79. THE FAIRY BRIDGES
From the Water-colour in the possession of the Artist.
Painted 1891.
The Fairy Bridges—a series of natural arches, carved or shaken out of the cliffs, in times long past, by the rollers of the Atlantic—are within a walk of Ballyshannon, and were often visited by Mrs. Allingham during her stay there. Three of them (there are five in all) are seen in the drawing, and a quaint and mythological faith connects them with Elfindom—a faith which every Irishman in the last generation imbibed with his mother’s milk, and which is not yet extinct in the lovely crags and glens of Donegal.
The scene is introduced into two of Mr. Allingham’s best-known songs; in one, “The Fairies,” thus—
Up the airy mountain,
Down the rushy glen,
We daren’t go a-hunting
For fear of little men.
Down along the rocky shore
Some make their home,
They live in crispy pancakes
Of yellow tide foam.
The only land which separates the wind-swept Fairy Bridges from America is the Slieve-League headland, whose wavy outline is seen in the distance. It, too, finds a place in one of Mr. Allingham’s songs, “The Winding Banks of Erne: the Emigrant’s Adieu to his Birthplace” (which in ballad form is sung by Erin’s children all the world over)—
Farewell to you, Kildenny lads, and them that pull an oar,
A lug-sail set, or haul a net, from the Point to Mullaghmore;
From Killikegs to bold Slieve-League, that ocean mountain steep,
Six hundred yards in air aloft, six hundred in the deep,
From Dorran to the Fairy Bridge, and round by Tullen Strand,
Level and long and white with waves, where gull and curlew stand,
Head out to sea, when on your lee the breakers you discern!
Adieu to all the billowy coast, and winding banks of Erne!
By a curious coincidence Mr. Allingham when here in “the eighties” sent an “Invitation to a Painter”[16]—
O come hither! weeks together let us watch the big Atlantic,
Blue or purple, green or gurly, dark or shining, smooth or frantic;
but the first to come was his own wife.
