, and then a rush for the dear life. The wheel shrinks, the line hisses through the rings, and thirty yards down the pool the great fish springs madly six feet into the air.
The hook is firm in his upper jaw; he had not shaken its hold, for the hook had gone into the bone – pretty subject of delight for a reasonable man, an editor of a magazine, and a would-be philosopher turned fifty! The enjoyments of the unreasoning part of us cannot be defended on grounds of reason, and experience shows that men who are all logic and morals, and have nothing of the animal left in them, are poor creatures after all.
Anyway I defy philosophy with a twenty-pound salmon fast hooked and a pool right ahead four hundred yards long, and half full of water-lilies. ‘Keep him up the strame,’ shrieked a Paddy, who, on the screaming of the wheel, had flung down his spade in the turf bog and rushed up to see the sport. ‘Keep him up the strame, your honour – bloody wars! you’ll lose him else.’
We were at fault Jack and I. We did not understand why downstream was particularly dangerous, and Pat was too eager and too busy swearing to explain himself. Alas, his meaning became soon but too intelligible. I had overtaken the fish on the bank and had wheeled in the line again, but he was only collecting himself for a fresh rush, and the next minute it seemed as if the bottom had been knocked out of the pool and an opening made into infinity. Round flew the wheel again; fifty yards were gone in as many seconds, the rod was bending double, and the line pointed straight down; straight as if there was a load at the end of it and unlimited space in which to sink. ‘Ah, didn’t I tell ye so?’ said Pat; ‘what will we do now?’
Too late Jack remembered that fourteen feet down at the bottom of that pool lay the stem of a fallen oak, below which the water had made a clear channel. The fish had turned under it, and whether he was now up the river or down, or where he was, who could tell?
He stopped at last. ‘Hold him hard,’ said Jack, hurling off his clothes, and while I was speculating whether it would be possible to drag him back the way that he had gone, his pink body flashed from behind me, bounded off the bank with a splendid header and disappeared. He was under for a quarter of a minute; when he rose he had the link in his hand between the fish and the tree.
‘All right!’ he sputtered, swimming with the other hand to the bank and scrambling up. ‘Run the rest of the line off the reel and out through the rings.’ He had divined by a brilliant instinct the only remedy for our situation. The thing was done, fast as Pat and I could ply our fingers. The loose end was drawn round the leg, and while Jack was humouring the fish with his hand and dancing up and down the bank regardless of proprieties, we had carried it back down the rings, replaced it on the wheel, wound in the slack, and had again command of the situation.
The salmon had played his best stroke. It had failed him, and he now surrendered like a gentleman. A mean-spirited fish will go to the bottom, bury himself in the weeds, and sulk. Ours set his head toward the sea, and sailed down the length of the pool in the open water without attempting any more plunges. As his strength failed he turned heavily on his back, and allowed himself to be drawn to the shore. The gaff was in his side and he was ours.
He was larger than we had guessed him. Clear run he would have weighed twenty-five pounds. The fresh water had reduced him to twenty-two, but without softening his muscle or touching his strength.
The fight had tired us all. If middle age does not impair the enjoyment of sport, it makes the appetite for it less voracious, and a little pleases more than a great deal. I delight in a mountain walk when I must work hard for my five brace of grouse. I see no amusement in dawdling over a lowland moor where the packs are as thick as chickens in a poultry-yard. I like better than most things a day with my own dogs in scattered covers, when I know not what may rise, a woodcock, an odd pheasant, a snipe in the outlying willow-bed, and perhaps a mallard or a teal. A hare or two falls in agreeably when the mistress of the house takes an interest in the bag.
I detest battues and hot corners, and slaughter for slaughter’s sake. I wish every tenant in England had his share in amusements, which in moderation are good for us all, and was allowed to shoot such birds or beasts as were bred on his own farm, any clause in his lease to the contrary notwithstanding.
Anyhow I had had enough of salmon fishing for the day. We gave the rod and the basket to Pat to carry home, the big fish which he was too proud to conceal flapping on his back. Jack and I ate our luncheon and smoked our pipes beside the fall, and Jack, before we went home, undertook to show me the lake.
Glanmore Valley: A Legend of Illaunatee Island
The river followed the bend of the valley. We took a shorter cut over a desolate and bare piece of mountain, and as we crossed the ridge we found ourselves suddenly in the luxuriant softness of a miniature Killarney. The lake was scarcely a mile in length, but either the wood-cutters had been less busy there, or nature had repaired the havoc that they had made. Half a dozen small islands were scattered on it, covered with arbutus and holly. The rocks on one side fell in grand precipices to the water.
At the end was the opening of Glanmore valley, with its masses of forest, its emerald meadows and cooing wood-pigeons, and bright, limpid river reaches. For its size there is no more lovely spot in the south of Ireland than Glanmore. It winds among the mountains for six miles beyond the lake, closed in at the extremity with the huge mass of Hungry Hill, from the top of which you look down upon Berehaven.
Here too the idea of sport pursued us – stray deer wandered over now and then from Glengariff – and my companion had stories of mighty bags of woodcocks made sometimes there when the snow was on the hills. My eye however was rather caught by a singular ruin of modern, unvenerable kind on the largest of the islands. Some chieftain’s castle had once stood there, as we could see from the remains of massive walls on the water-line; but this had been long destroyed, and in the place of it there had been a cottage of some pretensions, which in turn was now roofless.[6]
The story of it, so far as Jack could tell me, was this. Forty years ago or thereabouts a Major ____, who had difficulties with his creditors, came in to these parts to hide himself, built the cottage on the island, and lived there; and when the bailiffs found him out held them at bay with pistol and blunderbuss. The people of the glen provided him with food. The Irish are good friends to anyone who is on bad terms with the authorities. Like Goethe’s elves, Ob er heilig, ob er boss, Jammert sie der Unglucksmann.
So here Major _____ fished and shot and laughed at the attempts to arrest him. His sin however found him out at last. You may break the English laws as you please in Ireland, but there are some laws which you may not break, as Major _____ found.
In the farmhouse which supplied him with his milk and eggs, was a girl who anywhere but in Glanmore would have been called exceptionally beautiful. Major _____ abused the confidence which was placed in him, and seduced her. He had to fly for his life. Such is the present legend, as true, perhaps, as much that passes by the name of history. Major ______ himself might tell another story.[7]
Grouse Shooting Season
My space has run out. My tale is still half told. The next day was Sunday. The day following was August 20, when Irish grouse-shooting begins. If the reader’s patience is unexhausted he shall hear of the scratch-bag we made in a scramble of thirty miles; of the weird woman that we saw among the cliffs; of the ‘crass bull’ that we fell in with, and the double murder in Coomeengoura. I have to tell him too how the grandson of Macfinnan Dhu was caught red-handed spearing salmon, and how the bloody Saxon had to stand between him and eviction. How we held a land court in the hall at Derreen, and settled a disputed inheritance. How we went to the Holy Lake and saw the pilgrims from America there, and how when mass was over they made a night of it with the whiskey booths and the card-sharpers. How we had another sail upon the river, how we attended a tenant-right meeting at the board of guardians at Kenmare, and how the chairman floored the middle-man there to the delight of all his audience – the chairman, the brightest of companions, the most charming of men of business, the hero of the seal fight in Mr Trench’s Realities of Irish Life.
All this the reader shall hear if his curiosity leads him to wish for it. If he is sick of this light fare and desires more solid putting, we will dress our dishes to his mind, and the rest of my pleasant memories shall abide with myself, woven in bright colours in the web of my life by the fingers of the three sisters – my own, and never to be taken from me, let the future bring what fate it will.[8]
A Fortnight in Kerry Part II (first published January 1871)
The Apology
In the spring last year a sketch with the above title appeared in this magazine. The Irish Land Bill was under discussion in the House of Commons. English prejudice and English ignorance were busy with the reputation of the unfortunate country, clamorous with despair of its amendment by that or any other measure. I thought that at such a time a record of my own experience in Ireland might contribute, if infinitesimally little, towards setting her condition in a truer light – towards showing how among the darker features there were redeeming traits of singular interest and attractiveness.
Pleased with my own performance and intending to continue it, I trusted that if my friends in Kerry did not approve of all that I said, they would at least recognise my goodwill. How great was my surprise to find that I was regarded as an intruder into business which was none of mine, affecting English airs of insolent superiority, and under pretence of patronage turning the county and its inhabitants into ridicule! Struck by the absence of petty vices among the peasantry, their simplicity of habit, and the control for good which was exercised over them by the priests, I had said rashly that religion in Kerry appeared to me to mean the knowledge of right and wrong, and to mean little besides.
What dark insinuations the writer never dreamt of may be discovered in an unguarded word! By ‘little besides’ I had myself intended to imply that no Fenian sermons were to be heard in the chapels there, that no hatred was preached against England or English landlords there, the subjects believed on this side St George’s Channel to be eternally inculcated in Catholic pulpits. Our excellent priest at Tuosist – I take this opportunity of apologising to him – declared in the county papers that he was cut to the heart; that he had suffered many wrongs in life, but never one that had afflicted him so deeply as the insinuation that his flock learnt nothing from him but the obligations of morality.
