Connaught

by Stephen Lucius Gwynn

ON THE OWENBRIN RIVER, LOUGH MASK

A stone now set up in the street at Cong commemorates in a Gaelic inscription two Abbots of Cong, Nicol and Gillibard O'Duffy, and I hope that one of them may be the O'Duffy to whose order the cross was made—not in Cong, but in the other abbey of Roscommon, by the cunning craftsman whose name is inscribed on its arms: MAELISU MACBRADDAIN O-H-ECHAN.

An inscription of even greater interest can be seen in a setting of the most fascinating beauty. Sail or row across from Cong (you can fish as you go, and I caught a trout seventeen pounds weight on my first venture in that water—why should not you be as lucky?) to Inchagoill Island, and you will see one of the oldest churches in Ireland, called Teampul Phadraig—Patrick's Church. Its walls are of stone, very roughly put together; its doorway of the oldest type—two sides sloping towards the top, which is covered by a huge lintel slab. All this can be matched elsewhere, but the special interest is a stone graven in the oldest Celtic characters with these letters: LIE LUGNEEDON MACC LMENVEH: that is, The slab of Lugneedon, son of Lemenueh. Now Lugneedon was Patrick's nephew and his pilot; and this inscription may be contemporary—or may have been erected less early than the sixth century, but yet so early that the tradition was still alive of him who had died there. For the island's full name is Inis an Ghoill Chraoibthigh, the island of the Devout Stranger, and certainly keeps a memory of someone who, coming from far away, identified himself with it either by his life or by his death.

It is set in the most beautiful portion of the lake, midway from Cong to Oughterard, and you can see thence Benlevi steep over the isthmus of Cong, and Leckavrea with its grey, slaty cliff frowning over the upper end of Corrib between Oughterard and Maam.

In this sheet of water, which (by a sudden winding between cliffy wooded sides where the lake narrows at Doon) is so shut off as to seem a lake by itself, stands not far from the western end, Caislean na Circe, Hen's Castle. And popular imagination, stimulated by the name, has invented the story of a miraculous hen which was guaranteed to lay enough eggs to keep the garrison alive; but they tired of eggs, killed the bird, and so came by disaster. The truth, however, I believe to be that this castle, which was built for Rory O'Connor by one of the great De Burgos who made their way to Connaught, fell later into the de Burgos' (or Burkes') possession; and the Hen who gave her name to it was Grace O'Malley, Granuaile; for she proved herself the better bird when her second husband, the Burke who then owned it, was in danger of being forced to submit, till the doughty warrioress relieved him.

All these things you can see from Cong by easy pleasant excursions, to be combined if you so choose with fishing in waters where trout if caught are worth the catching; and when you have had your fill of Cong, the steamer will take you to Galway, down that long narrow lake with rick-shaped Benlevi steep above Cong and Leckavrea making a cliff on the southwest. To the east all is flat plain, the long level tract of limestone which stretches out to the Shannon, and which on this side of Tuam is for the most part stone and nothing else. Only one height rises on that hand—your left as you travel to Galway; it is the conical hill of Knockmagh, the greatest mount of fairies in all Ireland; crowned with a cairn, of course—Carn Ceasair—under which sleeps, they say, Ceasair, chieftainess of the first invasion that came to Ireland, just forty days before the Flood. There are lesser cairns on its sides, in which recent exploration has discovered funeral cists, flag covered, holding in them bones and even an urn of "bodkin-pencilled" clay.

Anyone who cares to see what is not in the common run of tourist visitation should make his way from Cong to Tuam, by Headford, where is the splendid ruin of Ross Errilly, a famous monastery of the Franciscans, standing almost intact, though unroofed, and stripped of its ornamentation by the Cromwellian soldiers. The friars clung to this abode till 1753, though six several times expelled, returning under the protection of Lord Clanricarde; since in those days Clanricarde, head of the Burkes in Connaught, was a name of shelter for the native Irish, among whom his de Burgo stock had been so long and so fully naturalized. The famous rallying song of 1848, "The West Awake", tells how "Glory guards Clanricarde's grave", and in truth, with scarcely an exception, not a Clanricarde of them all but was loved by the people. And if the name that was once so kindly, bears a very different sound to-day, Connaught has its own way of accounting for the change.

It is worth climbing Knockmagh to see across that spreading plain, crossed and chequered with the stone walls which endear Galway to all who like big jumping in the foxhunt: for the mountains of Connemara show westward but Croaghpatrick and Nephin away north. Under Knockmagh beside the road is the church of Donagh Patrick, marking the western point of St. Patrick's missionary journey here. But his favourite disciple Benen, or Benignus, had a monastery near Tuam at Kilbannon, where stands the stump of a round tower, and pushed his journeyings even to Aran where monuments bear his name.

Tuam itself is well worth a visit for things old and things new—or shall I say the survival of the remote and the recent past. Its long street of thatched houses, its marketplace crowded with Irish-speaking men and women all in characteristic western dress, make it more typically Irish than any town in Connaught except only Galway—and Galway is a thing apart. The modern cathedral, too, is of interest for the sake of sculptured heads wrought by a local craftsman who was a kind of Cruickshank in stone—preserving in his craft a glorious tradition of the place. For the great sculptured arch which can be seen in the ancient cathedral, restored more than a quarter of a century ago for Protestant worship, is the finest example of native Irish decorative architecture, before Continental influences came in. It is the Romanesque half-circle, with six concentric orders of arches included in the great span. The red sandstone of which it is wrought lent itself freely to carving, and the unknown and unnamed workers bestowed a wealth of detail upon it, blending, after the Celtic fashion, shapes of man, bird, and beast, into the interlaced scroll of the design.