Connaught

by Stephen Lucius Gwynn

A FISHERMAN'S HOME UNDER DIAMOND MOUNTAIN, BALLYNAKILL BAY

It is no business of mine here to write about hotels; but still one wishes to show what is practicable for those who may care to explore this great line of western lakes. By far the easiest way to go is by the little steamer from Galway to Cong—a run of some thirty miles, done very leisurely. There is a comfortable inn at Cong: a larger one three or four miles off at Clonbur; at Ballinrobe, I suppose, quarters can be had, and certainly in Tourmakeady on the west shore of Mask. If, however, you have followed the line from Recess to Letterfrack, and so to Leenane, then there is an admirable possibility for varying the journey. Take the road from Leenane to Maam. Halfway down it, near Kilmilkin, another road turns off steeply to the left so that you still contrive to skirt the Devil's Mother; and after a mile or two through bog, it goes corkscrewing down a woeful hill, and you are in the basin of Lough na Fooey, high among the hills of Joyce Country. Beyond the lake the road climbs again to emerge from that basin, and you pelt away down the long slope of Maamtrasna, the valley at the head of upper Lough Mask. Savage memories dwell there; memories of killings between peasants in the land war of the 'eighties, memories of high diplomatic slaughter when the heir to the earldom of Ulster was done away with in Illaun an Iarla, a little island which your driver will show you. The Stauntons who carried out that killing kept a bad name from it through centuries of Irish tradition.

Striking in, then, behind Kilbreedy Mountain, which sunders upper Lough Mask from the main water, you soon come out on the shore of the lake, and I wish you the luck to see two as pretty girls as met me just where the counties join at the little Owenbrin river. A few miles of tolerable road will bring you to the prosperous-looking little village of Tourmakeady, where is a hotel. Here is fishing to be had for pike and for big trout, and here much that is pleasant and profitable can be studied. At the Franciscan monastery, a civil-spoken stranger will always find a welcome, and, at least while Brother Leo is still living, one of the best of talkers to instruct him in the history of all that countryside. These monks have largely helped on the work of the Congested Districts Board in teaching improved methods of farming, and the like: they have been what monastic centres were often in old days. Close by is another factor in the modern development of Ireland, the Connaught college for study of the Irish language, here where it is living on the lips of young and old. In summer you shall find from eighty to a hundred students working there, with classes held largely in the open air: but all centring about a farmhouse converted to these unforeseen uses. Most of the students will be school teachers, desirous to advance themselves in a subject for which there is a swiftly growing demand; but you will almost to a certainty find a sprinkling there who have come, it may be, from France, from Hungary, from the Western States of America, from heaven knows where, to pursue this long-neglected but now eagerly followed branch of learning. And you may hear, and perhaps see, how with the study pleasant festivities interweave themselves of an evening, dances, jigs, reels, hornpipes, and the rest—or simply the céilidhe, a gathering for talk and story-telling round the fire.

From Tourmakeady, I would have you proceed by boat, crossing the lake to Ballinrobe, and seeing on your way Caisleán na Caillidhe, Hag's Castle, a very early example of the fortifications which Irish chiefs began to build when they had learnt from the Normans how much stronger were stone walls than earthen ramparts. Yet here the stone wall is on the model of an earthen dun, built circular, and of no great height—an enclosure for defence rather than a dwelling place—doubly defended too, for it stands on an island near to the Ballinrobe shore.

As you drive from Ballinrobe to Cong, you shall see on your left a huge cairn of stones crowning a low height. This is an outlying monument of that famous battle of Moytura, fought, it is said, between the legendary Tuatha de Danann, warrior demigods, against those older inhabitants of Ireland, Firbolgs, men of the leathern wallet. Who fought that fight, when they fought it, is obscure, but fought it was, and the cairns rise thick over the battlefield, a couple of miles behind Cong. All this lore was studied out and set down by the notable father of a still more celebrated son. Oscar Wilde must have spent no small part of his boyhood at Moytura House where his father, Sir William Wilde, passed what holidays a great surgeon could secure, and where he wrote his Antiquities of Lough Corrib.