He must excuse the English stupidity, the English preference for the practical results of religion, which betrayed me into forgetfulness of its mysteries. He was able, as will appear in the sequel, to punish me with kindness, and to show that at least I had not overrated his practical authority.
But this was the least of my offences. I had stirred a hornets’ nest. In describing the manners of a past generation I had sketched the likeness of a once notorious character in the neighbourhood. To avoid mentioning his real name I looked over a list of Irish chiefs, three centuries old, and called him at hazard Morty O’Sullivan. A dozen living Morty O’Sullivans, and the representatives of a dozen more who were dead, clamorously appropriated my description, while they denounced the inaccuracy of its details.
More seriously, I had used expressions about ‘the Liberator’ for which I was called to account by a member of his family. ‘The Liberator,’ I conceive, made himself the property of the public. I do not think he was a friend to Ireland. If he cast out one devil in carrying Catholic Emancipation he let loose seven others, which must be chained again before England and Ireland can work in harmony.
His invectives never spared others, either alive or dead; and I see no cause why I or anyone may not express our thoughts freely about him. If the anecdotes of his forefathers, which remain among the traditions of the coast, are untrue or exaggerated, I meant no dishonour to the past or present owner of Derrynane. In the days of high duties, English gentlemen who lived on the coast were no particular how they filled their wine cellars; the restrictions inflicted by English selfishness on Irish trade in the last century erected smuggling into patriotism; and if the O’Connells on the shore of the Atlantic submitted quietly to the despotism of the officers of the revenue, tamer blood ran in their veins than might have been expected from the character of their famous representative.
Anyhow I had given mortal offence where I had least thought of offending. I was an instance in my own person of the mistakes which Englishmen seem doomed to make when they meddle, however, lightly, with this singular people. I hesitated to take another step on so dangerous a soil, especially as (let me drop my disguise, and acknowledge myself as the tenant of the spot to which I described myself as a visitor) – especially as my lease was unexpired. I had another season before me in the scene of my delinquency; and courteous as the Irish uniformly show themselves to strangers who have nothing to do with them, they are credited with disagreeable tendencies when they consider themselves injured. It was hinted to me that I should be a brave man if I again ventured into Kerry.
The storm was renewed in America – files were forwarded to me of the Irish Republic in which I was denounced as a representative of the hereditary enemies of Ireland. And though I found a friend there – let me offer him my cordial thanks – himself an exile, having loved his country not wisely, but too well, who could yet listen patiently to an Englishman who loved her too, but did not love her faults, I held it but prudence to suspend the prosecution of my enterprise till the summer should have again passed, and we birds of passage had migrated to our winter homes.
Return to Derreen House
We went back to Derreen in spite of warnings, but our hearts beat uneasily as we approached the charmed neighbourhood. At Mallow, where we changed carriages, a gigantic O’Connell was sternly pacing the platform. I felt relieved when he passed our luggage without glancing at the address. The clouds on the mountain tops seemed to frown ominously.
The first thing that met our eyes at the hotel where we stopped to luncheon was a denunciatory paragraph in a local paper. When we arrived at our beautiful home a canard reached us that we had been censured, if not denounced, at a neighbouring Catholic chapel, for whom in past years we had provided an occasional holiday entertainment, had been forbidden, it was whispered, to come near us any more.
For a few days – such was the effect of a guilty conscience – we imagined the people were less polite to us. The ‘Good evening kindly’ of the peasant coming home from his work, the sure sign of genuine goodwill, seemed less frequent than silence or an inaudible mutter. Fewer old women than usual brought their sore legs to be mended or pitied, fewer family quarrels were brought to us to arbitrate, interminable disputes about ‘the grass of a cow’ or the interpretation of a will where a ragged testator had bequeathed an interest in a farm over which he had no more power than over a slice of the moon.
One day, so active is fancy in the uneasy atmosphere of Ireland, we conceived that we had been ‘visited.’ On a misty Sunday afternoon, when the servants about the place had gone to ‘the dance’ and we were alone in the house watching the alternate play of fog and sunlight on the lake, there appeared round the angle of a rock on the gravel walk before the windows a group of strangers. Going out to enquire their business, I found myself in the presence of ten or twelve men, not one of whose faces I recognised.
I asked what they wanted. One of them said they were looking at the place, which was obvious without their information. I suggested that the grounds were private – they should have asked leave. He replied, as I thought, with an odd smile, that he saw no occasion for it. And when I insisted that there was occasion, and that if he put it in that way they must go away, the rest looked enquiringly at their leader, as if to ask whether they should make me understand practically that I was not in England. He hesitated, and, after a pause, moved off, and his companions followed. I found afterwards they were boys from beyond the mountains, out holiday-making. They had meant to picnic in the woods, and, looking on me as an interloper, had not troubled themselves to remember my existence. My alarms were utterly groundless; but we had been reading Realities of Irish Life, and our heads were full of chimaeras.
Something had been amiss, but there was more smoke than fire. Our kind priest, when he understood at last that I had meant him no ill, but had rather intended to compliment him, forgave me on the score of ‘invincible ignorance.’ He had vindicated himself before the diocese in the Tralee Chronicle, and could now admit that I was no worse than a stupid John Bull.[9]
We held our feast of reconciliation, at which he was generously present, with the school children on the lawn. They leapt, raced, wrestled, jumped in sacks, climbed greasy poles, and the rest of it – a hundred stout little fellows with as many of their sisters; four out of five of the boys to grow up, thanks to the paternal wisdom of our legislators, into citizens of the United States; the fifth to be a Fenian at home; the girls to be mothers of families on the Ohio or the Missouri, where the Irish race seems intended to close its eventful history and disappear in the American Republic.
Quit, then, of my self-made difficulties, I might resume my story where I left it fall, and fill in with more discretion the parts of my original canvas which I left untouched. Longer acquaintance with the county, however, presented other matters to me, of fresher, perhaps more serious, interest. I prefer therefore to wander on in somewhat desultory fashion.
Grouse Shooting Expedition
I dropped my thread on the eve of the sportsman’s festival – the day of sufficient consequence to be marked in almanacs – on which ‘grouse-shooting commences.’ The momentous event takes place in Ireland on the 20th of August. All things lag behind in the sister country, and even grouse and partridges do not attain their full size till England and Scotland have set the example. May Ireland in this department of her business lag behind forever.
The spoilt voluptuary of the Northern Moors, whose idea of sport is to stand behind a turf bank with a servant to load his guns for him, while an army of gillies drives the grouse in clouds over his head, will find few charms in the Kerry mountains. Cattle graze the lower slopes; sheep and goats fatten on the soft sweet herbage of the higher ridges, which snow rarely covers or frost checks, and the warm winds from the Gulf Stream keep perennially green. Each family in the valley has its right of pasture on one or other of the ranges for its cows or its flocks, and the boys and girls that watch them disturb the solitudes elsewhere devoted to the sacred bird. Long may it remain so! Long may it be ere Irish landlords follow the precedents of Yorkshire or Sutherlandshire and sacrifice their human tenants to a surfeit of amusements.
The sportsman that would fill his bag in Kerry must be prepared to walk his twenty miles – keep his head steady among crags, where if he slip he may fall a thousand feet. He must miss little – kill his birds clean in places where he can find them; and let him do his best, if he spare the hares he will shoot no more than he can carry conveniently on his own shoulders for the supply of the larder at home. He must be content to find the best reward of his toil in the exquisite air, in the most elaborate variety of the most perfect scenery in the world – cliff, cataract, and glen – freshwater lake and inland sea – spirit-haunted all of them, with wild tales of Irish history – the mountain jewels set in the azure ring of the Atlantic which circles round three sides of the horizon.
Sporting thus, and in such scenes, may be censured by the moralist, but it is still exquisite fooling. I at least have not outgrown my taste for it. I must dare Mr Freeman’s ill opinion, and as the time comes round take my turn with the rest.
Let us suppose then, a morning late in August in this year of Grace, 1870. We set out on foot – myself, the keeper, and a second gun, a guest trained unhappily in more luxurious shooting grounds, who condescends for once to waste a day with me. Carriages, even ponies, cannot help us to our ground over the broken tracks we have to follow. It is still – so still that the cutter floats double at her moorings, yacht and shadow; while here and there two lines of ripple, meeting at a point, show where a cormorant is following slowly a school of retreating sprats, or a seal is taking his morning’s airing.
The path leads for half a mile along the shore, and then strikes up into the valley, which narrows as we advance. A deep river, fringed with marshy meadows, drags slowly down the middle of it to the sea. The lake out of which it runs two miles up in scarcely thirty feet above high-water mark. The ground is gradually sinking, and in a little while – a geologist’s little while, in a few thousand years or so – the precipices which wall in the glens will dip their bases in salt water.
The greater part of the valley on either side is raised above reach of floods; and the soil from its situation might be very easily drained, and has been evidently inhabited, and even thickly inhabited, from a very early era. Wild as is the scene at present, we see traces as we advance of three distinct eras of occupation. On the hill side a quarter of a mile from us is a circular mound, flat at the top, with steep scarped grassy sides. It is a rath – one of many which are in the neighbourhood – called a fort by some, but fort it could have never been – rather a human rabbit burrow. Beneath the surface seven or eight feet down, and excavated where the soil is hardest, run a series of chambers communicating with each other by holes, barely large enough to allow the body to pass through, the arches of both hole and chamber turned so accurately that one would think some animal working by instinct, some missing link, had made them rather than a Celt with a reason half grown.
