This Dingle Peninsula is explored by very few, unexplored by me, alas! I could see from the road the dark outline of Cahirconree, a wonderful stone fort, built two thousand feet up on the side of the Sliabh Mish mountains: and away out to the west the Blasket Islands were in sight, hardly more accessible than the Skelligs, but inhabited by a race of Irish-speaking fisher folk, among whom a Norse student of the Celtic languages settled himself the other day and was overjoyed to find a stone inscription in Runic characters, containing the mind of some Scandinavian forebear of his own, set down in the Norse that was spoken a thousand years ago and had waited ten centuries for him to decipher it.
Under Brandon, on the extreme west of the peninsula, lies Smerwick Bay, where in Elizabeth's reign a small detachment of Spaniards landed and established themselves; their earthworks at Fort del Oro (so called because Frobisher was wrecked there with a cargo of pyrites which he took to be gold) can be traced easily. Kingsley in Westward Ho! has dealt, not overfaithfully, with the story of that enterprise which ended in the wholesale butchery of combatants who surrendered at discretion—suggesting, very unworthily, that the brutal deed was excused by its deterrent effect. We have never heard that it stopped the landing at Kinsale not many years later. There is ground to hope that Raleigh has been wrongfully charged with the actual perpetration of that black deed. But in truth the blackest chapter in all Irish history is precisely that which deals with the Desmond wars under Elizabeth, which ended in the complete devastation of this lovely province. Not far from Tralee they show you the spot where the last Earl of Desmond was captured and the rough mound a little way from it that marks his grave: and still when the moaning of wind and wave is heard over that countryside, they call it the Desmond's keene.
BRICKEEN BRIDGE, LOWER LAKE, KILLARNEY
To escape from all this record of civilized barbarity, the mind gladly turns back to far older and by far less barbarous days. Brandon keeps the name of the most picturesque figure in the long roll of Irish saints—St. Brendan, the Navigator, who was born a little west of Tralee, at Barra, close to the promontory of Fenit, in or about the year 484. He was baptized by a bishop named Erc, whose name still lingers in Termon Eirc, a townland three miles north of Ardfert: and a well near Ardfert which keeps St. Brendan's name is still a place of pilgrimage and votive offering, more specially on the saint's own day. Under Erc's guidance the lad was brought up, though he got some of his schooling at Killeady, the convent where St. Ita had established her religious house near Newcastle West in county Limerick. Later, Erc sent him to travel that he might "see the lives of some of the holy fathers in Erin"; and he went north to Connacht where the school of St. Jarlath at Tuam was already famous (as Archbishop Healy, who sits in St. Jarlath's chair to-day, tells with natural pride in his book on the Ancient Schools and Scholars of Ireland, which I am pillaging, not for the first time). He went farther north still in Connacht, and is said to have established a settlement of Kerrymen in the plains near Castlebar; but he returned to Kerry to get his priestly orders from the hands of his tutor Erc, now nearing death.
"It was probably at this time," says Archbishop Healy, "that St. Brendan built his oratory on the summit of Brandon hill", and there was fired with the project of setting sail across the Atlantic in search of a Promised Land—Tir-nan-Og, the Country of the Young. For there on Brandon top, a man can see—even without the vision of faith—"over half the south of Ireland, mountain and valley, lake and stream, plain and town, stretching far away to the east and south. But the eye ever turns seaward to the grand panorama presented by the ultimate ocean." Brendan from his watch tower
"Saw it in all its varying moods—but above all, at even, when the setting sun went to his caverns below the sea, and the line of light along the glowing west seemed a road to the Fortunate Islands where the sorrows of earth never enter, and peace and beauty for ever dwell. It was a dim tradition of man's lost paradise, floating down the stream of time, for with curious unanimity the poets and sages both of Greece and Rome spoke of these Islands of the Blessed as located somewhere in the Western Ocean. The same idea from the earliest times has taken strong hold of the Celtic imagination, and reveals itself in many strange tales, which were extremely popular, especially with the peasantry on the western coast. To this day the existence of Hi Brasail, an enchanted land of joy and beauty, is very confidently believed by our western fishermen. It is seen from Aran once every seven years, as Brendan saw it in olden times, like a fairy city on the far horizon's verge."
According to the records, Brendan was not first on this quest. Barinthus, a neighbouring monk, had fared seaward in search of a truant brother and had found him in the island called "Delicious", from which they sailed yet farther west and found other wonders. But at all events, however moved, Brendan bade his monks to fast with him forty days, then choosing fourteen of them, he built a great curragh, with ribs and frame of willow, hide-covered, and so with forty days of provisions they set out upon the trackless sea, steering for the "summer solstice".
Seven years that voyage lasted: they reached island after island in the Atlantic main, "following God's guidance, fed by his Providence, and protected by his power". At length, it is said, they reached the continent of America and found the place where they landed "to be indeed a delicious country abounding in everything to gratify the palate and please the eye"; and they were about to push across the swift, silvery current that had borne them to the verge of this land, when an angel rose before their path and bid them turn homeward, instead of resting to enjoy. And so back to Ireland came Brendan the Navigator, the travelled Ulysses among Irish saints.