Kildavnet Castle on Achill Sound was one of the numerous retreats of Grace O’Malley. Its square keep still stands. The arm of the sea on which it was built was so deep that vessels rode at low water under the very walls of the castle. “Here,” tradition states, “the skull of Grace O’Malley was formerly preserved, and valued as a precious relic. One night, however,—so the legend goes,—the bones of the famous sea-queen were stolen from their resting-place, and conveyed, with those of thousands of her descendants, into Scotland, to be ground into fertilizer. The theft was of course perpetrated in secret, and in the night-time. If the crew had been seized by the peasantry, with their singular cargo, not a man of them would have lived to tell the tale, for the Irish regard with peculiar horror any desecration of the graveyard.”
According to a recent census, the population of Achill and Achill-beg, the baby islet off the southern limb of its parent, has decreased nearly ten per cent. in the space of ten years; from which fact it may be inferred that the popularity of this salubrious spot—for it ranks high among the world’s great natural sanatoria—is not increasing with the rapidity that might be expected.
The two villages of the larger island, Keel and Dooagh, seem populous enough, as is also the Protestant community of Dugort. The island, in general, is exceedingly unproductive, though the sea yields a wonderful harvest to the fisher folk.
There is but a narrow margin between the well-being and distress of the inhabitants, but signs are not wanting that whatever, in exceptional periods, may have been their condition, at present they are relatively better off than many of their compatriots in the west of Ireland. Considerable numbers annually migrate to the north of England and the south of Scotland for the harvest, just as, with the same motive, the “East-Enders” of London throng to the hop-fields of Kent, and the willing and industrious Bretons cross the Channel, in the autumn, to the hay-fields of England’s “home counties.”
Off the western Irish coast, from Connemara and Mayo, there are yet to be found remote islands with an exceedingly primitive civilization. Achill owes much of its interest to the fact that it exhibits a similar state of things, in many points little altered by contact with the mainland. The people, the cabins they inhabit, and their manner of life show very little change, in spite of the introduction of a good many articles of manufacture which a generation or two ago were quite unheard of. One thing which cannot fail to be noticed will be the queer little “public houses.” The tenement itself, however aboriginal, is sure to contain an assortment of strong drinks as varied as the average West End bar. The quality may be dubious, but there will be no question as to the strength and specific gravity of the spirit, particularly the eau-de-vie, or the “mountain dew.”
Of the charms of Dugort, the “Settlement,” and Dugort proper, the poet-laureate, in the pages of “Maga,” has written eulogistically. He says:
“A more perfect place of holiday resort it would not be possible to imagine. There are fine yellow sands, where children may make dykes, fortresses, and mountains of moderate height.... There is fishing, either in smooth or rolling water, for those who love the indolent rocking or the rough rise and fall of the sea; precipitous and fretted cliffs, carved with the likeness of some time-eaten Gothic fane by the architectonic ocean; rides, drives, and walks amid the finest scenery of the kingdom. ‘I think she prefers Brighton,’ said a stranger to me of his companion; and, if one prefers Brighton, one knows where to go. But if nature, now majestically serene, now fierce and passionate, be more to you than bicyclettes and German bands, you can nowhere be better than at Achill.”
The Settlement, or modern Dugort, is a group of cabins above the shore, which owed its creation to the Rev. Edward Nangle, a clergyman of the Established Church. In 1831 he visited Achill, and was so impressed with what he deemed the “spiritual destitution”