Beside the road stands a circle of gray stones nine or ten feet high, raised, doubtless, by the hands which borrowed the mounds; perhaps the burial spot of some famous chief, perhaps a House of Parliament or court of law, perhaps a temple to which ages before the Deluge honest folks plodded morning and evening on Sundays.
Farther on, and lately exposed by the abrasion of the peat which had covered and protected it, is a broad slab of old red sandstone ground smooth by glacier action and scored over with circles something like a genealogical tree. They are of all sizes, and disposed in all varieties of pattern. Sometimes the rings are concentric, two or even three lying one within the others. Sometimes single rings, large and small, are clustered into groups. These, too, are a mystery. Was the stone the starry map of some Druid astronomer? Was it a rude astrolabe – were the circles magical signs – and did here stand the chair of justice of some Brehon, half rogue, half sage, that sat in judgment there on the quarrels of the glen? Even the rashest antiquarians forbear their conjectures. We know only that we are among the remains of a race which lies far away beyond the horizon of history.
Remnants of Sir William Petty’s Smelting Works
Below us, among some trees at the side of a watercourse, are the fragments of a ruined building more modern infinitely than the monuments which I have just described, for it is composed of bricks, genuine burnt clay, and mortar. Yet it is still old. It has been standing certainly not less than two centuries.
Looked at closer, it will explain how these valleys and mountain sides, clothed not so long ago, as we can see by the stumps protruding from the ground, with forests of fir, and birch, and yew, assumed their present aspect of naked desolation. Sloping away from the foot of the wall lies a heap of what looks at first like broken stone, but proves on examination to be slag. We have before us all that is left of the once famous smelting furnaces established by Sir William Petty.
The founder of the Lansdowne family secured, in the scramble for Irish land, for some trifling sum, the lordship of this wilderness of mountains. His utilitarian eye discerned the wealth that lay stored in the mass of timber. He shipped cargoes of ore from Wales and Cornwall to the Kenmare river, and stripped the district bare – bare to the very bone of rock – to melt it into metal. What harm? The woods were hiding-places for wolves and rapparees, or, worse than both, for Jesuits; and the lovers of the picturesque had not yet come into being even in England.
Farming Practices 1870
And there is a third record before us of an order of things which, though nearer to us far than the other two, has still vanished as they have vanished. Far up the mountain sides and on the sloping meadows are ridges which mark departed cultivation, now fast relapsing into peat. Ditches, too, we can see, which were once deep and effective drains, overgrown with briar and bush, and choked with reeds and mud. I mentioned in my former paper that these districts, before the potato famine, were densely peopled. One house stands now where a quarter of a century ago there were four. The holdings attached to them are thrown together, and subdivision under any pretext is sternly forbidden. Should hard times come again, there are thus fewer inhabitants in danger of starvation, and those that remain are no longer utterly dependent upon a single root.
They are so far better off than their fathers that they are above the reach of being overwhelmed by any sudden calamity like that which overtook them before; but the difference is rather relative then absolute. Their farms are now larger than they care to cultivate, or could cultivate if they wished it, where only spade husbandry is possible. They till just so much soil as will provide their own potatoes, and keep alive their cattle through the winter and spring.
They make money by their wool, and butter, and pigs; but they keep their holdings as they keep their persons, in rags. Their fences are always broken. Their drains are filled in. The cabins are still the common home of all the livestock, human and animal. Their habits are unchanged, and to all appearance unchangeable. They refuse to acquire a taste for any cleaner or better style of living. The turf bog provides them with fuel, and warmth is the only form of comfort which they value. Thus they have no motive for work when all their wants are satisfied. They tell you with a shrug that emigration has trebled the price of labour, and that they cannot afford to hire workmen. And thus everywhere in the south cultivation recedes with the decrease of population. The country, in its own language, is going back to bog.
A stream at one place overran the road. In times of flood the ford was impassable; the cause was simply that an old drain had been closed by neglect, and the water at the same time was drowning and ruining twenty acres of excellent meadow. The tenant of the said meadow told me he was going to apply to Lord _____ to build a bridge at the ford. The bridge would cost sixty pounds, while five pounds laid out in labour would dry both road and fields. There is your Kerry farmer; and lease or no lease, Land Act or no Land Act, such he will remain till he is carried away from the land of his birth and released from its enchantments.
While the holdings were small, they had to make the most of them, or they could not live. But no Irish peasant will work harder than necessity obliges; and if the soil is to be again adequately tilled by the Celtic race, it will be by subdivision, and not otherwise. I can easily understand the objections of the landlords. The lesson of the famine is too terrible to be forgotten. Ireland may become more and more a cattle-growing country, or in time Scotch and English labourers may be imported, and the agricultural system be revolutionised; but the fact remains, that the valleys in Kerry would support, if properly tilled, at least twice their present population with ease.
The grouse are waiting for us, but they must still wait; we have a long climb to make before we shall see them. Although the heather lies thickest on the lower slopes, they prefer the colder altitudes, and the Italian softness of the climate down below does not agree with them. Up, then, we must mount. The ranges for which we are bound are near two thousand feet above the sea; and as the keeper’s wind is better than ours, he tells us a story as we rise.
An Rábach of Cummeengeera
The ascent leads first by a rocky path where the river falls beside us in a series of cascades, the projecting rocks forming cool dripping caves where ferns of all varieties, from the tall Osmunda to the shy Killarney fern which hides itself in the most sequestered corners, cluster in the transparent gloom. A few hundred feet up we emerge upon a level meadow half a mile wide and a mile deep, walled in by precipices, with a solitary farmhouse at the upper end, which is throwing up its thin column of smoke against the cliff at its back.
More desolate spot for a human habitation the eye has rarely rested on. In the winter months the occupants of it are cut off utterly from intercourse with the outer world. During summer the children descend to the valley school, and the old people to the chapel to mass. From November to March the rain and wind keep them prisoners.
The river, where it leaves the plateau, leaps over a shelf of rock and falls thirty or forty feet into a rocky pool. It was here, said our guide as we passed it, that Kathleen Sullivan was murdered. The tale, when he told it, was as singular as it was wild.
The ridge overhanging the glen forms the dividing line between Cork and Kerry. From the crest you look on one side over the Kenmare river, on the other upon Bantry Bay – Berehaven lies at your feet; and about forty years ago, when the English fleet was anchored there, a sailor who by some means had become possessed of a bag of sovereigns, secured them in a belt round his waist, deserted from his ship, climbed the crags by a goat track where they are generally considered inaccessible, and descended in this valley.
He intended to hide himself there till the pursuit was over, and then to escape to America. A criminal flying from justice is a sacred person in most parts of Ireland. He made his way to the farmhouse, where he was offered shelter for the night; and presuming on his character, and perhaps warmed by whisky, he showed his host the treasure which he had brought with him.
The temptation was too strong to be resisted. The sailor fell asleep by the fire. Kathleen, a girl belonging to the farm, who slept in the loft above, was disturbed by a light which glimmered through the chinks in the floor, and looking down she saw her master stand over the sleeping sailor and kill him. The body was carried out and buried. The man’s presence there was of course unknown and no inquiry was made for him.
The girl, terrified at the dreadful secret of which she had become the unwilling possessor, did not venture to speak. At last, in an evil moment for herself, in a quarrel with her master she let fall an incautious word, from which he gathered that she knew what he had done.
One morning early, when she went out to milk the cows, he followed her to the top of the waterfall, watched his opportunity, and flung her over. She was killed on the spot. There was an inquest. She was supposed to have fallen accidentally, and the murderer, whom we will call O’Brien, was now assured of his safety. He was shrewd in his generation; quietly and without ostentation he laid out the sailor’s money. He bought cows and sheep, he grew rich, and all that he did prospered with him.
So passed seventeen years. Kathleen was forgotten. The lucky O’Brien was the sovereign of the glen, and the envy of the neighbourhood, till justice awoke suddenly from its long sleep. As Kathleen had seen him kill the sailor, so there had been an unknown witness to the murder of Kathleen. A stranger had been on the mountains, himself after no good – shearing O’Brien’s sheep to steal the wool. He had been on the watch lest he should be himself detected, and from a crag overhanging the fall he had observed all that took place.
He, too, remained silent, from a consciousness of his own guilt. He went down to Berehaven, where he found employment as a labourer in the copper mines, and there he continued to work, still keeping his secret, till, having grown an elderly man, he one day fell down a shaft: he was badly hurt, and believing himself to be dying, sent for a priest, and in confession told him all.
The priest insisted that he must make his declaration public. A magistrate took his deposition upon oath, and a warrant was issued for O’Brien’s arrest. Months elapsed before it could be executed: the murderer was protected by the customs which he had himself broken. By daylight his cabin commanded all the approaches to it; no one could come within half a mile of it unseen; the people in the valley below gave him warning by signals when danger was near, and he escaped into a cave high up among the crags, where he lay concealed till the coast was clear.
