Oxford The Heart of Wessex
The English Lakes The Peak District
Canterbury The Cornish Riviera
Shakespeare-Land Dickens-Land
The Thames Winchester
Windsor Castle The Isle of Wight
Cambridge Chester and the Dee
Norwich and the Broads York

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Page
Lough Breenbannia[Frontispiece]
Lowlands, Ballinlough, Roscommon[8]
Mweelrea and the Killary, from Tully Strand, Renvyle[14]
A Fisherman's Home under Diamond Mountain, Ballynakill Bay[20]
On the Owenbrin River, Lough Mask[26]
Castle Kirke and Upper Lough Corrib[32]
In the Pass of Delphi, Killary Bay[36]
Wrack-Gathering on the West Coast[42]
Croagh Patrick, from Oldhead, Clew Bay[46]
The Minaun Cliffs, Achill Island[50]
Nephin, from Lough Conn[54]
Lough Gill[58]

I

Connaught—or Connacht, as it is more properly spelt and spoken—is geographically the best-marked among the provinces of Ireland; and, as usual, other discriminations follow. I would not say that it is of all provinces the most Irish; nobody has better rights to stand for Ireland than the "boys of Wexford", and at a Wexford fair or meeting you will see scores of big farmers the very picture of Mr. Punch's John Bull, only not so round about the abdomen. But Connaught, Connaughtmen, and Connaught ways certainly come nearest to an Englishman's traditional conception of Ireland and its inhabitants; the stage Irishman is based upon Connaught characteristics. In West Mayo people do say "shtruck" (or in moments of emotion "shhtrruck"); and you can see still in places the traditional costumes. Shawled heads and bare feet are (thank goodness) to be met with all along the Atlantic seaboard; but the red petticoat (home-dyed with madder, though alas! aniline dyes are fast replacing the costlier and more beautiful crimson) is characteristic of Galway and Mayo; and in remote recesses of Joyce country and Connemara old and lovely fashions of braiding the hair and training ringlets to stray over the forehead still hold their own. In Connemara and on Aran, the tall lad of thirteen may still, though rarely, be seen in the long-petticoated shirt (his only garment) of red or blue flannel; but this is only a relic of sheer poverty. The men's clothes, however, keep to antique and excellent fashions: throughout Galway, east of the Corrib, almost everyone wears the cut-away skirted coat of dark heavy frieze, and for the most part its wearers hold to the custom of clean-shaven face with a narrow strip of close-cropped whisker past the cheekbones. In Connemara the "bawneen" or sleeved waistcoat of whitish flannel is general and very becoming to its wearers, among whom are to be found the handsomest men in Ireland. Kerry women, who in certain parts really have the "black-blue Irish hair and Irish eyes", may perhaps hold their own even with the girls of Connaught; but for fine-looking men I would back Galway against any county in the British Isles.

There is much talk of a Spanish strain on this coast, and undoubtedly commerce was constant between Galway Bay and the Iberian peninsula: but the truth is that you have in western Ireland, as in western Spain, survivals of a race which the red-haired people pushed off the good lands towards the limit of the sea. On the Claddagh at Galway I have seen a man at work in his cottage mending a net, who might have posed for the model of a Basque peasant; and the olive-skinned fisher folk about the great mackerel-curing station at Cleggan (near Clifden) are simply variants of a type that repeats itself along the coasts of Spain.

The people have changed very little in themselves since Lever wrote of them: where food has always been too scarce, as at the extremity of the Mullet peninsula curving about Blacksod Bay, famine and famine fever have weakened the stock terribly, and in such places you can see that looped and windowed raggedness and that squalor of hovels which go to make up the Englishman's conception of the sister island. But you can see also in markets in north Mayo many a handsome old man, springy and active even in his extreme age, who wears the blue tail coat, with its complement of brass buttons, which perhaps his father handed down to him—and a fine figure he makes in it, especially if he still keeps to the tight knee breeches and buckled shoes which were universal in his boyhood.

Here and there, too, the ancient beaver hat with its long nap still lingers: such things must be almost indestructible. A few years ago the beautiful ruin of Ross Errilly Abbey near Headford was guarded by an old peasant in this headgear; corduroy breeches and gaiters completed the picture. But on the whole, Connaught—more's the pity—is trouser-wearing like the rest of Europe: yet for all that the Connaught-man remains distinctive.