Part 35 (1/2)
The rapids are just above the mill, and are quite imposing; and there, just beyond them, is the abbey. I was near enough to see it fairly well, though not, of course, in detail as I should have liked to do; but I comforted myself with the thought that it is a comparatively modern one, dating from the sixteenth century, when Margaret, the wife of another O'Rourke, having, perhaps, like Dervorgilla, done something she regretted, built it for the Franciscans.
I had another comfort, too; for I asked the Englishman if he had seen the Leacht-Con-Mic-Ruis; and he said that he had been hunting for it for a week, but hadn't been able to find it, as none of the people thereabouts seemed to know where it was; and he was astonished when I told him that we had found it, and commented with envy upon the energy of Americans. He asked me where it was, and I told him as nearly as I could; and then he wanted me to come in and have tea, and was for sending up to the hotel for Betty; but I had to decline that invitation.
I think he was lonely and glad to find some one to talk to, for he was unusually expansive for an Englishman; and he said he would send his car in to Sligo after us, if we would come out next day; but I told him we were going on to Bundoran.
And then I left him and went back up the hill to the ivy-covered ruin which was really the castle of Tiernan O'Rourke. It stands on the edge of the hill overlooking the valley--the same valley which lay smiling before him that evening he came back from his pilgrimage to Lough Derg; and up there was the battlement from which no light burned. It was battered down in the sixteenth century, in some obscure fight, and all that is left of the castle now is the sh.e.l.l of its walls.
I am afraid Tom Moore, as well as O'Connell, journeyman tailor, has invested the story with a glamour which did not belong to it; for Tiernan O'Rourke was a one-eyed bandit who had sacked the abbey of Clonard a few years before, and who certainly had need of pilgrimages to shrive him from his sins; and Dervorgilla, so far from being a ”young false one,” was forty-two years old; and MacMurrough took care to carry off, not only the lady's person, but all her movable property, and most of her husband's, as well.
The clouds were gathering in the west as we set out from Dromahair, and presently the rain began to slant down, slowly and softly at first, and then in a regular torrent. I do not know when I have seen it rain harder; but we were soon fixed for it and didn't mind. Dromahair is about twelve miles from Sligo, and they are hilly miles, so we knew that we had at least three hours of this wet work ahead of us; but the people working in the fields or plodding along the road paid no attention to the rain, so why should we? In fact, most of them, though without any sort of protection, seemed to be quite unconscious that it was raining at all.
And then, just when the rain was hardest, I saw to the left a circle of stones crowning a little hill, and I knew it was a cashel. A cashel, as I have explained already, is a fort made of stones, just as a rath is a fort made of earth, both being in the form of a circle; and I knew I could get pictures of raths without much difficulty, but I didn't know when I would see another cashel; so I made the driver stop, and got my camera out of the well, and started off through a field to get a picture of this one, not heeding Betty's anxious inquiry if I had suddenly gone mad.
That field into which I plunged was thigh-deep with dripping gra.s.s, and I didn't realise how wet it was until I was well into it, and then there was nothing to do but go on. So I scrambled up the hill and took two pictures, s.h.i.+elding my lens, as well as I could, against the driving rain; and I hadn't any idea that the pictures would be good ones, but they were, and one of them is opposite the next page.
There was no vantage point from which I could take a picture which would show the circular shape of the cashel; but it had been built in a perfect circle about sixty feet in diameter. It was on top of a steep hillock, of which it occupied nearly the whole summit. The walls, pierced only by a single narrow entrance, were about six feet high, and four or five feet thick, and the lower stones were very ma.s.sive, as the picture shows. They had been roughly dressed and laid without mortar--the ancient Irish knew nothing of mortar, apparently, for all these old stone circles are uncemented; but they had been so nicely fitted that they were still in place after many centuries, though the clambering ivy was doing its best to pull them down.