At last one stormy night, when the watchers were under cover, and sounds were drowned in the warring of the wind and the waterfalls, a party of police made their way to his door and caught him.[10] He was taken to Tralee, was tried, found guilty, and after a full confession was hanged.[11]
It is faring with the grouse as with Corporal Trim’s story of ‘The King of Bohemia and his Seven Castles.’ We cannot get beyond the first sentence for interruptions. No matter, we are near the ground now. While listening to the keeper’s tale we have left the valley, and ascended gradually by the sheep walks. We are making for a gap in the ridge which is now immediately above our heads. The aneroid gives us 1,700 feet above the sea level.
Five minutes’ hand-and-foot climbing, up to our waists in heather, lands us on the top, and we fling ourselves on the grass to recover breath and wet our throats in an ice-cold spring. Even here there is no breeze. The sky above us is cloudlessly blue; the gorges underneath are filled with a transparent haze; behind us is our own harbour of Kilmikalloge, with the Derreen woods and birch-fringed inlets.
We trace the course of the broad river as it sweeps away to the Atlantic, Scarriff towering at its mouth, and then the Skelligs, and far away Mount Brandon and the Dingle range. An English yacht is drifting up with the tide, her sails hanging loose without a breath to fill them. Landwards Carran Tual has a veil of mist upon it. Every other peak throughout the mountain panorama is clear.
In front the cliffs fall away to Bantry Bay, which lies stretched at our feet in summer calm. To the left is Sugar-loaf, keeping watch over the fairy Glengariff. Outside it, covering Bantry itself, is Whiddy Island, where the French fleet came in 1797 – came, tempted by Irish promises, to find despair and destruction. Across the bay and over the hills, and far as we can see, lies the blue girdle of the illimitable ocean, flecked with white spots of sails, or crossed by lines of smoke where an Inman or a Cunarder is forming a floating bridge between the Old and the New World.
We have now no more climbing for the day; we can walk along the high level till, if we please, we make the circuit of our bounds. At any rate, we shall pass round the head of the great valley and descend ten miles distant. My companion looks in dismay at the wilderness of rocks, and exclaims that he would as soon expect to meet a tiger as a grouse there. He need not despair – he will meet a few, and that was as much as we promised him.
The red grouse of Kerry differs in all his habits from his brothers in North Britain. He is larger, heavier, and stronger on the wing. The packs break up early; the birds lie about singly, or in twos and threes, chiefly on shelves of cliff or in the hollows between the high hummocks, where the heather is thick and the sheep least disturb them. They are wild; so, though we let the dogs range, we cannot afford to wait for a point, and must walk well up to them.
When the grouse rise their flight is like a blackcock’s, and if we let them go we shall see no more of them. The sheep and goats have chosen the highest ridges today, in the absurd hope of finding the air cooler there. They are as active as deer. With a fiendish ingenuity they divine the way that we are going, and while they keep steadily a few hundred yards ahead of us, ahead of them we see a continual flutter of brown wings, and mountain hares by dozens cantering leisurely away. It can’t be helped. Sheep are of more consequence than sportsmen’s pleasure, and meanwhile make the best of keepers. If they prevent the grouse from multiplying, they insure them effectively against being killed down. No matter – we shall get what we want.
We separate that we may not talk. We must keep our eyes peeled, as the Americans say, for we know not where or when a bird may rise. A right and left from my friend, as we part, restores his good humour. We press a gossoon who is sheep-watching into our service to carry hares, and shoot whatever we come across.
Why tire the reader with particulars? After three hours it is luncheon time. We have five braces of grouse, half a dozen hares, and a snipe or two; and for Kerry we have done respectably. We lie down in the heather beside a spring which spouts from a rift in the rocks, cold as if it ran out of a glacier. Our flasks and sandwich boxes are emptied, the dogs lie curled at our feet, and we smoke our pipes in meditative inertness, gazing over the glorious scene.
Go where we will among these hills there is always some fresh surprise. The abruptness with which the gorges fall off conceals their existence till we are close on them. We are sitting now on the rim of Glenarm, a narrow valley scarce a rifle shot across, with a solitary lake at the bottom of it sixteen hundred feet down. The lake is a famous fishing place, and had been the scene of a quarrel in the beginning of the summer which, though happily it went no further than words, is extremely characteristic of the country. It may serve to amuse us for a few minutes till our pipes are finished.
The Fish Fight
I must premise that in the south of Ireland the priests and the fisheries go ill together. For some unknown reason the presence of a priest is supposed to bring ill-luck both to net and rod. In a village a mile below the lake is a congregation of Soupers – Protestant converts so named by the Catholics from the means said to have been used to convince them of their errors. However this might be, there is now a church there, a school, two dozen or more useful Protestant families, and an excellent high-spirited young clergyman, Irish born and Irish tempered, and one of the most hard-working of men.
In this wild country we depend sometimes for our dinners on what we can catch or shoot. P, so let me call the clergyman, is a fisherman after the Apostles’ model. One day he had gone with his rod to the lake. His rival the priest, Father T, an athletic young giant well known in the neighbourhood, was on another part of it on the same errand. Some boys who were fishing also passed P and complained of bad sport; and P, who lives in normal militancy with the spiritual opposition, observed that they could expect no better when there was a priest on the lake.
The boys repeated the words to the father, who was seen shortly after coming up at a swinging trot. ‘What’s that you said about me?’ he exclaimed when he reached P. P made no answer, but fished on. ‘What did you say about me?’ reiterated the father more fiercely. ‘I never mentioned your name,’ replied P, not caring to turn round. ‘You did!’ rejoined the other. ‘Well, if you wish to have it,’ said P, ‘I told them there was neither grace nor luck where a priest came.’
P’s head scarcely reached T’s shoulder. The father flourished his blackthorn. ‘It is lucky for you,’ he said, ‘that we are in a land where the law is over us, or I’d break your head across. How dare you speak like that?’ ‘The law over us!’ retorted P, ‘well, it is, and we must bear it. If there was no law, I was brought up where I learnt the use of my hands. But, if it comes to daring, how dared you take five shillings last winter from the fishermen for saying mass on their nets when they were after the herring, and you know as well as I that your mass would bring them neither bad nor good?’
How much farther the conversation went, I know not. The most curious part of the matter was to follow. So far it might be thought each of the parties had got as good as he brought, and neither had much to complain of. P, however, sued his antagonist at the _____ Sessions for exciting to commit a breach of the peace. One of the magistrates, I was told, was a Catholic; but poor Father T, notwithstanding, was condemned in costs and had to pay ten pounds. Protestant clergy, it seems, can still have justice in Ireland, notwithstanding the disestablishment.[12]
Return to Derreen: The Lady of the Glen
We have loitered long enough over our luncheon, and we must up and away. We still keep along the high ground skirting the head of the valley, and firing an occasional shot. Our moderate game-bag is filled. By four o’clock we are on the range opposite to that on which we ascended in the morning, and, as the crow flies, we are not far from home. The harbour is just under us, and the house is just visible among the woods. The sea breeze, the sea turn, or Satan, as the people call it, which always blows from the ocean on summer afternoons, has brought in the English schooner, which lies at anchor half a mile from the boathouse. Our shooting is over.
The gossoon has taken a short cut, and gone down with the hares. The keeper prepares to follow with the dogs and bag. We have ourselves a choice of ways – either to accompany him down the gently sloping shoulder of the mountain direct to Derreen, or to make a round by another glen as remarkable as any that we had seen.
My companion was tired, and selected to go with the keeper. It still wanted three hours of sunset, and I myself decided for the glen. Here, again, the cliffs were precipitous, falling sheer from below my feet to where the rocks, which have been split off by wet and frost, lie piled in masses under the crags. There was a sort of chimney, however, where it was possible to descend with safety, and I had a special reason for my choice of way.
All the glens are inhabited more or less. In this one there was a cabin, which I could see from the edge on which I was standing, where we had heard the day before that there was a woman lying dangerously ill. Her husband had applied to us for wine or medicine, but though there has been a school in the neighbourhood for thirty years, where, besides the three Rs, there are taught grammar, and geography, and the principles of mechanics, and natural history, and choice specimens of English composition in prose and verse are learnt by rote by pupils who do not understand a word of them, simpler matters of more immediately consequence are forgotten.
The Irish of the glens do not yet distinguish between a physic-bottle and a charm. They would hang castor oil about their necks, and expect as much result as if it was in their stomachs, and would swallow a paper prescription with as much faith as the drugs which it indicated. They have a contempt for professional doctors, and unbounded belief in amateurs. We cannot escape our responsibilities, but we can venture on nothing without going in person to learn what is the matter, and without seeing our instructions obeyed with our own eyes.
The cabin to which I was going was a mile distant from any other habitation. It stood on a green bank across a river, and was only accessible over stepping-stones. Notwithstanding the dry weather the filth was ankle-deep before the door. The windows were blocked up with straw, and when I entered I could see nothing till my eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness.
Gradually I made out two or three pigs, a spindle half overturned, and a plate or two. Human creatures there were none to be seen, old or young, nor sign of them. The place seemed so entirely deserted that I supposed I had made a mistake. Groping round, however, I found the latch of a second door, and on lifting it found myself in a sort of outhouse more wretched than many an English pigsty; and there, on a rude shelf of boards, littered over with straw, lay the woman I was in search of.
