One reads in Murray, which is a very British guide-book, how, on that occasion, the king and his party killed ninety brace of woodcock in a single day; and how, five years later, 587 brace were bagged in five days; but it will be quite impossible for you to understand, unless you are also British, the peculiar veneration with which such coverts as these are regarded by British sportsmen, and the peculiar cast of mind which deems it right and proper that thousands of fertile acres should be maintained as game preserves in a land where most of the people are forced to wring their livelihood from the rocky hillsides.
It is only for such great parties that Lord Ardilaun returns to do the honours; and he hastens away again, as soon as the parties are over. He knows nothing of his tenants; he leaves the collection of his rents to a factor, and the preservation of his coverts to a force of gamekeepers, and any one caught inside the wall may expect to be prosecuted to the limit of the law.
Now I have no quarrel with Lord Ardilaun. The stout he sells is honest stout, and he got possession of this estate by honest purchase, which is more than can be said for most great estates in Ireland. But he presents an example of that absentee landlordism which has been the chief and peculiar curse of this unfortunate country. With landlords who lived on their estates and looked after their properties and got acquainted with their tenants and took some human interest in their welfare, the tenants themselves seldom had any quarrel. It was the landlords who lived in England or on the continent, who entrusted the collection of rents to agents, and whose only interest in their Irish estates was to get the largest possible returns from them—it was these men who kept the country in an uproar of eviction and persecution.
Indeed, I believe that if all Irish landlords were resident landlords, the Irish labourer would be better off without the land purchase act; for there are no more grasping and exacting masters in the world than the small farmers to whom the great estates are passing. The old owners might be despotic, but they were not mean; and where they lived among their people and came to know them, their despotism was usually a benevolent despotism, tempered with mercy. The rule of the small farmer will be a despotism, too, but there will be no mercy about it. Joyce, our driver, voiced all this in a sentence, as we were driving back.
"Land purchase, is it?" he said, puffing his short pipe, and staring out across the hills. "Yes, I have heard much of it; but I'm thinking it will be a cruel time for the poor."
The neighbourhood of Cong is remarkable for its natural curiosities, for the ground to the north toward Lough Mask is honeycombed with caves, made by the water working its way through to Lough Corrib. Geologists explain it learnedly, and doubtless to their own satisfaction, by saying that the peninsula is composed of carboniferous limestone which has been perforated and undermined by the solvent action of the free carbonic acid in the river water; but I prefer to believe, with the residents of the neighbourhood, that it was the work of the Little People.
The lofty tunnel through which the sunken river flows is accessible in several places, and one of these, called the Pigeon Hole, is not far from the village and is worth visiting. It is in the centre of a field, and is a perpendicular hole some sixty feet deep, clothed with ferns and moss and very damp indeed, and the steps by which one goes down are very slippery, so that some caution is necessary; but there at the bottom is a vaulted cavern through which the river sweeps. The girl who has come along, carrying a wisp of straw, lights it and walks away into the depths of the cavern, but the effect is not especially dazzling and the smoke from the straw is most offensive. They order these things better in France—at the Grotto of Han, for instance!
Another curiosity of the peninsula is not a natural but an artificial one—a canal dug during famine times with government money to connect Lough Corrib with Lough Mask. This was expected to be a great blessing to the west of Ireland, extending navigation from Galway clear up across Lough Mask and Lough Conn to Ballina; but, alas, when it was finished, it was found that the canal wouldn't hold water, for the rock through which it was cut was so porous that the water ran through it like a sieve, and left the canal as dry as a bone. So there it remains to this day, and one may walk from end to end of it dryshod and ponder on the marvels of English rule in Ireland!
One thing more at Cong is worth inspecting, and that is the old cross which stands at the intersection of the street with the road to the abbey. It was erected centuries ago to the memory of two abbots, Nicol and Gilbert O'Duffy, whose names may yet be read on its base; and it is a cross that can work miracles. Here is one of them: