Past many a little field hemmed in with stony barricades, past many an ancient ruin, sitting in desolation, into Athenry, the ancient Ath-an- righ, the fortress of kings. It was pouring rain, it often is pouring rain. I took shelter in the hotel whose steps rise from the railway station. There, in a quaint little corner room with a broad strip of window, I settled myself to write with the light of a poor candle, and the rain fell outside. Athenry bristles with ruins.
King John has another castle here all in ruins. There is a part of a wall here and there, and the arch of a gate which has been patched up and has some fearful hovels leaning up against it. It has the ruins of an abbey and of a priory. The names of Clanricarde and De Birmingham linger among these ruins; the modern cabins, without window pane or any chimney at all, but a hole in the roof, are mixed up with the ruins also.
The well-fed maid at the hotel informed me that they were very poor. There is no work and no tillage, the land being in grass for sheep. "I do not believe any of them know what a full meal means. No one knows how they manage to live, the creatures," said the maid, comfortably. So the night and the morning passed at Athenry, and we passed on to the village of Oranmore.
LI.
GALWAY AND THE MEN OF GALWAY.
From Athenry and its ruins went to Oranmore and its ruins. The poverty of Athenry deepens into still greater poverty in Oranmore. The country is under grass, hay is the staple crop, so there being little tillage, little labor is required. They depend on chance employment to procure the foreign meal on which they live. Some depend for help to a great extent on the friends in America.
There is a new pier being built here, for an arm of the sea runs up to Oranmore. They told me that this pier was being built by the Canadian money. It will be a harbor of refuge for fishing craft and better days of work and food may yet dawn upon the West.
Behind the pier are the ruins of a large castle which belonged to the Blakes, one of the Galway tribes. It was inhabited by the last Blake who held any of the broad acres of his ancestors within the memory of the old people. I stood in the roofless upper room which had been the dancing saloon, penetrated into galleries built for defence lit only by loop holes, went down the little dark stair into the dungeon, tried to peer into the underground passage that connected with the seashore, ascended to the battlements and looked over the lonely land and explored multitudes of small rooms reached by many different flights of stone steps.
These people are largely of the Norman blood. Oh, for the time when peace and plenty, law and order shall reign here; when the peasant shall not consider law as an oppressor to be defied or evaded, an engine of oppression in the hands of the rich, but an impartial and inflexible protector of the rights of rich and poor alike!
A young priest told me here that the clergy about this place were opposed to the teachings of the Land League—did not countenance it among their people. A Catholic gentleman in Roscommon told me the same concerning the bishop and clergy of his own locality.