There is another legendary battlefield in Sligo called the northern Moytura, which tradition identifies with the site of a second and final battle in which the De Danann defeated the men of the wallet, and it is marked by the same profusion of cairns and stone circles—which, it must be allowed, can be constructed with less labour in the west of Ireland than elsewhere, because the whole surface of the ground is covered with the material for them. Yet assuredly some great event must be marked by monuments so laborious: though I find their associations a trifle too shadowy for interest.

The great cairn on the road to Ballinrobe is said to be that of King Eochy, the Firbolg leader, who was slain on the last day of the fight. But near it stands a modern landmark of undisputable authenticity. Lough Mask House was in the early 'eighties the residence of Captain Boycott, against whom was first organized the "boycott" which proved to be the peasantry's most effective weapon in the revolution which has been in progress for the past thirty years. All this countryside is peaceable enough nowadays, but there was wild work there before compulsory rent fixing, followed by voluntary purchase, began to settle the land war.

In Cong itself is a wealth of things to be seen: first of all, the demesne, planted by one of the Guinness family, who showed his fine understanding of trees in the disposal of that varied wooding: and leave can be had also to visit the gardens whose owner, Lady Ardilaun, is famous among Irish lovers of flowers. But apart from this, there is the strange river which past Cong flows crystal clear over a limestone bed, and about half a mile off issues from its underground journey out of Lough Mask in a strange cavern called the Pigeon Hole. Near by is costly and deplorable evidence of the queer tendency to fissure in this limestone formation: for sometime in the last century a canal was dug laboriously to connect Mask and Corrib, and so open traffic by boat and barge to Tourmakeady and Ballinrobe from the sea. But when the long digging and hewing was finished, they let the water in, and it promptly leaked away through a hundred clefts and crannies—making, no doubt, wonderful and mysterious noises. All through East Galway (for west of Corrib the stone is mostly granite) there are rivers that appear and disappear in this strange fashion, running now overground, now under; and where the stream sinks out of sight can often be heard queer rhythmic throbbings and beatings, in which the sound of a fairy mill is easily detected; and about these popular imagination quickly builds legends, telling how in old days corn would be laid there and in the morning its owner would come back to find it ready ground, till at last some covetous man failed to leave the unseen miller his due portion, and so no more corn was miraculously ground for deceitful mortals.

These are the marvels of nature. But by the river of Cong, which divides Mayo from Galway, stands one of the most beautiful ruins in the west—all that is left of what was once St. Fechin's monastery. But St. Fechin belongs to the old days of the seventh century, long before any builder in these islands had the skill to construct that graceful cloister. The abbey which we know is pre-Norman, an Augustinian foundation, and it has a special interest, for to its repose came Rory O'Connor, last of the native kings to claim sovereignty over all Ireland. Already he had been sorely driven and harried by the Norman invaders, before he retired here in 1183 to spend yet fifteen years more of his life. It was doubtless he who made it into the gem of the western dioceses; and in all the changes and chances of the centuries there still was an abbot of Cong till a date hardly outside living memory. In Cong, too, was treasured—or rather was heedlessly kept—the most famous of all the jewels which descend from the ancient craftsmanship of Ireland. The cross of Cong, a reliquary, made to be borne in procession, enclosing a fragment of the true cross, stands two feet and a half in height and is covered with gold tracery of the most incredible complexity and fineness. What the artist could do with his fine pointed brush in the Book of Kells, this artificer could almost rival in his twisting of the delicate wire. The thing is priceless and was bought (in a transaction of doubtful morality) for the Royal Irish Academy through Wilde's agency. But in truth the National Museum in Kildare Street where it reposes is the proper place for it: though one cannot but feel sympathy for the zealous young priest who made his way from Cong to Dublin, boldly smashed the case and rushed into the street with the reliquary, prepared at all hazards to bring it back to the home which it had known for seven centuries.