She had been left perfectly alone. Her pulse was scarcely perceptible. She had received the last sacraments, and might have died at any moment; yet of all her family (she had a husband and two grown sons, certainly – whether she had daughters I do not know) there was not one who cared to watch by her.
They were in good circumstances; they had cows and sheep; they had a fair sized farm, and relatives in America who had helped them with money to stock it. When she died she would be decently waked. The whisky would flow freely; the keen would ring along the valley as if a thousand hearts were breaking. Yet the poor soul could be left to start upon its last journey with no friendly hand to soothe the parting pain, or loving voice to whisper hope and comfort. I could but feel that the words of Swift, written a century and a half ago of Ireland, were still as applicable as ever: ‘Whoever travels in this country, and observes the faces, habits, and dwellings of the natives, will hardly think himself in a land where law, religion, or common humanity is professed.’
Visitors at Derreen House
The coming in of a yacht is always an event with us. It rarely happens but there is some one on board that we know or know about. At least they will have heard of Derreen, and will wish to see it; and living as we do at the end of all things, the sight of fresh faces is specially welcome. On the present occasion we were more than usually fortunate. The owner, Mr ____, was a distant acquaintance. He had an American gentleman on board who was fresh from Gravelotte, who had stood on that bloody field beside the King of Prussia, and had been obliged, in leaving it, to pick his way for half a mile as he walked, lest he should tread upon the mangled bodies of men.[13]
We have supped full of horrors since that day. Death and destruction have become our common food. They have lost the dreadful charm of novelty, and we turn sick and weary from the monotonous tale. Here at least we have no more of it.
There was, besides, a person whose name I had often heard – Mr C F, an Irish landlord, whose stern rule had made him notorious for the crimes which he had provoked, who himself had borne a charmed life, so many a ball had whistled past him harmlessly. We had a visitor too of our own, the Dean of ____, the most accomplished of Irish antiquaries, long second only to Petrie, and Petrie’s death succeeding to his vacant chair.[14]
Antiquarian Adventure
Taking advantage of our company we determined the next day to open one of the large raths which I mentioned above, that we might see if it contained any curiosities. Guarded by superstition, and believed to be inhabited by the good people, it had been left untouched till thirty years ago, when an adventurous treasure-seeker was reported to have attempted an entrance.
Attempted, not succeeded. An old man in the neighbourhood told us that being then a rash youth, he had himself taken part in the adventure. They had penetrated into the first chamber, where they had found a broken quern; their way had then been stopped by an iron door, and while struggling to force it they had been encountered by a black apparition resembling a man; they had fled for their lives; one of them (there were three) had broken his leg, a second had fallen and sprained an ankle, the third lost three of his cows. The neighbourhood was up in arms; it was feared that the whole valley would be ruined. The hole was instantly filled in, and the spectre returned to his den.
Thirty years of rationalism had not been without their effects. There was no open opposition to our project, but we had great difficulty in procuring workmen. A farmer was found at last who had spent ten years in America; another offered himself who was going the next week to America, and believed that the devil, if devil there were, would not follow him to the land of promise; the Scotch keeper and the gardener made two more; and to work we went with pickaxe and crowbar.
We were obliged to be careful, for the mound having a supernatural reputation had been used as a burying-ground during the famine. The bodies lay within a few inches of the surface, and the chambers which we were in search of were far beneath them; we sank our shaft, however, out of their way at the extreme edge, on the traces of the treasure-seeker, being especially anxious to find the iron door.
The first thing was to remove the stones which had been flung in to block up the entrance; this took us two hours of hard work: at length eight feet down we came on a hole like the mouth of a fox’s earth. Usually the raths are dry, the situations of them having been selected with a view to natural drainage: here the wet had penetrated where the soil had been loosened, and to enter we had to crawl through deep mud. A lighted candle pushed in at the end of a stick showed that the air was fresh. Clusters of boys were hanging round at a respectful distance, who refused to be bribed to make the first venture; so, disregarding the prayers and denunciations of a venerable old patriarch who was looking on in horror, one of our own party crawled in.
He reported nothing of any door or other obstacle; there was a passage open, leading he knew not whither: so we procured a tape to measure the distance and guide us back if we lost our way, and entered in single file. After creeping on our stomachs for a few feet in three inches of mud we found ourselves in a cave eight feet long, five feet wide, and four feet and a half or five feet high; at the end of it was a second hole, through which we could barely squeeze ourselves, leading into a second cave like the first. Beyond this were another and another, seven in all: all but the first were dry.
The floors were covered with the undisturbed dust of centuries. At the far extremity, within a few feet of the opposite edge of the mound, was a rude stone fireplace with traces of ashes. There was no sign of any other opening; and how a fire could have been lighted in such a position without suffocating everyone in the place there was nothing to show. On the floor lay the remains of the last dinner that had been eaten there, a few mussel shells and the bones of a sheep’s head. That was all. No instrument of any kind, of stone, or wood, or metal. There were marks of the tools which had been used in the excavation, but of the tools themselves, or of the hands in which they were held, not a trace.
What these places could have been baffles conjecture. They were not places of concealment, for the situations of all of them are purposely conspicuous; as little could they have been forts, for it was but to stop the earths and every creature inside must have been stifled. The Dean tells us that, like the present one, they are uniformly empty. Once, only, a rude crucifix was found, but this proves little. In the days of persecution, when supernatural terrors were more active than they are now, these strange caves might have served as safe retreats for hunted priests or friars.
We came out as wise as we had gone in, save that our imaginations could indulge no longer in possible discoveries. We had only inflicted an incurable wound on the spiritual temperament of the valley. The already wavering faith in the supernatural was confirmed into incredulity. We had made a way for scepticism, and another group of pious beliefs was withered.
Political Talk with Mr C F
As we walked home I had a talk with Mr F. He had earned his notoriety by the scale on which he had forced up rents, carried out evictions, and brought his vast property under economic and paying conditions. To make a property pay in the mountainous parts of Ireland is to drive off the inhabitants and substitute sheep for them. I could not venture to touch on his personal experience; or the sensations of a man who had shot his covers under a guard of policemen, and to whom to take a solitary ride had been as dangerous as to lead a charge of cavalry, might have been curious to enquire into.
Our conversation turned rather on the social condition of these two islands, with their scanty area of soil and their relatively vast population. Mr F’s theory had at least the merit of boldness. The business and life of the empire, he said, lay in the great cities, where the wear and tear and anxiety of work became daily more exhausting. Our overtaxed constitutions required opportunities of escaping the strain close at hand and readily available. England, Scotland, and Ireland therefore, ought to be divided into, on the one hand, swarming centres of industry, densely-crowded hives of people; and on the other, wildernesses, solitudes of mountain and forest, where the deer ranged free as on the prairies, and wearied man could recuperate his energies in contact with primitive nature.
It was a complete conception, expressed without flinching. Artificial solitudes require strict exclusiveness. Itinerant tourist parties disturb game. Remains of picnic parties, fragments of newspapers, and chicken bones banish the illusions of the picturesque. The happy beings, therefore, who can command an entrance into these charmed circles must be the very rich and the very few – less than one in a thousand of us – while of these few the brain of a large percentage is never taxed by a severer effort than the adjustment of a betting book, and their services to the community extend no further than the diligent use of their digestive apparatus.
The resultant good, therefore, is slightly incommensurate with the cost of production. Mr F, however, was but stating nakedly the principle on which the Scotch Highlands have been now for some time administered. There may be other Irish proprietors besides my companion who would follow the example if they dared. Were our colonies brought closer to us, were the enormous area of fertile soil belonging to England in all parts of the world made accessible by easy and cheap communication, and some shreds of our enormous income expended in enabling our people to spread, something might be said in defence of Mr F’s position. At all events, it would not be utterly detestable.
The Missing Fish Nets
Two pieces of news were awaiting us meanwhile at home; one most unpleasant. The water-bailiff – water baby, as our little boy persisted in calling him – was in the yard with a long face to report that our salmon-nets had been stolen. Search for the thief had been fruitless: there was but one resource – we must apply to the priest. How do our sins find us out!
Among the unlucky remarks of mine which Father M [Callaghan McCarthy] had taken so deeply to heart, had been an intimation intended solely for the benefit of English squires, that the Catholic clergy in Ireland set themselves against poaching. Lord L’s keeper had told me that Father M was worth six watchers to him. It was quite true, but I had been most heedless in repeating it. The Father had been bitterly pained; and now we must either lose our nets, with indefinite trouble lying ahead from the same cause, or we must appeal to him to exert the power which I had accused him of possessing.
When the case came before him he considered neither his own injuries nor our interests, nor anything but the special welfare of the flock committed to him. A wrong act had been done; he instantly ordered restitution to be made; and within twenty-four hours word was whispered out of the air to the water-bailiff, that if he looked in a particular spot, at a particular hour of the night the nets would be found.
