So the statues vanished, together with the grottoes and the terraces; but the sweet silent brook still ripples through the grounds, and its banks are covered with daisies and buttercups, and guarded by giant beeches. Very lovely it is, so that one loiters to watch the dancing water, even with Blarney Castle close at hand.
Approached thus, the massive donjon tower, set on a cliff and looming a hundred and twenty feet into the air, is most impressive. To the left is a lower and more ornamental fragment of the old castle, which, in its day, was the strongest in all Munster. Cormac McCarthy built it in the fifteenth century as a defence against the English, and it was held by the Irish until Cromwell's army besieged and captured it. Around the top of the tower is a series of machicolations, or openings between supporting corbels, through which the besieged, in the old days, could drop stones and pour molten lead and red-hot ashes and such-like things down upon the assailants, and it is in the sill of one of these openings that the famous Blarney stone is fixed.
Legend has it that, once upon a time, in the spring of the year when the waters were running high, Cormac McCarthy was returning home through the blackness of the night, and when he put his horse at the last ford, he thought for a moment he would be swept away, so swift and deep was the current. But his horse managed to keep its feet, and just as it was scrambling out upon the farther bank, McCarthy heard a scream from the darkness behind him, and then a woman's voice crying for help. So he dashed back into the stream, and after a fearful struggle, dragged the woman to safety.
In the dim light, McCarthy could see only that she was old and withered; but her eyes gleamed like a cat's when she looked at him; and she called down blessings upon him for his courage, and bade him, when he got home, go out upon the battlement and kiss a certain stone, whose location she described to him. Thereupon she vanished, and so McCarthy knew it was a witch he had rescued. Next morning, he went out upon the battlement and found the stone and kissed it, and thereafter was endowed with an eloquence so sweet and persuasive that no man or woman could resist it.
Such is the legend, and it may have had its origin in the soft, delutherin speeches with which Dermot McCarthy put off the English, when they called upon him to surrender his castle. Certain it is that it was fixed finally and firmly in the popular mind by the stanza which Father Prout added to Milliken's song:
There is a stone there, that whoever kisses
Oh! he never misses to grow eloquent.
'Tis he may clamber to a lady's chamber,
Or become a member of Parliament.
A clever spouter he'll sure turn out, or
An out and outer, to be let alone;
Don't hope to hinder him, or to bewilder him,
Sure he's a pilgrim from the Blarney Stone.
And ever since then, troops of pilgrims have thronged to Blarney to kiss the stone.
The top of the tower is reached by a narrow staircase which goes round and round in the thickness of the wall, with narrow loopholes of windows here and there looking out upon the beautiful country, and a door at every level giving access to the great, square interior. The floors have all fallen in and there is only the blue sky for roof, but the graceful old fireplaces still remain and some traces of ornamentation, and the ancient walls, eighteen feet thick in places, and with mortar as hard as the rock, are wonderful to see; and finally you come out upon the battlemented parapet, with miles and miles of Ireland at your feet.
But it wasn't to gaze at the view we had come to Blarney Castle, it was to kiss the stone, and we went at once to look for it. It was easy enough to find, for, on top of the battlement above it, a row of tall iron spikes has been set, and the stone itself is tied into the wall by iron braces, for one of Cromwell's cannon-balls almost dislodged it, and it is worn and polished by the application of thousands of lips. But to kiss it—well, that is another story!
For the sill of which the stone forms a part is some two feet lower than the level of the walk around the parapet, and, to get to it, there is a horrid open space some three feet wide to span, and below that open space is a sheer drop of a hundred and twenty feet to the ground below. When one looks down through it, all that one can see are the waving tree-tops far, far beneath. There is just one way to accomplish the feat, and that is to lie down on your back, while somebody grasps your ankles, and then permit yourself to be shoved backward and downward across the abyss until your mouth is underneath the sill.