Part 39 (2/2)

”I can,” he said; ”but it is a long way from here, and a stiff climb. Do you see that hill yonder?” and he pointed to a lofty peak some miles away. ”It is there you will find the fort, right on the very top.”

”Have you ever been there?” I asked.

”I have not, though I'm thinking I will go some day, for them that have seen it tell me it is a wonderful sight. But 'tis a long walk.”

”Well, I'm going to try for it,” I said, and hitched my camera under my arm. ”How do I start?”

”By that road yonder; and turn to your right at the village. Good luck to you, sir.”

I could see he didn't really believe I would get to the cashel; but I set off happily along the road, between high hedges; and presently I pa.s.sed a village, and turned to the right, as he had told me; and then two barefooted children caught up with me, on their way home from school. They knew the way to the cashel very well, though they had never been there either; and presently they left me and struck off across the fields; and then I came to a place where the road forked, and stopped to ask a man who was wheeling manure from a big stable which way to go. He too was astonished that any one should start off so carelessly on such an expedition; but he directed me up a narrow by-way, which soon began to climb steeply; and then the valley beneath me opened more and more, and finally I saw to my right the summit I was aiming for, and struck boldly toward it along a boggy path.

The path led me to the rear of a thatched cottage, where two men were stacking hay. They a.s.sured me that I was on the right road, and I pushed on again for the summit, past another little house, from which a man suddenly emerged and hailed me.

”Where be you going?” he demanded.

”To the fort,” I said. ”It's up this way, isn't it?”

”It might be.”

”Am I trespa.s.sing?” I asked, for there seemed to be an unfriendly air about him.

”You are so,” he answered.

”I'm sorry,” I stammered; ”if there's another way--”

”There is no other way.”

”Well, then, I'll have to go this way,” I said. ”I'll not do any harm.”

”That's as may be. You must pay three-pence if you wish to pa.s.s.”

I paid the three-pence rather than waste time in argument, which, of course, wouldn't have done any good; and his countenance became distinctly more pleasant when the pennies were in his hand, and he directed me how to go; and I started up again, over springy heather now, along a high wall of stones gathered from the field; and then the ground grew wet and boggy, just as it is on the mountains of Connemara, and I had to make a detour--the man who directed me, probably thought nothing of a little bog! A ploughman in a neighbouring field stopped work to watch me with interest until I pa.s.sed from sight, and two red calves also came close to investigate the stranger; and then I crested the last ridge and saw towering before me the stronghold where Owen, son of Nial the Great, established himself to rule over his province, Tyrone.

For a moment I was fairly startled at the huge apparition, grey and solitary and impressive, for I had expected no such monster edifice--a cyclopean circle of stone, looking like the handiwork of some race of giants, three hundred feet around and eighteen feet high, with a wall fourteen feet in thickness!

The outer face of the wall is inclined slightly inwards, and is very smooth and regular. It is made of flat, hammer-dressed stones of various sizes, carefully fitted together, but uncemented, as with all these old forts. The stones are for the most part quite small, very different from the great blocks used in the other cashels I had seen. There is a single entrance, a doorway some five feet high by two wide, slightly inclined inward toward the top, and looking very tiny indeed in that great stretch of wall; and then my heart stood still with dismay, for there was an iron gate across the entrance, and I thought for a moment that it was locked. With a sigh of relief I found that the padlock which held it was not snapped shut, and I opened it and entered.

It was as though I had stepped into some old Roman amphitheatre, for the terraces which run around it from top to bottom have the appearance of tiers of seats. They mount one above the other to the narrow platform at the top, which is guarded by a low parapet. Two flights of steps run up the slope, but an active man would have no need of them. On either side of the entrance door a gallery runs away in the thickness of the wall, opening some distance away on the interior, and designed, I suppose, to enable an extra force to defend the entrance.

Of the castle which once stood within that stone circle not a trace remains, and the circle itself, as it stands to-day, is largely a restoration, for Murtagh O'Brien captured it in 1101 and did his best to destroy it, and the storms of the centuries that followed beat it down stone by stone. But these fragments have all been gathered up and put back into place, so that the great fort stands to-day much as it did in the days of its glory, except that the outworks of earth and stone which formed the first lines of defence, have disappeared. The cashel was to this great fortification what the donjon tower was to the later Norman castle--the ultimate place of refuge for the garrison.

”Grainan” means a royal seat, and ”Aileach,” so say the Four Masters of Donegal, was a Scotch princess, ”modest and blooming,” who lost her heart to Owen of the Hy-Nial, and followed him back to Erin. After the division of the north of Ireland with his brother Connell, he set up his palace here--Connell's you will remember was at Donegal--and so this became the royal seat of the rulers of Tyrone. Hither came St. Patrick to baptise Owen and his family; hither came St. Columba before his exile to Iona; hither captive Danes were dragged in triumph. But at last Murtagh O'Brien, King of Munster, led a great raid to the north, and defeated the army of Tyrone and captured the mighty fortress, and made each of his soldiers carry away a stone of it in token of his triumph.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE WALLS OF DERRY]

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