John Townsend Trench and the Sir St George Gore Affair
The second and more agreeable surprise was, that Lord L’s agent, the autocrat of the South-west of Kerry, the brilliant son of the author of Irish Realities, had dropped upon us out of the clouds. We had imagined him far away preparing for his impending marriage.[15] He had been obliged to return to Ireland by an intricate lawsuit, which he had just brought to a successful issue at the assizes, and before he vanished again he had come to pay us a flying visit. What befell him on this occasion might claim a place in the next edition of his father’s book. For fear his modesty might prevent its insertion, and because the story is characteristic of place and people, I will tell it for him.
We had a neighbour between us and Kenmare whose bounds marched with ours, and whom for various reasons there had been a desire at head-quarters to see removed. Mr _____ held the remains of another tenant’s lease, and it was found extremely difficult to dispossess him. His house was like the castle of some border baron, patrolled by huge bloodhounds and wolfhounds, whose deep bay echoed fearfully through the mountains in the midnight air. Among other weapons, he was an accomplished master of his pen. The war in the courts was carried into the press – lampoons, rightly or wrongly attributed to him, were posted on the walls of the town – saucy, scandalous verses were dispersed through the post office.
For two years and more all our corner of Kerry had been agitated by the quarrel. At length it had been decided. The authorities of the estate had won the battle. A verdict had been given for Lord L. The sheriff’s officer was prepared to execute the eviction, and T [John Townsend Trench] had come down to us partly to announce his triumph.
We had a delightful evening. Never had we found him more charming; never, for some reason, had he appeared more satisfied with the world and with himself. We offered him a bed; he was seventeen miles from home, and the road was peculiarly lonely. He was not to be persuaded, however: he had to return instantly to England on the most interesting of errands. Little knots of well-wishers from the neighbourhood had been to the house to wish him joy. The school-master especially, slightly anticipating the future, had prayed ‘that he might be wafted to heaven on the bosom of his numerous family.’
There was no moon, but the night was soft, sultry, and brilliant with stars. The car came round to the door an hour before midnight, and he was on the point of starting, when a gossoon, panting for breath from a long run, appeared suddenly upon the gravel. He had come to beg T, if he loved his life, not to leave the house that night. Mr _____ was waiting for him upon the mountains, and had sworn to have his life.
It came out – confessed, perhaps, with a shadow of reluctance – that T, who had to pass Mr ___’s gate on his way down to us, either unable to conceal his exultation in his triumph or wishing to give his enemy an opportunity of encountering him on his own dunghill, had stopped his car, walked up to the house, and executed a deliberate parade for some minutes outside the drawing-room windows. The provocation was too strong for flesh and blood to bear. Had Mr _____ been at home, the consequences might have been considerable.
Happily he was out, and T had been gone for a quarter of an hour when he returned. There was an instant pursuit, but it was unsuccessful; and the indignant gentleman was now reported to be lying out on the top of the pass with his bloodhounds, and no one knew how many desperate boys besides, to waylay T on his road home. What was to be done? We, of course, insisted that he must stay where he was; that with his marriage settlement signed, and the day fixed not ten days distant, he had no right to expose himself. If go he must, the water was open; we could send him up in a boat. We might as well have argued with the wind. He said that if he allowed himself to be frightened off the road he could never show his face among the gentlemen of Kerry again. He had done nothing but what was strictly in harmony with Irish proprieties. Go he must, if there were fifty ____s in the pass and all the bloodhounds in the county. There was nothing for it but to give him a couple of double-barrelled guns, mount the Scotch keeper the other side of the car, and let him start.
They drove off into the darkness, the driver scarcely able to keep his seat for terror. The ring of horses’ hoofs on the hard road gradually sank and was lost. We listened for shots, but all was still. T told us afterwards he had been on the point of firing to give us a little excitement but he recollected in time that it might bring us in force to the scene of action, and he forbore. He saw nothing either of _____ or his dogs. Either Mr ____ had been tired of waiting – it was by this time midnight – or perhaps he had never been on the hill after all. Anyhow, T got home with colours flying, and would have stood a degree higher (were elevation possible) in the estimation of the neighbourhood for his bearing in the whole transaction.[16]
Froude’s Concluding Discourse on the ‘Irish Problem’
I have rambled on incoherently, wishing rather to convey an idea of the constituents of daily life as they present themselves to an English stranger in the wild parts of Ireland than to tell a consecutive story. As I have observed little order hitherto, I shall be no less abrupt in the rest of what I have to say, and I shall conclude these sketches by a few words on the long-vexed Irish problem.
I have nothing to propose in the way of remedial measures: no measures could be expressed in words which could heal a chronic sore as little now as ever disposed to heal. I speak merely as one who knows something of Ireland and something of its history. Let it not be supposed that the late concessions to Irish agitation have touched as yet the source of disloyalty. They may have been right in themselves – I do not question it; but the wound remains, and will remain.
The Irish, as a body, are disloyal to the English Crown, and disloyal they will continue. The Church Bill was the removal of a scandal; the Land Bill will rescue the poorer tenants from the tyranny of middlemen and adventurers chiefly of their own race; but the people generally regards these Bills, both of them, as extorted from us by the Clerkenwell explosion. They do not thank us for them. They rather gather courage to despise us for our fears. Their sympathies on all subjects are in antagonism to ours. If we are entangled in a war, they will rejoice in our defeat; and they will do their worst or their best, whatever their worst or best may be, to forward our misfortunes.
England had one great opportunity of thoroughly assimilating Ireland to herself, and she threw it wilfully away. The Celts, who had been conquered by the Normans, recovered their power and part of their lands when England was convulsed by the Wars of the Roses. The great Norman families maintained themselves by adopting their manners and their cause, and intermarrying with their families. The Tudor princes had to contend with the hostility of the united island, and the struggle for supremacy continued till it closed in the decisive subjugation of the Irish race after the battle of the Boyne.
The Irish party, Celts and Catholics, were totally broken; their leaders went abroad and took service in foreign armies; the restless spirits were perennially drafted off into the Irish brigade on the continent; their lands were distributed among Scotch and English immigrants; their creed was proscribed; and for the first half of the eighteenth century the Celts were of no more account in their own island than the negroes in the Southern States of America before emancipation. The penal laws in the present state of opinion have become as execrable as slavery: they are mentioned only with shame and regret; yet the essential injustice in yet more important matters with which the poor country was trampled upon by England at the time that they were in force was yet more execrable than the penal laws.
After a hundred and seventy years of intermittent rebellion, massacre, and confusion, something might be said in favour of severe coercion. It was natural to seek for a perpetual removal of disturbing causes which were ineradicable except by excision; yet, if it was found necessary to confiscate an entire country, to prohibit the exercise of its religion, to create a new proprietary, to sow the four provinces with colonies of aliens of another race and another creed, the justification of those stern measures was to be looked for only in the most unrelaxed exertions to benefit morally and materially the people who were so cruelly held down – to develop their industry, to teach them a purer faith, to make them feel that the conquerors whom they had resisted so desperately were, after all, their best and truest friends.
At the close of the seventeenth century a third of the population of Ireland were Scots and English, French and Flemings – all Protestants. They had nine-tenths of the land; they possessed all the skill, knowledge, enterprise, and capital; they were covering the country with flocks and herds; they were growing flax on a great scale; they had established a lucrative foreign trade; they had founded manufactories which were employing tens of thousands of people; and by the laws of natural expansion, had they been allowed to grow, they would have absorbed and provided with organised occupation the entire nation.
They were sturdy Protestants, as I said – not lukewarm Anglicans misbegotten out of compromise, but men tried in the fire; sturdy Calvinists, who hold the traditions of the Ironsides. Had such a race as these been allowed fair play, had England only abstained from interfering with them, it is absurd to doubt that the Celts of Ireland, broken down as they were, without leaders, mere helpless, ignorant peasants, would have yielded to the superior intelligence and irresistible influence of their masters, as their brothers of the same race yielded in Wales and the Highlands.
Worried as England had so long been by the Irish difficulty, it might have been thought that she would have rejoiced at last to see the troubles there so happily composed, and would have exerted herself to build vigorously upon a foundation which had been laid so fortunately at last.
But the victory had been too complete. The mercantile element in English legislation – always short-sighted, always mean, always preferring the base profits of individuals, I will not say to duty and high principle, for that is not to be expected, but to patriotism and national interest – took advantage of Ireland’s political weakness to destroy in the germ her promise of prosperity.
English ship owners took alarm at the growth of Irish commerce – English mill owners at the dimensions of her woollen fabrics. Possessed as Ireland was of cheap labour and inexhaustible water power, they found that she could undersell them in the world’s markets, and the dread of diminishing profits drove them mad with jealousy. The woollen factories were nipped in the bud by prohibitive statutes.
The industrial immigration was not only checked, but twenty thousand skilled Protestant artisans already settled in the North moved instantly back across the Channel. Driven from their manufactures, the settlers turned their hands to the growth of raw material and multiplied their sheep. Again they were forbidden to export their wool to any country except England, and in England only to a few selected ports. These are but a few instances of the detailed tyranny by which Irish industry was broken down. The prospects of Ireland were deliberately sacrificed to fill the pockets of a few English rich men, and the wretched natives were forced back upon their potato gardens as their only means of subsistence.
