CHAPTER XII.
BELFAST AND ARMAGH
THE stranger to Ireland will never imagine, as the result of his visit to Belfast, that the land is the home of the effete civilization that some English writers would have him believe.
Belfast, more than all other centres of population in Ireland, more even than Dublin, the capital, is the equal of any city of its size in the known world for transportation facilities of a thoroughly up-to-date order.
This, perhaps, does not aid in any way in the serious contemplation of its other charms; but it is a significant “sign of the times,” nevertheless.
Savants will tell one that here, at the head of Belfast Lough, was fought, in the year 665, a great battle between the Ulidians and the Cruthni. This event is sufficiently remote to have lost some interest, and appears somewhat lacking in appeal in view of what happened afterward, though the region in the immediate vicinity of Belfast does not abound in the wealth of interesting shrines which exist in most other parts of Ireland.
John de Courcy built a fortified castle here in 1177, after Ulster had been granted to him by Henry II., but no trace of it remains to-day.
The city really owes its rise, however, to the Scottish settlers who came here in large numbers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Before which time, says one writer, “the town consisted of but one hundred and twenty odd huts, and a castle roofed with shingles.”
It is on record that the town made a vigorous protest against the execution of Charles I., as might have been expected from its religious and political tendencies. In connection with this protest the usually gentle Milton wrote contemptuously concerning “the blockish presbyters of Clandeboye.... The unhallowed priestlings of an unchristian synagogue.”
The town was incorporated in 1613, but was only given civic dignity in 1888, when its population had grown to 250,000 from its previous minute proportions. The name of the city is evolved from Bel, a ford or river-mouth, and fearsal, a sand-bank.
The chief features of interest in the city proper are unquestionably its attributes of modernity. With such aspects this book has little to do. This is not so, however, with its famous flax and linen industries, made familiar to children of all nations in their very earliest years, when they are given for playthings the spools or bobbins of Barbour’s linen thread, with the gaudy end label picturing the “bloody hand of Ulster.”