[TWO THINGS THAT WON’T GO GREY]
I met a woman up Glengesh going in the direction of the danger-post. She seemed an old woman by her look, but she more than beat me at the walking. When we got to the top of the hill I complimented her on her powers. “’Deed,” says she, with a deprecating little laugh, “and I’m getting old now. I’m fair enough yet at the walking, but I’m going grey—going fast. A year ago my hair was as black as that stack there”—pointing to a turf-stack out in the bog—“but now it’s on the turn. And I tell you there’s only two things in the world that won’t go grey some time—and that’s salt and iron.”
[RUNDAL]
I see a green island. It is hardly an island now, for the tide is out, and one might walk across to it by the neck of yellow-grey sand that connects it with the mainland. It is held in rundal by a score of tenants living in the mountains in-by. Little patches of oats, potatoes, turnips, and “cow’s grass” diversify its otherwise barren surface. There are no mearings, but each man’s patch is marked by a cairn of loose stones, thrown aside in the process of reclamation. The stones, I see, are used also as seaweed beds. They are spitted in the sand about, like a cheval de frise, and in the course of time the seaweed carried in by successive tides gathers on them, and is used by the tenants for manure.
[PÚCA-PILES]
“What are these?” I asked an old woman in the fields this morning, pointing to a cluster of what we in the north-east corner call paddock-stools, and sometimes fairy-stools. “Well,” said she, “they’re not mushrooms, anyway. They’re what you call Púca-piles. They say the Púca lays them!”
[THE ROSSES]
Bog and sky: a boulder-strewn waste, with salt lochs and freshwater lochs innumerable, and a trail running up to a huddle of white clouds.
BOG AND SKY.