Right in the middle of the circle was a great stone slab, flush with the ground. The only use I could imagine for it was as a base for a shrine or altar; but as I went down to the road again, an old man came out of a little house to talk, and he said that some antiquarians from Sligo, who believed the slab covered the entrance to a secret pa.s.sage, had taken it up and found beneath it, not a pa.s.sage, but a beautifully fitted pavement; and that the parish priest, investigating on his own account, had dug up some wood ashes, and so decided that this was the place where the fire was built.
[Ill.u.s.tration: A CASHEL NEAR DROMAHAIR]
[Ill.u.s.tration: ST. PATRICK'S HOLY WELL]
”But no one knows,” my informant rambled on. ”Maybe some day some wise man like yourself will be able to tell us what it was for.”
I remarked that the man who did so would have to be far wiser than I; but he protested that he knew a wise man when he saw one; and I suspect that there is a blarney stone in some of these ruins, which the general public doesn't know about.
I was sorry it was raining, for there was another cashel on a hill to the right, and a great rath a little farther off, and I should have liked to explore both of them; but really the weather was too bad, so I went back reluctantly to the car, which our jarvey had driven close under a clump of trees for shelter, and we were soon jogging contentedly on again.
The valley which slopes down here to Lough Gill seems very fertile, and the little farms have a more prosperous look than is usual in Ireland.
This is partly due to the fact that a number of neat labourers' cottages have been built to replace the usual tumbledown hovels, and still more are going up.
This erection of labourers' cottages, which is going on to-day all over Ireland, seems to me almost as important as land purchase. If there is any cla.s.s of Irish more deserving of pity than another, it is the agricultural labourer. He is worse off than the tenants; he has no land, however poor, to cultivate, except perhaps a tiny patch in front of his door; he has no means of livelihood except the unskilled labour of his hands; if he can manage to earn ten s.h.i.+llings a week he is unusually fortunate. In most cases, his average income throughout the year will be scarcely half that. So naturally the labourers and their families live in the most wretched of all the wretched hovels, in want, discomfort and peril of disease.
It is for the relief of these unfortunate people that the new houses are being built. They are very plain; but they have large windows which can be opened, and stone floors which can be cleaned, and tight slate roofs, and sanitary outbuildings; and each of them has a half acre or so of garden, where vegetables enough to support the family can be raised during the summer; and they rent for from two to three s.h.i.+llings a week--just enough to pay interest on the amount invested in the house, with a small sinking fund for upkeep and repairs. The money needed is borrowed from the government by the county council, and the council has control of the houses, decides where they shall be built, what rent shall be asked for them, and exercises a general supervision over the tenants.
The same thing is being done in the towns, where the insanitary dwellings of the poorer artisans are being replaced by comfortable houses, rented at a very low rate. Nearly a hundred thousand of these cottages have been built within the past ten years, replacing as many insanitary shacks, which, for the most part, have been torn down. The shacks were much more picturesque, but n.o.body regrets them. And the severely utilitarian aspect of the new dwellings will no doubt soon be masked with vines and climbing roses.
It was such cottages as this, then, that gave the valley sloping down to Lough Gill an unusually prosperous appearance, and many more were in course of erection throughout the neighbourhood. We padded past them, along the road above the lake, between beautiful hedgerows, gay with climbing roses; and then we turned away through a luxuriant wood, where the bracken was almost waist-high and the trees were draped with moss and ferns, just as we had seen them along the southern coast. And then we pa.s.sed through a gate and jolted down a very rough and narrow lane; and finally our driver stopped at the edge of a wood, and pointed to a path running away under the trees.
”'Tis the path to St. Patrick's holy well,” he said; and we clambered down, and made our way under the trees and up the hillside, and there before us was the well.
It is a lively spring, which bubbles up from the ground in considerable volume, fills a deep basin, and then sparkles away down into the valley.
A wall has been built around it, with an opening on one side, and steps by which one may descend and drink of the magic water. Just above it on the hillside is a shrine, something like the one we had seen at St.
Senan's well--really an altar, where, I suppose, Ma.s.s may be celebrated; and it was crowded with figurines of the Virgin and small crucifixes and rosaries and sacred pictures, and the bushes all about were tied with rags and strings and other tokens which the pilgrims to the shrine had left behind.