Spiritual matters went the same road. If the Irish Church was not oppressed in the same sense, it was oppressed in a worse; for the benefices, high and low, were distributed as patronage to make provision for persons who could not decently be promoted in England. The principle on which the vacant places in the hierarchy were supplied is immortalised in the bitter scorn of Dean Swift. The English government, he said, nominated highly proper persons; but the reverend gentlemen were waylaid by the highwaymen on Hounslow Heath, who cut their throats, stole their papers, and came over and were inducted in their places.
When the church could hold no more, there were the Irish revenues to fall back upon. Wretched Ireland was compelled to place upon its pension list every scandalous blackguard who, in unmentionable or un-producible ways, had laid the court or cabinet of St James’s under obligation.
Thus, hard as it might have seemed to ruin so fair a prospect, the English government succeeded in doing it. The Protestant immigrants were driven back upon the Celts by this ingenious variety of ill-usage, and made common cause with them against a tyranny which had grown intolerable to both.
In spite of the government, their mere presence in Ireland had produced astonishing improvement. They had ruled, so far as their power extended, justly and wisely. They maintained unbroken order while England was convulsed with rebellion. The population increased three-fold in ninety years. The selling value of the land rose in places twenty and thirty fold. Ireland in 1782 was still in essentials a Protestant country. Grattan’s volunteers were Protestants. Even the United Irishmen of 1798 were most of them Protestants; but they had been driven into revolt by England’s unendurable folly; and, cut off as they were from the source of their strength, their ascendancy inevitably declined.
The era of agitation recommenced. The Celts raised their heads again. Their relative numbers multiplied; they became once more the dominant race of the island. The Anglo-Irish authority, established so hardly, became a thing of the past, and the history of the last half-century has been of the recovery, step by step, by the Celtic and Catholic population of the powers which had seemed gone from them for ever. The country has fallen back into the condition in which William found it, and the families of the old blood inevitably have resumed the aspirations which they displayed in the last Parliament of James.
England deserves what has come upon her; yet the two islands must remain where nature placed them. They are tied together like an ill-matched pair between whom no divorce is possible. Must they continue a thorn in each other’s side till Doomsday? Are the temperaments of the races so discordant that the secret of their reconciliation is for ever undiscoverable?
The present hope is, that by assiduous ‘justice’ – that is, by conceding everything which the Irish please to ask – we shall disarm their enmity and convince them of our goodwill. It may be so. There are persons sanguine enough to hope that the Irish will be so moderate in what they demand, and the English so liberal in what they will grant, that at last we shall fling ourselves into each other’s arms in tears of natural forgiveness.
I do not share that expectation. It is more likely that they will press their importunities till we turn upon them and refuse to yield further. There will be a struggle once more; and either the emigration to America will increase in volume till it has carried the entire race beyond our reach, or in some shape or other they will again have to be coerced into submission. This only is certain – that the fortunes of the two islands are inseparably linked. Ireland can never be independent of England, nor is it likely that a fuller measure of what is called freedom will make Irishmen acquiesce more graciously in their forced connection with us.
The Irishman has many faults: he has one pre-eminent virtue. If the master of the best pack of foxhounds in England were to go to the kennel and say, ‘My dear hounds, you have been kept in slavery – the finest part of your nature has been destroyed for want of your natural rights – you have been taken out when you wished to stay at home – you have not been consulted either about your victuals or your lodging – you have been sent after foxes when you would have preferred hares – you have been treated as if you were mere dogs rather than as rational and responsible beings: I am going to alter that – I shall put before you what is right, but I shall leave you to take your own way if you prefer it, and you shall each of you vote every morning exactly what you like to do.’
If the master were to act thus, the fate of that pack and of the flocks of sheep in the neighbourhood would not be difficult to predict. It was an Irishman who, when some one said ‘one man was as good as another,’ exclaimed, ‘Ay, and better too.’ He understands himself, if no one else understands him. He is the worst of leaders, but the truest and most loyal of followers.
In the past he was devoted to his chiefs; in the present his allegiance is waiting for anyone who will boldly claim it. Give him a master and he will stick by him through life and death; but it must be a master who knows that he is master and means to continue master. The wildest village boy that ever flung up his cap for O’Donovan Rossa has but to be caught, laid under discipline, and dressed in a policeman’s uniform, to be true as steel.[17]
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[1] Froude alludes to The Siege of Killowen. See http://www.odonohoearchive.com/the-rise-and-fall-of-orpens-fort-killowen-kenmare/ [2] Froude’s visit to Kerry in the 1840s is recalled in Muckross: A True Tale of Love on the Lakes during the Famine (2010). [3] Froude appears to be describing Castle Cove (Bunaneer Castle) at Behaghane. A legend is told of the castle at http://www.odonohoearchive.com/war-and-words-the-unfinished-castles-of-kilcrohane/ [4] Staigue Fort lies above Castle Cover/Bunaneer. [5] ‘Killeenagh Burial Ground for Children’ is marked on the OS map at the North West side of Glanmore Lake at Gortavallig. [6] Froude seems to have been describing the islands of Glanmore Lake, among which are Bush Island, Cormorant Island, Crane Island, Duck Rock, and Illaunatee, the largest. It contains the ruins of a house. Further reference, ‘Islands of Ireland: The stories of Glanmore Lake’ by Dan MacCarthy, Irish Examiner, 13 April 2021. Local legend has it the property was used as a hideaway for James Stephens while on the run in the 1860s. [7] See The Ireland of James Anthony Froude (2010), p42. [8] ‘A Fortnight in Kerry Part I’ reproduced from Fraser’s Magazine, April 1870, pp513-530. [9] To the Editor of the Tralee Chronicle, 13 May 1870: Dear Sir – My attention has been drawn to an article which appeared in a late number of the Chronicle, headed a ‘Fortnight in Kerry’ by J A Froude (the eminent English historian) and copied from Fraser’s Magazine. This article comprises a copious and romantic pleasure-trip of Mr Froude’s from London to Direen, a place beautifully situated in a fine valley in this parish. His narrative in relation to this country opens with his arrival at Kenmare at the Lansdowne Arms Hotel. He tells his readers that he met at the door of that hotel, some thirty years ago, on his return from a tour at Glengariffe, a group of gentlemen, whom his attention was directed to by the driver, and whom he describes, as two O’Connells – cousins of the Liberator, a Morty O’Sullivan and another, whose name he forgets. The point about them was, that each killed his man in a duel, and that Morty killed two. He makes a particular point at Morty, describing him as the descendant of the chiefs of Berehaven, and ruling the wreck of his inheritance with the same despotism as they did as far as it extended; showing him up as a fire-eater, a litigant, and a drunkard, and thus heaping all manner of opprobrium on the man’s memory. Now in reference to this Morty O’Sullivan whom I knew well, and whose memory still lives, and is cherished in all Berehaven, and in this part of Kerry, I will say fearlessly that no fouler calumny was ever cast upon the memory of any man. He possessed, no doubt, most powerful influence in Berehaven, but was known to exercise it in a moderate way. He was kind, hospitable, and remarkable for his temperate habits, and how he could be the man as above described by Mr Froude, I can’t at all understand; and as to these O’Connells, whom he only describes as the Liberator’s cousins – he has so many cousins of that name, that I do not know particularly who these were, but this I know that no cousins of his, that ever heard of, were at all remarkable for their fighting, or duelling propensities. Be that as it may, I am only surprised that Mr Froude in thus aspersing the memory of the dead, did not foresee that he was provoking by the very fact the resentment of some surviving relative, who may not be easily restrained from requiring satisfaction for such ungenerous and unwarrantable observations. So much bile thrown off, he now proceeds on his way to Dirreen, and once there he enumerates with an unwearied pen, the various scenes of amusement which await his arrival at that charming place, fishing, shooting, sailing, &c, and in order to make his narrative more spicy, and more to the taste of his English readers, he throws into it, by way of episode, other amusing incidents, showing up into obloquy, and contempt, the traditions of the country and the peculiarities of the Irish peasant, in the same fashion as he did these gentlemen whom he met at the hotel door at Kenmare – proving thereby, that we here in the South West of Ireland have little felt the humanizing influence of modern civilization, and, that if it reached some, the great bulk of the population are still without it. That English haughtiness would thus scoff at our degraded position, and represent us as so many barbarians, is not very wonderful. It was only lately that we could breathe with any freedom in our native land – thanks to the immortal O’Connell – the great Liberator of his country – the ‘smuggler’s son,’ as Mr Froude sneeringly calls him, whether in good or bad taste, I’ll leave himself to judge. The dark pages of our history tell us in mournful detail how our ancestors suffered under English domination and English law – how they were deprived of their literature, how their seats of learning, the nurseries of the arts and sciences, which once won the admiration of Europe, were razed and levelled in the dust, and finally how persecution set a price on the heads of priests and school masters – the civilizers and instructors of the people, and put them in the same category with the wolf, in order to eradicate every vestige of knowledge – religious and secular, out of the country, and make the poor Irish as easy prey to the fanaticism and bigotry of their English masters. The Irish, however, though they lost their schools, kept their faith, and their