I shall not soon forget that walk, at first through the busy streets of the town, past solid, well-built houses of brick, with bright shops on the lower floor and living-rooms above; then into the poorer and quainter quarter, where the houses are all one-storied, built of rubble, roofed with straw, and, as we could see through the open doors, stuffed with trash, as all these little Irish houses seem to be; and finally out along the country road, between fragrant hedges, occasionally passing a pretty villa, set in the midst of handsome grounds—and then we came to a place where the road branched, and we stopped.
Our guide-book gave no definite directions as to how to get to Carrowmore. "On Carrowmore," it says, with magnificent vagueness, "within three miles south-west of Sligo, is a large and most interesting series of megalithic remains"; nor does it tell how far the remains are apart, or how to find them. If it had been Baedeker, now, we would not have stood there hesitant at the cross-roads, because he would not only have told us which way to turn, but would have provided a diagram, and led us step by step from one cromlech to the other. There is no Baedeker for Ireland, which is a pity, for I have never yet found a guide to equal that painstaking German.
There was no one to ask, so we took the road which led toward Knocknarea; but after we had gone some distance, a telegraph-boy came by on his wheel, and told us that we should have taken the other road; so we walked back to the branch and turned up it. The road mounted steadily, and after about a mile of up-hill work, we came to a cluster of thatched houses, and I went up to one of them to ask the way of a woman who was leaning over her half-door.
I think I have already said somewhere that Irish directions are the vaguest in the world—perhaps this is the reason Murray is so vague, since it is written by an Irishman!—and the conversation on this occasion ran something like this:
"Good morning," I began. "It is a fine day, isn't it?"
"It is so, glory be to God."
"Can you tell me how to get to the cromlechs?"
"The cromlechs? What might that be?"
"The big stone monuments that are back here in the fields somewhere."
"Ah—so it is the big stones you would be after?"