mountains go, but withal a very respectable eminence to climb.
North of Achill is Black Sod Bay, whose memory comes down to us through Kipling’s reminiscence in “A Fleet in Being.” More anciently, it was one of the harbours where a part of the ill-fated Armada was supposed to have gone ashore. There are no great centres of population here in the bleak northwest of County Mayo, and there are no architectural remains of note; but there is local colour, and much of it, for one who would study the poor Irish peasant on his native heath.
Until one rounds the headland of Benwee, and passes the “Stags of Broadhaven,”—a head of deep-water pinnacles of rock whose jagged outlines have been likened to a stag’s antlers,—and reaches Killala Bay, there is naught of twentieth-century civilization to remind one he is not living in other days, or certainly in other lands and among other associations than those which city folk have come to consider necessaries.
Killala Bay is flanked on the west by Downpatrick Head, which rises two thousand feet sheer above the sea-level. It is one of Ireland’s true wonders, but attracts few visitors save migratory sea-fowl.
Killala itself, one learns from the “Life of St. Patrick,” is a place of great age. The holy man himself—
“Came to a pleasant place where the river Muadas (Moy) empties itself into the ocean; and on the south banks of said river he built a noble church called Kill Aladh, of which he made one of his disciples, Muredach, the first bishop.”
The present cathedral was entirely rebuilt in the seventeenth century, and has no architectural importance. Close by, on a knoll, about which the village is built, is a round tower, eighty-four feet high and fifty-one feet in circumference.
“At Kilcummin, on the west side of Killala Bay, a body of French troops, under General Humbert, landed, August 22, 1798, with the object of supporting the United Irishmen. They at once took Killala and Ballina, and at Castlebar the government levies were in such haste to retire without fighting as to give rise to the nickname, ‘Castlebar Races.’”
Ballina, at the head of Killala Bay, is the “tourist resort” of the region. It is pleasant and delightful in all of its aspects, and in its neighbourhood are some very interesting architectural remains. There are, as is often the case, a Roman Catholic and a Protestant cathedral in the town, and an Augustinian monastery, a ruin of a fifteenth-century structure, also many attractive vistas and spots most worthy of the brush and pencil of the artist.
These attractions pall in the mind of the local spreader of publicity, who extols only the size and varieties of fish which may be taken in the river Moy and other near-by waters.