rulers seeing that persection failed to gain its object relaxed the rigour of their laws, they granted Catholic Emancipation through the dauntless and persevering efforts of O’Connell, and the liberal party, and gave a system of National Education which, though open to objection on account of its mixed character, was still received as a great boon, and tended much towards the enlightenment of the county. This system which has already produced good fruit in a secular point of view in more favored localities, is yet slow in its operation in mountainous districts such as ours. the many impediments in the way of the children in a rugged country, where the schools are far asunder, amidst a thinly scattered population, are a great check to its progress amongst us. No wonder then that our poor people would appear to disadvantage before tourists and other sight-seers who, like Mr Froude, are attracted by the splendid scenery of our glens and mountains, but I trust they won’t be open to that reproach much longer. Our kind landlord, the Marquis of Lansdowne, who for the first time since he succeeded to the ownership of his estates, visited this part of his property last year, seeing the difficulties of our situation, encouraged the making of roadways, which besides the other advantages to the tenantry, will give facility of access to the schools, and extend the benefits of education through the whole country. Be our deficiencies, however, and shortcomings what they may, I still expected that Mr Froude would not be the man to expose them to English ridicule – much less to cast any aspersion on our creed or ministry, which, it will be seen, he has done very unsparingly. I enjoyed his acquaintance for the last two summers since he came to Dirreen, and found him courteous and kind. I, therefore, little thought that there was anything ungenerous, or illiberal in his nature, but, when I saw this extraordinary narrative of his, I at once came to the conclusion that he was no friend to our country or creed, and that his anti-Irish feelings, which he suppressed while here in Kerry, got full vent when he went back into his native atmosphere. ‘Tis true that in consideration of his civilities, and through respect for his good wife, whom I esteem much for her amiable qualities, especially her great feeling for the poor, I would have pardoned him much of what he said, but the slur he cast upon the religion of the country is an offence that I could not allow to pass unnoticed, and that he did so, without reserve or disguise. I need only quote his own words as they appear in the following part of his narrative. He introduces the Dirreen keeper one ‘Jack Harper’ to his readers, and describes him as a staunch Scotch Protestant, tells how he got married to a Catholic ‘lassie’ of the place, and much as he admired her, would not get married to her in our church but was married by the Registrar in Kenmare, that he attends our church but holds the proceedings there in some disdain – showing that he is still no convert. It would be shocking, forsooth, if he were; and to prove that he is not, he says that he doesn’t mind confession, but yet that he pays the priest his dues. Why then pay those dues, if he sets no value on the priests’ performances? Jack himself is made to tell the reason. He gives to understand that it is an affair of mere barter, between himself and the priest, saying that the priest in turn is worth a dozen watchers to him, that if his traps be stolen from off the mountains, or a salmon made away with out of the spawning bed, he has only to state his grievance to the priest, and the curses of the church are at his service, telling plainly that in consideration of a few shillings, by way of dues, our sacred ministry is profaned – literally sold out for the protection of his traps and salmon – an opinion endorsed, it seems, by the writer, when he says in a breath after, that ‘religion down here means right and wrong, and materially, perhaps, not much besides.’ Thus it is that Mr Froude insults most wantonly our country, its religion, and ministers, and in place of being the amiable man we thought him to be, places himself side by side without bitterest enemies. Before I close these remarks, I deem it a duty I owe myself and to the order I belong to, to say, that in reference to Harper’s story, it is a great mistake to hope or imagine that the curses of our church would be flung right and left for the protection or restitution of property – a practice which the church abhors, and it is only a rank bigot or a person unacquainted with our discipline, that could assert it, or presume to look for it. The duty of the priest, in such cases, is simply this, to exhort his people most strenuously to respect the rights of the neighbour, and that neighbour implies every person under the sun, of whatever clime or creed, to impress on their minds the obligation, enjoined upon us all, of observing these two branches of the natural law, viz, ‘to do unto others as you would have others do unto you, and not to do unto others what you would not have others do unto you,’ which is further inculcated by the divine precept, ‘thou shalt not steal.’ But, as to cursing, or denunciation, as it is more properly called, it is never resorted to, except in the case of great scandal, and when the transgressor happens to be so obstinate as not to be corrected by other means; then, after due warning, he comes liable to excommunication by the authority of the church, following the example of St Paul who excommunicated the incestuous Corinthian, and by that sentence, when pronounced upon him, he is cut off from the communion of the faithful, and no longer to be considered while in that state a living member of the church. In this sense alone is meant a curse inflicted by the church. How then Mr Froude could found upon Harper’s story, the sweeping assertion he made immediately after, that ‘religion down here means right and wrong and materially perhaps not much besides’ can only be explained by his total ignorance, like that of Harper’s, of the discipline of the Catholic Church, and this ignorance is unhappily the cause of that rancor and bigotry with which she is so frequently assailed. And now, taking leave of the subject, which indeed to me is anything but pleasant, and hoping that Mr Froude will see that any observations I have made were only called for. I remain, dear sir, yours faithfully, Callaghan McCarthy, PP, Tuosist, 11 May 1870. ‘Lauragh Church was built in 1866 by Father Callaghan McCarthy a native of Ballyhar, Firies; he was parish priest of Tuosist from 1834 till his death in 1876. Fr McCarthy came to Tuosist in 1834 with his nephew Charlie McCarthy. At that time the old church in Lauragh had a thatched roof. Fr McCarthy built the present Church in 1866, using donations from people abroad and voluntary labour from the parishioners. St.Kilian’s Church was originally a stone building which was reroofed in 1963 and the walls were pebble dashed. Fr McCarthy travelled around the parish by pony and trap up to his death in 1876; he is buried inside the church. The grave is marked with a marble plaque on the left hand side of the church in the front rows not far from the altar. To this day members of the McCarthy family, grandchildren of Charlie McCarthy who arrived in 1834, continue to serve as caretakers in the church’ (Kenmare News, 22 July 2016). [10] Froude adds a footnote to his account: ‘I have altered the names. The story is otherwise true in all its parts, and in this summer of 1870 had a singular sequel. A man bearing marks of ill-usage appeared one day at a cabin near Kenmare, and complained of having been badly beaten. He was the son of the Berehaven miner. He had been in America since the trial, and had but newly returned. O’Brien’s son had fallen in with him, recognised him, knocked him down and kicked him, and had sworn that if he saw him again his life should pay for his father’s.’ [11] The case is researched in An Rábach of Cummeengeera: the fact and the theatre (2012) by Janet Murphy with illustrations. [12] Froude may have been describing the village of Adrigole with school and Protestant church which lies beyond Glanmore Lake. See notes on the protestant churches of Tuosist/Kilmakilloge in The Church of Ireland in Co Kerry: a record of church & clergy in the nineteenth century (2011), pp203-210. [13] The Battle of Gravelotte took place in France on 18 August 1870. [14] Froude refers to Charles Graves (1812-1899), Bishop of Limerick, Ardfert and Aghadoe. [15] See John Townsend Trench’s Address to the people of Kenmare in the Tralee Chronicle, 9 September 1870: ‘The reception which you have given to my wife and myself is one which must make a profound impression on her, and can never be forgotten by me.’ The life and times of John Townsend Trench are discussed in Richard John Mahony of Dromore: A Nineteenth Century Gentleman (2011) and ‘John Townsend Trench: Land Agent and Preacher’ by Janet Murphy, Bulletin of the Methodist Historical Society of Ireland (2012) Vol 17 (Number 33), pp39-54. [16] The subject of this account, Sir St George Gore, is discussed in the thesis, The Ireland of James Anthony Froude: A Nineteenth Century Drama (2010) https://sword.cit.ie/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1860&context=allthe ‘Marquis of Lansdowne v Sir John George Gore. This was an action £79 8s 4d rent. The defence set up was that the party from whom the land was taken was a Mr Barlow and not the plaintiff whom they refused to recognise. Verdict for the plaintiff’ (Tralee Chronicle, 26 July 1870). The background to this case concerning property at Cloonee and Derrylough, Ardea is discussed in ‘The Marquis of Lansdowne v Anne Sullivan, Tralee Chronicle, 6 May 1870. Lord George Gore: Sir St George Gore, Bart, of Manor Gore, Co Donegal, only son of Sir Ralph Gore, 7th baronet by Lady Grace Maxwell, daughter of the Earl of Farnham, responded to the affair with Pamphlet: by Sir St George Gore, Bart, on the ‘Vagaries’ of Messrs Trench & Froude (1871). He described Froude as a ‘reckless holiday scribbler’ and Trench as the ‘Lansdowne Chronicler.’ Sir St George Gore died at Ness Bank, Inverness on 31 December 1878 aged 67, unmarried. The title passed to his cousin, Sir St George Ralph Gore, ninth Baronet of Manor Gore. ‘Sir St George will be missed by not a few of his craftsmen in the United Kingdom, Ireland and Norway, for his ways were peculiar, such, for instance, as the taking with him of 50 rods for a week’s fishing expedition’ (Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 10 July 1879). Gore was described as a man who killed more big game in America than any other man of his time (obituary, Aberdeen Press and Journal, 2 January 1879). In Colorado, Gore Canyon, Gore Pass, and the Gore Range perpetuate the name of this sporting baronet (‘A Celtic Nimrod in the Old West’ by Clark C Spence, Montana The Magazine of Western History, Vol 9, No 2 (Spring 1959), pp56-66. [17] ‘A Fortnight in Kerry Part II’ reproduced from Fraser’s Magazine, January 1871, pp28-45.
