Half a mile along this lane brought us to another gate; and there our driver stopped, and showed us the castle just ahead, and said that was all the farther he could go, and that we would have to walk the rest of the way. There was a certain constraint in his manner which I did not understand till afterwards.
We went on through the gate, and across what had once been the demesne, but had been swept bare of trees, and was now divided between a meadow and a stable-yard, and in a few minutes we stood before the castle which was the scene of a romance very dear to Irish hearts. It is not really a castle, but merely a tall and ugly house, with three bays and a low terrace in front, and it is not very old, since it dates only from 1739, when it was built as the home of the Ffolliotts, a powerful English family into whose hands this whole neighbourhood had fallen. The Ffolliotts, of course, were Protestants, and Willy Reilly was a Catholic; but Helen Ffolliott was so ill-advised as to fall in love with him, and one night packed up her jewels and eloped. A hue and cry was raised after them, and they were soon captured, and Reilly was thrown into Sligo jail, and it looked for a while as though he might be "stretched," for all this happened about 1745, when the penal laws against Catholics were most severe. But the fair Helen came to the rescue, and swore at the trial that she had been the leader in the affair, not Reilly, and so he escaped with a sentence of banishment. What happened thereafter history does not state; but Will Carleton, who wove a poor romance about the affair, manages to reunite the lovers in the end.
It is not to be wondered at that Reilly became a popular hero. Here was a young and handsome Catholic, who, in the most daring way, had captured the heart of a great Protestant heiress, the daughter of a persecutor of Catholics, and, in addition, a girl so lovely that she was the toast of the whole country-side. The ballad which celebrated the affair had an immense vogue. It is a real ballad, rough and halting, but rudely eloquent. You remember how it starts:
"Oh! rise up, Willy Reilly, and come alongst with me,
I mean for to go with you and leave this countrie,
To leave my father's dwelling, his houses and fine lands;"
And away goes Willy Reilly and his dear Colleen Bawn.
In the ballad, the family is called Folliard, which is the way the name is still pronounced in the neighbourhood; but the old mansion is now occupied by a tenant. And pretty soon we understood our jarvey's uneasiness, for first a man came to the front door and looked at us, and then went quickly in again; and then an old woman opened the side door, and glared at us, and when we asked if we might have a glimpse of the interior, slammed the door in our faces. I must give her credit, however, for restraining a particularly savage-looking dog eager to be at us. But it was evident we weren't wanted there, for even the turkey gobbler resented our visit, and strutted fiercely about us, trying to scare us out. So we went back to the car, and our jarvey breathed a sigh of relief when he saw us.
"Sure, I didn't know whether you'd come back alive or not," he said. "The master is away from home the day, and the woman that does work for him wouldn't be above settin' the dog on you. But it's all right, glory be to God," and he climbed up to his box and drove us back to Ballyshannon.
We left our luggage at the station of the Donegal narrow-gauge railway, and then walked down into the town. We found it a quaint place, with the friendliest of people; and we were fortunate in discovering a clean inn on the main street, where we had the nicest of lunches, after which we set off to see the abbey.
The road to the abbey lies through a deep, romantic dell, at the bottom of which we found a grain mill working, its great wheel turned by the brook which rushes through the glen; and a little farther on were four or five other mills, all fallen to decay, their wheels mere skeletons, and their machinery red with rust. Just beyond, a little higher up the hill, stands all that is left of the abbey, a few shattered fragments of the old walls. Yet the abbey was, in its day, a great foundation, patronised by the mighty Prince of Tyrconnell, and taking its name of Assaroe from the falls in the river—Eas Aedha Ruaidh, the Waterfall of Red Hugh, who was High King of Erin about three centuries before Christ, and who was swept over the falls and drowned while trying to cross the ford above them. A boy who played about the ruins described them, when he grew to manhood, in a musical stanza:
Grey, grey is Abbey Assaroe, by Ballyshanny town,
It has neither door nor window, the walls are broken down;
The carven stones lie scattered in briars and nettle-bed;
The only feet are those that come at burial of the dead.
A little rocky rivulet runs murmuring to the tide,
Singing a song of ancient days, in sorrow, not in pride;
The bore-tree and the lightsome ash across the portal grow,
And heaven itself is now the roof of Abbey Assaroe.
We had heard certain legends of underground passages, which could still be explored, and we asked an old man who was cutting grass in the graveyard if he knew anything about them, and he said that he did not. We remarked that it was a hard task cutting the grass around the gravestones; and he said it was so, and would not be worth doing but that the grass was given to him for the cutting; but the guardians were unreasonable men who wanted it cut long before it was ready—it ought really to stand a week longer, now, but them ones would not wait!