If the “bloody hand of Ulster” should ever grasp firearms and enter into warfare again, the result might be different to this old castle of Carrickfergus, one of the few in Ireland which are not claimed as having belonged to King John.
Southward toward Armagh one first comes to Lisburn, noted principally for its great damask industry. It is truly enough a busy manufacturing town, and has thrived amazingly since the linen manufacture was introduced by the Huguenots who fled to this refuge after the Edict of Nantes.
The cathedral here contains a monument to Jeremy Taylor, who was bishop of County Down. Referring to Taylor’s tenure in Ireland, it has been the custom to recount it thus:
“Under the restoration of Charles II. he was given a bishopric in the wilds of Ireland, in a sour, gloomy country, with sour, gloomy looks all around him ... which broke him at the age of fifty-five.”
Part of this is true, the latter part, but it was not the gloomy, sour wilds around Lisburn that did it, for the whole neighbourhood around about is a charming place, and must have been then. It seems, indeed, always to smile, and, though possessed of no great grandeur, such as rugged peaks and roaring waters, it in every way fulfils one’s idea of a busy town, charmingly environed.
Armagh is to-day a “cathedral town” which possesses two cathedrals. One is the ancient and venerable cathedral which belongs to the Established Church, and dates from the thirteenth century; and the other is the modern Roman Catholic Cathedral, which dates only from 1873.
Armagh is now, as it always has been, a most important centre of religious and churchly activity.
St. Patrick came here to preach the gospel in 432, and a quarter of a century later founded the Church of Armagh. The first edifice endured for nearly four hundred years when it was sacked by the Danes. Reërected again in 1268, it was burned by Shane O’Neill in the sixteenth century, and rebuilt and again burned inside the next half-century. The final rebuilding, or rather the building up from the old fire-swept remains of the ancient structure, took place at the instigation and expense of the Primate Margetson. Armagh is one of the metropolitan sees of Ireland, Dublin being the other; but the Archbishop of Armagh is Primate of Ireland.
The chief centre of interest in Armagh lies with the church and its foundation, though, of itself, Armagh is what many other towns of as great promise are not,—a charmingly unspoiled old-world spot which, in spite of the advent of the steam railway, the telegraph, and the telephone, apparently conducts its daily life much as it did three-quarters of a century ago.
It is a well-kept little city or town, with no great evidences of modern improvements, though nowhere are there any indications of squalor or decay.