Connaught

by Stephen Lucius Gwynn

Smooth-tongued you will find them: supple you may think them: but the fire which kindles in Connaught is no flicker. Michael Davitt was born in a Mayo peasant's cabin, his earliest memory the eviction which drove him and his adrift on the world. He died in early middle age, yet before he died, what he himself called the Fall of Feudalism was accomplished: he himself, more than any other man, had destroyed the old order under which such eviction was the universal terror hanging over every peasant's head. Lord MacDonnell of Swinford was a poor man's son in Connaught, his parents hardly rich enough to equip him for the priesthood. He got an even cheaper education at the Queen's College in Galway, won his place in the Indian Civil Service, and there proved himself a governor as imperious and as capable and as beneficent as India had known since the Lawrences. It is a poor province, but it breeds notable men. I sat at dinner not long ago with three who had been at school together in the west, poor lads all of them. One had become bishop of his diocese; one was the best-known journalist in England and no mean force in politics; the third, perhaps, the greatest orator in America, something of a party to himself—but beyond all doubt a power.

LOWLANDS, BALLINLOUGH, ROSCOMMON

It is perhaps well to remember such facts in visiting a country where poverty stares you in the face, where, at least in certain parts, it has become a disease. Courtesy in the poor is apt to seem obsequious; yet courtesy is of all things most native to Connaught, and it is finest shown where the folk have acquired some stable security. I fished one afternoon with an old man in a lake in the mountains behind Leenane, a poor man but evidently not needy; he and his wife pressed on us the best they had to give, and because our fishing had been unsuccessful, wanted to refuse all payment. What we paid was little enough for those hours of easy paddling in the sunshine amid noble hills, and for the pleasure of that old boatman's wise, shrewd, and witty company.

That lake—Lough na Fooey—lies midway, beautiful itself but unutterably wild, between the two most beautiful centres in Connaught: between Killary Bay and the upper end of Lough Corrib. With Lough na Fooey for centre, a radius of twenty miles would take in all or almost all the scenic beauty of County Galway—and a good deal of what is finest in Mayo. North of that again is fine scenery about Westport: then comes the superb cliff-front of Achill: then after a long interval, you come again to Sligo with yet another noble grouping of mountain, lake, river, and sea.

In the other two of Connaught's five counties—Roscommon and Leitrim—there is very little to tempt the tourist; though a great deal of interest for the student in Irish history, whether of to-day or the remotest past. Croghan, Cruachan, was the seat of Connaught's kingdom when Emain Macha at Armagh made a fortress for the Red Branch chivalry. It was from Cruachan that Maeve and her army set out to win the Brown Bull of Cooley to enrich the Connaught herds; and to-day no part of Ireland has greater store of fine cattle, fine sheep, and fine horses than Roscommon's fertile plains. Nor is there anywhere better to see that work of resettling on the good land (left for decades in mere prairie) those people whose fathers were huddled too thick on the bogs and moors where grass would not grow. Roscommon contributes more than its share—though five counties take a part—to what is still the great event of the year in Connaught, the fair of Ballinasloe, lasting through the first week in October. To that wonderful muster comes the pick of all the sheep and cattle, and above all, of the horses from western and central Ireland. The sheep fair, held in Lord Clancarty's demesne, covers a huge space of the park—Galway, Roscommon, and Tipperary each having its allotted quarter: but unless you rise early, all you will see is trampled ground, over which hangs the greasy smell of wool, and only some few scores of the twenty thousand animals that were gathered there, by pen and pen, in the grey dawn, bleating and huddling together. But any day and all day in the week, on the broad fair green outside the town you may see the best of Ireland's horses being galloped and trotted and shown off and examined—for the benefit of buyers from over all Europe. You may hear German, Italian, French, Spanish, all, or any of them spoken on that astonishing mart; and you may observe the likeness in diversity which stamps itself upon horsey men, whatever their nationality.

Except on a fair day, Ballinasloe has no special interest or beauty, but five miles west of it lies the field of Aughrim, where was fought the greatest though not the most decisive battle of the Williamite wars. It is easy to trace the lie of the fight, along the range of hillocks by Aughrim where St. Ruth, James's general, took up position, facing the bog which divided him from Urrachree, to which Ginkel had moved out from Ballinasloe. Till quite lately a thorn-tree marked the spot where St. Ruth lay, struck down by a cannon shot as he headed what should have been the decisive charge. One can guess, too, at the position behind the ridges, where the Frenchman's jealousy kept Ireland's own leader, Sarsfield, out of action with the reserves, chafing for action, till St. Ruth's fall disorganized everything, and the call for Sarsfield came too late. In the north of Ireland they still perform a play representing this great encounter, and every Orangeman is more anxious to be Sarsfield than any hero on the Orange side.

But no one goes to Aughrim in search of beauty (in truth no one goes there at all, which is a strange effect of indifference to history), and on the main Connaught line you do not reach fine scenery till at Oranmore an old castle rises by the inner shallow waters of Galway Bay, here strewn with numberless little reefs and islets.—Salute the best stretch of oyster-breeding water which these counties know: Galway Bay oysters, from Red Bank on the Clare side, to Ardfry where the Department of Agriculture controls a spawning ground a few miles from Galway itself, are not only the best in flavour but the freest from any suspicion of pollution of all oysters in the world, and in Galway at the proper season they should always be demanded by every visitor while it is still time: for the English market will almost certainly engross them, when it becomes really aware of their existence. Ten years ago as you travelled in summer round the coast of Galway or Mayo, the hotels were not splendid, their menu was rudimentary, but always there was a dish of lobsters big and little piled up in careless profusion; you ate one or two or three as the fancy took you. Now, you hardly buy a lobster along that coast; a company has contracted for the whole take, fishermen bring them in their curraghs to a depot where they are put into anchored crates, until the steamer comes up to collect and direct them into that vast maw which has its tentacles exploring the very shores of Iceland and Russia for daily supply.

Still, when you get to Connemara or Mayo, you will not grudge these folk the access to a market which makes lobster fishing almost the most profitable of their industries. Along Galway Bay you look out over one of the most beautiful scenes in Ireland, and the most barren. Across, opposite you, is the mountainous shore of Clare, where, in the limestone district called Burren, Ireton (down there on some errand of mercy) reported that there was not water enough to drown a man, soil enough to bury him, nor wood enough to hang him. Off the mouth of the bay, making a natural breakwater for its superb natural harbour, lie the three islands of Aran which are, like Burren, built up of flat limestone slabs—in whose crevices there grows herbage, sweet and nourishing for cattle; but how human beings, let alone cows, travel those rocks without breaking a leg a week in the fissures passes all comprehension.

Rocky though the soil, these waters are not barren, and Aran lives by its nets, and lives much better than it did in the old days before the Congested Districts Board set up the folk with strong boats and good gear, and established a steamer to bring them in touch with the market. Yet Synge's wonderful and terrible little drama, Riders to the Sea, tells the true story of their life, shows how encompassed it is at any moment by the deadliest peril; for the waves on that western coast have been seen to break where there was nearly a hundred feet in depth of water, so vast, so tremendous are the movements of storm where the Atlantic swings in its full force upon the first bulwark it meets—a bulwark planted in the deep, and dreadfully sudden therefore in its check to the whole power of ocean.