CHAPTER XX
JOYCE'S COUNTRY
Twenty-five miles away to the eastward from Leenane, across a wild stretch of hill and bog known as Joyce's Country, are the ruins of the old abbey of Cong, and thither we set out, next morning, behind a little black mare who would need all her staying powers for the trip that day, and on a car driven, as was fitting, by a man named Joyce—as perhaps half the men are who live in this neighbourhood. "Jyce" is the local pronunciation; and the Joyces are one of the handsomest and fiercest breeds of mountaineers to be met with anywhere—fit companions for those of Kentucky and Tennessee.
The original Joyces were Welshmen, so it is said, who came to Ireland about 1300, and, with the permission of the all-powerful O'Flaherties, settled in this country between Lough Mask and the sea. Why they should have chosen so inhospitable a region I don't know—perhaps because no one else wanted it. Certainly the O'Flaherties didn't; for they preferred to live along the sea, where fish was plentiful. But the Joyces were an agricultural people; they turned as much of the hillside as they could into arable land, cultivated with the spade to this day and reaped with the hook. On the rest of it, they grazed their flocks, and they still graze them there.
It was a beautiful, warm day, with fleecy clouds in the sky and a blue haze about the hills, and everybody was out enjoying the sunshine as we drove through the village and turned up along the shoulder of the Devil's Mother Mountain. The fine weather had brought the men and women out to work in the potato fields—such of the men, that is, as hadn't yet left for England or Scotland to spend the summer in the fields there. Usually there were five or six women to one man, each of them armed with a spade or a fork, and it was pitiful to see the poor little patches in which they were working. Almost always they were on a steep hillside—there isn't much else but hillside hereabouts which can be cultivated, for even where there happens to be a little level land in the valley, it is almost always wet bog in which nothing can be grown. The patches were very, very small, and each of them was surrounded by a high wall built of the stones which had been dug from the ground; and at the bottom of every slope was a pile of surplus stones which had been rolled there out of the way.
The potatoes were planted in drills about two feet wide, and then between the drills a deep trench was dug to carry off the water, for even on the hillsides the ground is very wet; and these trenches must be kept clear of weeds so that the water will run off freely, and of course the drills must be kept clear of weeds too; and the ground is so poor that manure must be freely used, and the only way to get it where it is needed is to place it there by hand. And almost every time the spade is driven into the ground, it brings up more stones which must be carried away, until it sometimes becomes quite a problem what to do with them.
As many as possible are built into the fences; and the dominant feature of every Connemara landscape is the zig-zag tapestry of stone walls which covers it. They run in every direction—up the sides of hills so steep that it seems a miracle they don't slide off, around fields so small that the ground can't be seen above the fence, along the tops of high ridges where they form grotesque patterns against the sky which shines through every chink, in places where there seems to be no need whatever for a wall and yet to which the stones have been carried with prodigious labour.
But do not suppose that, even with all this toil, the fields are cleared of stones. Everywhere there are outcroppings of solid rock which the tiller of the field has been unable to dislodge, and around which he must sow and reap. In consequence, there are practically no fields in which it would be possible to drive a plow, and few indeed in which it is possible to swing a scythe. The fields themselves are so small that one wonders anybody should trouble to cultivate them at all. I have seen scores and scores not more than fifty feet square, each surrounded with its high wall; I have seen many less than that, with just space enough for a two-roomed hovel, where the family must take the stock into the house with them, because there is no place for an out-building, and where the manure must be heaped against the wall, because to throw it a foot away would be to put it on land belonging to some one else. The land which the family itself cultivated might lie in twenty different places, miles away.