Connaught

by Stephen Lucius Gwynn

MWEELREA AND THE KILLARY, FROM TULLY STRAND, RENVYLE

That is what gives a special character to all the scenery of western Ireland. It is not only sea you are looking at, it is ocean: ocean in its full depth within a few miles of the shore, and the blueness of deep water is a very different thing from the blue of the Irish Channel or the English, to say nothing of the yellowish waters of the North Sea. And the wash of waves there, even on a calm day, has in it a slow, heavy rhythm, a sense of power which rocks and soothes the senses. But to face that sea on that coast, not only rockbound but flanked with a line of reefs and islands, in hooker or pookaun or canvas-covered curragh, is an enterprise that might well dismay. Yet, oddly enough, these men whose daily life is one long risk of drowning, who endanger themselves times innumerable in the mere act of entering or leaving a curragh when a sea runs, are more frightened than women by the unknown adventure of sailing in a strong vessel clear away to sea, and when they first lose sight of land and see only water round them, they will lie down and give themselves over for lost.

All the north shore of Galway Bay is long, low, and indented with a hundred creeks and bays. It is the paradise of fishermen, full of small lakes connected by little rivers up which the white trout run as nowhere else, and on a good day you may kill three or four dozen—but such fishings are of course not for the chance comer. The most famous and beautiful of these lake and river systems is that of Ballynahinch, once the home of the Martins—types of all that was kindest, oddest, wildest, and most feudal in the old feudal days. Miss Edgeworth came there on a journey in the early days of last century, while roads as yet were little more than a name, and the illness of a travelling companion detained her party as guests for a stay that ran into weeks: lucky chance, to which we owe a picture, such as she only could sketch, of that primitive family hospitality, its table loaded with delicacies of the wilds, salmon, venison, oysters, and the rest, presided over by a host used to administer patriarchal justice among the clansmen, sometimes by form of law, sometimes by the strong fist. The hostess was a lady of the old school; but strangest and most picturesque of all, was their one child, a daughter, the lovely "Princess of Connemara", creature of the mountains no less than any Flora MacIvor with her train of ragged gillies—yet instructed not only in the modern tongues but also in the ancient classics. She read the Greek poets, back there among her ragged mountain peaks: she spoke fluently a French which savoured oddly of the camp, for her teacher was a waif from Napoleon's armies, and this young chieftainess had the French Revolution in her heart.—God be with the old days, now passed clean out of sight, if not out of mind. When the Martin estate went down in the ruin that involved so many of the landed gentry sixty years ago, it at least perished nobly; for the Martin of that day beggared himself in the effort to feed the population that was starving by thousands in the great famine. Old folk remember still the droch-aimsir, the bad times, all over Ireland: yet in the nakedness of Connemara I have not heard any such awful tales as come down by word of mouth and written record relating to places far less out of reach of help.

The Martins are gone from Ballynahinch and a newcomer has their home, and for the moment something of their lordship, though here the Congested Districts Board is at last seriously at work, striving to settle the people not only on holdings of their own, but on holdings which may support them. But the beauty of that region is unchanged: the mountain group which we call the Twelve Pins rises in peaks from out of moor and lake and river: the marble which it holds glistens in rain and sun: and whether you see it from the south by the shore of Galway Bay, from Camus water near Rosmuck, or beside the broader water of Kilkerrin, or from the west where Ballinakill Bay runs up in creeks and windings towards the pretty village of Letterfrack,—wherever you take your view point, no mountain group in all Ireland can quite compare with it for grace and for perfection of line.

At Recess, near Ballynahinch, where is the railway hotel, one is too close under the heights, too shut in; to see the Connemara Mountains rightly, they should be seen from the shore of the sea. Clifden, where the railway has its terminus, is a little too far off; and upon the whole my choice would be for Letterfrack (Leitir-bhreac, the speckled meadow) on the shore of Ballinakill, where a delightful river has its outfall. Yet perhaps one who cared less for the running water and its chance of fish would like that country best of all from Renvyle, where an old country house is kept open as a hotel—facing the Atlantic, and commanding full view not of the Twelve Pins only but of the mountains which lie about Killary harbour and beyond.

Killary is the deep narrow cleft which strikes far in past the base of Mweelrea, the highest mountain in all Connaught, and runs up to where the flank of the Devil's Mother divides the village of Leenane from the outflow of the Erriff river, plunging over the fall at Aasleigh. I recite a litany of names well known to every angler in the west—and to more than anglers, for the hotel at Leenane is a halting place on the coachroad which follows the coast from Clifden to Westport; and no sea lough in all Ireland is more beautiful than Killary on its own day.

Leenane is on the boundary of the two counties, Galway and Mayo (which latter name is properly pronounced with the accent on the o). From the hamlet a steep road runs back climbing the skirts of the Devil's Mother—where eagles build—and then plunges down the pass which leads to Maam at the upper end of Lough Corrib, and so to the isthmus of Cong, under which water makes a subterranean pathway for the eels of Lough Mask into Corrib, whence they go by the weir at Galway (where eel traps take toll of them) to their spawning grounds in the deepest sea.

This road is one of the boundaries about the region of the Twelve Pins, through which wild sanctuary no made track for wheels has been driven. You have the Pins (or "Bens" rather) on the south as you go from Leenane to Maam; on the west as you go from Maam to Maam Cross; on the north from Maam Cross to Recess, and on the east as you take the beautiful road from Recess by Lough Inagh, and so through the defile at Kylemore, where the great house stands with long terrace facing on to the exquisite lower lake, approached by a roadway along which are mile-long hedges of crimson fuchsia. Kylemore means the Big Wood, and the name is natural enough, for here only in Connemara is there any considerable growth of trees; the country is too bare and wild for them. At Carna, on the shore of Galway Bay, can be seen the lamentable remains of an experimental plantation, replaced now by a new and much more successful planting of the New Zealand flax, which with its yucca-like fronds grows very freely on the west, and gives some hope of a new industry.

But beyond Maam, on the shores of Corrib, is wooding and to spare; none denser, more undisturbed. About Cong are the famous woodcock covers where Lord Ardilaun's guests have killed five hundred birds in a day. Almost every island on the lake (and there is said to be an island for every day in the year) is set thick with leafage, and there are those who claim that Corrib where it broadens out between Cong and Oughterard is a rival to Killarney. I do not seek to decide such a contention; but the place is far richer in antiquarian interest than Killarney, and infinitely less tourist-ridden.