though by no means tame, is not of the grandeur of many other parts.
It is doubtful if Tory Island—which is but a mere name, even to the few who know it at all—will ever be inundated by any large flow of travel. If it was, there would doubtless be little accommodation provided for them, for the simple reason that it does not exist, though the island is possessed of a population of some hundreds of men and women and children, with schools and a church—in fact two, which are ever a point of contention and argument among their respective constituencies. It was not long since that the cleric in charge of one of these houses of God nearly starved, because he would not desert his post, and “the powers that be” on the mainland had evidently abandoned him to his fate, or had forgotten him altogether.
Between the Tory Island and Malin Head, that other beacon-light for seafarers, is the great inlet or fiord of Lough Swilly, meaning in Celtic “Lake of Shadows,” which, though quite as beautiful as Lough Foyle, its neighbour on the east, is, for some unexplained reason, quite neglected. Of Lough Foyle, at the head of whose ample waters sits that city familiarly called Derry,—built by certain citizens of London in the reign of James I.,—Sir Walter Scott has said:
“Nothing can be more favourable than this specimen of Ireland—a beautiful variety of cultivated slopes, intermixed with banks of wood; rocks skirted with a distant ridge of healthy hills, watered by various brooks; the glens or banks being in general planted or covered with copse.”
This is not a particularly vivid statement, to be sure, but it is true and temperate, and far more likely to fit in with the views of the casual observer than the rather florid word-paintings of other parts of Ireland which have been offered by rhapsodists of all shades of opinion.