Peeps at Many Lands: Ireland

by Katharine Tynan

I think of the lavish Irish hedges and of the strip of grass white with daisies which ran either side of the footpath. There was always a clear stream singing along the ditch. It had come down from the mountains, and was amber-brown in colour, and clear as glass; it ran over pebbles that were pure gold and silver and precious stones, now and again getting dammed around a boulder, making a leap to escape, and coming around the boulder with a swirl and a few specks of foam floating upon it. Ireland of the Streams is one of the old names for Ireland, and it is justified; for not only are there lordly rivers like the Shannon and the Blackwater, to mention but two of them, but there are innumerable little streams everywhere, undefiled—at least, as I know them—by factories. You can always kneel down of a summer’s day by one, fill your two hands full and drink your fill; and that mountain water is better than any wine. You may track it, if you will, up to the mountains, where you will find it welling out, perhaps, through the fronds of a hartstongue fern, the first tiny gush of it; and you will find it widening out and almost hidden by a million flowers and plants that like to stand with their feet in water. Or you will see it, cool and deep, with golden shadows sleeping in it, slipping round little boulders and clattering over stones, in a tremendous hurry to escape from these sweet places to the noisome city, where it will lose itself in the sewer water before it finds its way to the sea.

There is no such order in an Irish as in an English landscape: none of the rich, ordered garden air which in England so delights Americans and colonials. The Irish landscape is always somewhat forlorn, wild and soft, with an impalpable melancholy upon it—this even in the fat pasture-lands of Dublin County. How much more so when the bogs spread their beautiful brown desolation over miles of country, or in the wild places where man asks for bread and Nature gives him a stone! At its most prosperous the country is always a little wild, a little mournful, a barefooted colleen with cloudy hair and shy eyes sometimes tearful, and no conventional beauty—only something that takes the heart by storm and holds it fast.

Irish skies weep a deal. That accounts, of course, for the great vegetation, the intense greenness. If I did not know the Irish green I should be unable to realize the mantle of grass-green silk which so often the old ballad-makers gave their knights and ladies. Knowing the Irish grass, I see an intenser green than if I did not know it. Where there are not rocks and stones and mountains, where there is cultivation in Ireland, there is leafage and grass of great luxuriousness. Of a wet summer in Ireland you could scarcely walk through the grass; it might meet above a child’s head. Contrariwise, the flora of Ireland, as I know it, is much less various and luxuriant than that of England. In a childhood and youth spent in the Irish country—it was round about Dublin—I recall only the simpler and commoner wild-flowers. On a chalk cliff at Dover, when May spread a carpet of flowers, I have seen a greater variety of wild-flowers than I knew in a lifetime in Ireland—most of them unknown to me by name.

BLARNEY CASTLE.

Nor do I think the birds are so many as in England, perhaps because so much of Ireland is stripped of its woods; perhaps because Ireland has been slower to protect the birds than England; perhaps, also, because of the scantier population, which leaves the birds to suffer hunger in the winter. There are no nightingales in Ireland, but I do not think we have missed them, having the thrush and the blackbird, which seem to me to sing with a richer sweetness in Ireland than in England; but that may be because the Irish-born person is prone to exaggerate the sweetness he has lost. But the most characteristic note of the Irish summer is the corn-crake’s. Somehow the Irish corn-crake has a bigger note and is much more in evidence than his English brother. All the nights of the early summer in Ireland he saws away with his rasping note, till the hay is cut, when he disappears. I suppose one hears him as much in the day-time, but one does not notice him. He is the harsh Irish nightingale. Poor fellow! he is often immolated before the mowing-machine; and you shall see him flying with his long-legged wife and children—or rather scurrying—to the nearest hedgerow, where there is always a plentiful supply of grass to cover him till he can make up his mind to go elsewhere. It is a saying in Ireland that you never see a corn-crake after the meadows are cut. A learned doctor has assured me that they migrate to Egypt for the good of their voices.

For the rest, in the Irish country there are villages of an incredible poverty. The Irish village mars a landscape, whereas so often an English one enhances its beauty. There are farmhouses and isolated cottages. The farmhouses are seldom even pretty. Irish house architecture is terribly ugly, as a rule, except for the few eighteenth-century houses which derive from the English. The Irish farmhouse is generally a two-story building, slated and whitewashed. It is too narrow for its height, although the height may be no great thing. A mean hall-door in the middle, with a mean window to either side, three mean windows above—that is the Irish farmer’s idea of house-building. I remember an Irishman of genius objecting to Morland that his cottages were impossible; there was never the like out of Arcadia. As a matter of fact, the cottages were such as are the commonplaces of English villages. But no good Irishman will concede to England a beauty, natural or otherwise, which Ireland does not possess. The country shows many ruins—ruined houses, the houses of the Irish gentry; ruined mills; ruined churches and castles; and behind grey stone walls, unthought of, uncared for, old disused graveyards filled with prairie grass to the height of the crumbling walls.