The Charm of Ireland

by Burton Egbert Stevenson

At one end of the room was an open fireplace in which a few blocks of turf smoked and flared, with that pungent odour which we had already come to like, but which, at such close quarters, was a little over-powering. A black and battered pot hung on a crane above the fire, and some sort of mess was bubbling in it—potatoes I suppose. There was a rude table, and two or three chairs, and all sorts of rags and debris hung against the walls and piled in the corners, and a few dishes in a rough home-made dresser, and an old brush-broom, and some boxes and a lot of other indescribable trash. Three or four bedraggled chickens were wandering in and out, and I glanced around for the pig. But there was no pig—this family was far too poor to own one.

It seemed impossible that a human being could live for any length of time in a place so bare of comfort, and I looked at the old woman, who had sat down across from us, and wondered how she managed to survive. I suspect she was not half so old as her wrinkled face and sunken eyes and shrivelled hands indicated. She lived there with her husband, she said, and had for many years. He was a labourer, and, in good times, could earn ten shillings a week; but most of the time it was impossible to find any work at all. She had no relatives in America to turn to, and neither she nor her husband was old enough to get a pension, so that it was a hard struggle to keep out of the workhouse. But they had kept out thus far, glory be to God, though the struggle was growing harder every year, for they were getting older and their rheumatism was getting worse, and neither of them could work as they once could.

All this was said quite simply, in a manner not complaining, but resigned, as if accepting the inevitable. Her philosophy of life seemed to be that, since Fate had chosen to set herself and her husband in the midst of circumstances so hard, there was nothing to do but struggle on as long as possible, with the certainty of coming to the workhouse in the end. No doubt they would be far more comfortable in the workhouse than they had ever been outside of it, and yet they had that horror of it which is common to all Irish men and women. The horror, I think, is not so much at the abstract idea of receiving charity as at the public stigma which the workhouse gives. The Irish have been eager enough to draw their old age pensions, and many of them, who shrink from the workhouse as from a foul disgrace, do not hesitate to beg a few pennies from the passing stranger.

The old woman at Inchigeelagh, however, did not beg, nor intimate in any way that she desired or expected money, but she did not refuse the coin I slipped into her hand, after I had taken the picture of her and of her cottage, which you will find opposite this page. Perhaps she would have liked to do so, but the little coin represented a measure of potatoes or of turnips, and so a little less hunger, a little more strength. How many of us, I wonder, would be too proud to beg if we could find no work to do, and our backs were bare and our stomachs empty?

The tooting of the horn warned us that our bus was ready to go on again, and we were soon skirting the shore of Lough Allua, with picturesque mountains closing in ahead. And then our driver crossed the bridge over the Lee, and made a wrong turning, and didn't know it until somebody shouted at him and set him right; and this small misadventure seemed completely to wreck his self-control, so that, when he got back to the main road, he rushed along in a manner more terrifying than ever. The fearful racket heralded our approach, else there must have been more than one bad accident; and I can yet see wild-eyed men leaping from their seats and springing frantically to their horses' heads, while the white-faced women seated in the carts peered out at us under their shawls as we brushed past, and no doubt sent a malediction after us. Geese, chickens and pigs scurried wildly in every direction, and that we did not leave the road strewn with their dead bodies was little less than a miracle. The road ran between high hedges, so that we could see only a little way ahead, and we got to watching the curves with a sort of fascination, for it seemed certain that we must run into something at the next one.

We had been mounting gradually all this time, often up gradients so steep that they kept the driver busy with his gears, and the view had gradually widened and grown in impressiveness. Then we turned off a narrow road at the right, and I thought for a moment our driver had gone wrong again.

"We're going to Gougane Barra," he explained, seeing my look, for I sat on the seat beside him, and in a few minutes we were skirting a narrow lough, hemmed in, on the north, by a range of precipitous mountains, with gullied sides patched with grey granite and dark heather, as bare and desolate as a mountain could be.

There is an inn by the lake shore, and the bus stopped in front of it. The driver showed us with a gesture the little island containing the shrine of St. Fin Barre, and then hastened away into the inn. We four started for the island, and presently we heard heavy steps behind us, and an animated scarecrow armed with a big stick came running up and shouted something in an incomprehensible tongue, and waved the stick above his head, and proceeded to lead the way. He was evidently the guide, so we followed him along the border of the lake, and across the narrow strip of land which now connects the island with the shore, and all the time our guide was talking in the most earnest way, but not a word could any of us understand. It sounded remotely like English, and he evidently understood English, for when we asked him to repeat some particularly emphatic bit, he would do so with added emphasis, but quite in vain. I shall never forget how earnestly he would look in our faces, raising his voice as though we were deaf, and pointing with his stick, and gesturing with his other hand, in the effort to make us understand.

We persuaded him to go and sit down, after awhile, and then we had a chance really to look about us. There is something indescribably savage and threatening about that dark sheet of water, shadowed by gloomy cliffs, bare of vegetation, and torn into deep gullies by the cataracts which leap down them. Through the hills to the east, the water from the lake has carved itself a narrow outlet, and the stream which rushes away through this gorge is the beginning of the River Lee. No place so grand and desolate would be without its legend, and this is Gougane Barra's: