“There is a green island in lone Gougane-barra,
Where Allua of songs rushes forth as an arrow.”
We visited the “green island,” reaching it by an overland route (a method of access which I do not remember to have noticed out of Ireland); and the “Allua of Songs” was represented by a discordant din in Anglo-Irish, from the illustrious humbug in the beard, and his satellites, which would have interested us in a greater degree, had we understood only a twentieth part of it.
Ultimately, we caught a small boy, intelligent and intelligible, and he told us how the great Saint had here made himself deliciously miserable, feasting upon the idea of his fasts; contemplating his macerations in the lake, as complacently as a cornet his new uniform, or his sister her first ball-dress, in the glass; whipping himself as industriously as a schoolboy his top; hugging himself in his hair shirt, and nestling cosily as a child in its crib, in a bed composed of ashes and broken glass.
These and other austerities by which the Reverend Mr. Bar so signally extinguished himself, have made Gougane-barra, even to this day, a great resort for pilgrims; you see “the Stations,” and you see graven upon a stone, which was formerly an altar-stone, the list of prayers to be said there; and you hear of many wonderful cures, which have been performed (I always like that story of the priest, who was overheard, while telling his friend, that he must be so good as to excuse his absence, as he was engaged “to rehearse a miracle at two 0 clock!”) at the Holy Well hard by,—the very well, it may be, to which Larry O'Toole took Sheelah, his wife, and Phelim (as they thought) was “the consekins of that manoover.”
These pilgrims, some fifty years ago, used to drink diligently as soon as they had finished their prayers, laying aside the staff for the shillelagh, and kicking off their sandals for a jig on the green. Having paid off the old score, they began a new account like gentlemen, just as an undergraduate, having advanced ten pounds to his tailor, immediately orders clothes to the amount of twenty.
Regaining the car and main road, we pass by small silvery lakes from which the trout are leaping, “bekase,” says our driver, “the wather's so full o' fish that whinever they want to turn round they must jist jump out and do it in the air,” through a country prettily diversified with
“Woods and corn-fields, and the abode of men,
Scatter'd at intervals, and wreathing smoke,
Arising from such rustic roofs”
as are only to be seen in Ireland, and so come to Inchigeela.
À propos of cornfields, I must not forget a striking example of scientific ingenuity, which we saw in this neighbourhood. A small cornstack had been raised, so grievously out of the perpendicular, that the tower of Pisa would have looked severely straight by it. But the builder saw his error, before it was too late, and had gloriously saved his cereal structure, by erecting another, opposite to and abutting towards it, until they supported each other, like the commencement of those card houses, which we built in early youth, a chevron in heraldry, or two drunken sots “seeing each other home.”
At Inchigeela's clean and comfortable inn, we had a capital luncheon for ninepence, and then “lionised” the village. The first object of interest was a pig, asleep under a tree by the brookside.