The Charm of Ireland

by Burton Egbert Stevenson

So next morning we sat down to our breakfast of tea and bacon and eggs with a good appetite. The cloth was not as clean as it might have been, but the eggs were fresh and the bacon sweet, and the bread and butter were delicious—as they are all over Ireland—and the tea tasted better than I had ever imagined tea could taste, and outside the sun was shining brightly, but no brighter than the face of the maid who waited on us, and there was a pleasant stir of movement up and down the street, for it was Saturday and market-day, so that it was quite impossible to be otherwise than happy and content. And presently the car I had arranged for the night before drove up, and we were off on the four-mile drive to the ruins of Holy Cross Abbey.

We had to go slowly, at first, for the street was crowded with people come to market, and with the wares exposed for sale. There were little carts heaped high with brown turf, which might be bought for two or three shillings a load, though every load represented as many days' hard work; there were red calves in little pens, and chickens in crates, and eggs and butter in baskets; and there were a lot of pedlars offering all sorts of dry-goods and hardware and odds and ends to the country-people who stood stolidly around, apparently rather sorry they had come. The faces were typically Irish—the men with short noses and shaved lips and little fuzzy side-whiskers, and the women with cheeks almost startlingly ruddy; but there wasn't a trace of those rollicking spirits which the Irish in books and on the stage seldom fail to display.

Once clear of the crowd, we rolled out of the town, over a bridge above the railway, and along a pleasant road, past little thatched cottages overflowing with children; meeting, from time to time, a family driving to town, all crowded together on a little cart behind a shaggy donkey, the men with their feet hanging down, the women scrooched up under their shawls, with their knees as high as their chins. They all stared at us curiously; but our driver passed them by with disdain, as not worth his notice, and from a word or two he let fall, it was evident that he considered them beneath him.

The road was rather higher than the surrounding country, and we could see across it, north and south, for many miles; then it descended to a winding stream, the Suir, flowing gently between rushy banks, and presently we saw ahead a great pile of crumbling buildings—and then we were at Holy Cross, one of the most exquisite and interesting of the hundreds of ruins which cover Ireland.

That word "hundreds" is no exaggeration. In a single day's journey, one will see scores; and as one goes on thus, day after day, one begins to realise what a populous and wealthy country Ireland was eight hundred years ago, how crowded with castles and monasteries; and I think the deepest impression the traveller bears away with him is the memory of these battered and deserted remnants of former grandeur. And yet it is not quite just to blame England for them, as most of the Irish do. It was the English, of course, who broke up the monasteries and destroyed many of the castles; but the march of the centuries would probably have wrought much the same ruin in the end; for men no longer live in castles, finding homes far pleasanter; and it is not now to monks they go for learning, nor is the right of sanctuary needed as it was in the time when might made right, and a poor man's only hope of safety lay in getting to some altar ahead of his pursuers. Yet one cannot tread these beautiful places without a certain sadness and regret—regret for the vanished pomp and ceremony, the cowled processions and torch-lit feasts, the shuffle of feet and the songs of minstrels—in a word, for the old order, so impressive, so picturesque—and so cruel!

Holy Cross was a great place in those days, for, as its name indicates, it held as its most precious relic a fragment of the True Cross, given by the Pope, in 1110, to Donough O'Brien, grandson of Brian Boru, and thousands of pilgrims came to pray before it. The relic had many strange vicissitudes, in the centuries that followed, but it was not lost, as was the one which the Cross of Cong enshrined, and it is preserved to-day in the Ursuline convent at Blackrock. Holy Cross had better luck than most, for, at the dissolution in 1563, it was granted to the Earl of Ormonde, a friend who cherished it. But the end came with the passing of the Stuarts, and now it is deserted save for the old woman who acts as caretaker, and who lives in a little ivy-covered house built against the wall of the great church.

She opened the iron gate which bars access to the ruins, and let us wander about them at will, for which we were grateful. The plan of the place is that common to almost all monastic establishments: a cruciform church, with the altar at the east end, as nearest Jerusalem, the arms of the cross, or transepts, stretching north and south, and the body of the cross, or nave, extending to the west, where the main entrance was; a door from the nave opened to the south into a court around which were the cloisters and the domestic buildings—the refectory, the chapter-house and the dormitories; and still beyond these were the granaries and storehouses and guest-houses and various out-buildings. Also, like most others, it stands on the bank of a river, for the monks were fond of fishing,—and had no mind to go hungry on Friday!

The roof of the church has fallen in, but it is otherwise well-preserved, even to the window-tracery; and the square tower above the crossing is apparently as firm as ever. The whole place abounds in beautiful detail, proof of the loving workmanship that was lavished on it; but its bright particular gem is a little sanctum in the north transept, surrounded by delicate twisted pillars and covered by a roof beautifully groined. Whether this was the sanctuary of the relic, or the place where the monks were laid from death to burial, or the tomb of some saintly Abbot, no one knows; but there it is, a living testimony to the beauty of Irish artistry.

The cloister is now a grass-grown court, and only a few arches remain of the colonnade which once surrounded it; but the square of domestic buildings about it is better preserved than one will find almost anywhere else, and deserves careful exploration.