The Charm of Ireland

by Burton Egbert Stevenson

We went on together, after that, and I asked him what the people of the neighbourhood thought about Home Rule.

"The truth is, sir," he answered, "that we don't know what to think, what with this man telling us one thing and that man another; but most of the poor people about here would be glad to see it, for they can't be worse off than they are, and a change might better them. Drilling and arming? Ah, there's none of that around here; there's no army of Ulster in these parts. That's just talk."

He left me at the crossroads, for he had still a letter or two to deliver farther down the road, and I went on by myself toward the town. There were more whitewashers out, and they were splashing the lime about in the most reckless fashion, besprinkling the hedges and the shrubbery and even the road, somewhat to the danger of the passers-by; and at the first houses of the town I met Betty. She had been talking to the caretaker of the churchyard about the true shamrock; and he said that it did not grow wild thereabouts, but that he had some in a pot at home and would be glad to bring her a spray; and he told her of a ruined church and an old Celtic cross out along the road above the cliffs, very near, he said—not over eight minutes' walk at the most.

So we determined to take a look at it; but first we walked about the town a little, and found it quite an ordinary town, except for a great square tower at the intersection of the principal streets—a tower erected, so the tablet on it says, "as a place of confinement for rioters and idlers." I suppose the town has a modern jail now—perhaps even with panoptic galleries! At any rate, the tower is no longer used. I took a picture of it, and if you will look at the picture closely, you will see a girl drawing water from the town pump just below the tower.

We started off finally for the ruins, first to the cliffs along the sea, and then on along the path which runs at their very edge. The view was very lovely, and we didn't notice how the time was flying; but I looked at my watch presently and found that we had been walking twenty minutes, with no ruins in sight. We pushed on ten minutes longer, and had about given them up, when some children directed us which way to go, and we finally found the few remaining fragments of Layd Church, so overgrown with ivy and embowered in trees that they were scarcely recognisable as ruins at all. The cross proved to be a very modern one; and the graveyard is sadly neglected, with the grass knee-deep among the tombs, which have fallen into sorry disarray. Most of them cover some long-dead MacDonnell—they were all MacDonnells, in the old days, who lived in the Glens of Antrim.

The "eight minute walk" had taken more than half an hour, and we had need to hasten if we were to get back to the hotel in time for lunch, for the car which was to take us to Larne was to start at two; but we made it, and when the car drove up, we found it was a long outside-car with room for five people on each side. We chose the forward end of the side next the sea; and then the car proceeded to another hotel in the town, where five or six more people were waiting; and the two women who were condemned to the landward side complained bitterly. They were making the trip, they said, just to see the sea, and here they would be compelled to sit the whole way facing the blank cliff.

"Sure, there's nothing I can do, miss," said the jarvey, who had listened sympathetically; "I can't make the car any longer, now can I? Maybe you might be glancin' over your shoulder from time to time; anyway I'm thinkin' you'll be seein' enough of the sea before you're home again."

And with that they had to be consoled.

The road runs inland for about a mile beyond Cushendall, and then turns down close to the shore of Red Bay, a vast amphitheatre of red sandstone cliffs, in whose face the road is cut. At the deepest point of the circle, where the Vale of Glenariff opens up into the mountains, is clustered a little village of white houses; and then the road runs on round the base of towering precipices; and suddenly the red sandstone changes to chalk, and the water washing against the shore, which has been a lovely green, turns milky white, with outstanding pinnacles of chalk, worn to fantastic shapes, keeping guard above it.