MUCKISH AND ARDS FROM ROSAPENNA, SHEEPHAVEN, DONEGAL
These people are for the most part pure Irish, and west of Dunfanaghy all are Irish speakers. Under Irish rule it was the territory of the M'Swineys, chief urraghts of the O'Donnell, and Doe Castle, at the outfall of the Lackagh, was the fortress of the chief of the name. Owen Roe O'Neill made his landing here, Cromwell's most formidable opponent in Ireland—removed at last either by sickness or poison. Here Red Hugh O'Donnell was fostered by Owen M'Swiney of the Battle Axes before the treacherous kidnapping at Rathmullen. There were three M'Swiney clans—M'Swiney Doe, M'Swiney Banaght in the west of the county, and M'Swiney Fanad in the peninsula that divides Mulroy from Swilly. Each had its own war tune, and a schoolmaster friend of mine—himself a Sweeny—who collected native airs, had got two of the three, but not the third; until at last he heard of an old bedridden man in Fanad who might have it. He rode the twenty miles from his home at Gartan, with fiddle on his back, and found the old peasant wavering on the brink of death, yet still able to frame feebly the whistle or lilt, which my friend picked up on the strings of the fiddle bit by bit, till gradually he had it all, and, there and then, by the dying man's bedside, set the cabin ringing with the oldtime war march of his clan.
Another M'Sweeny that I have known was Turlough, the famous piper of Gweedore, whose repute has travelled far overseas. Aristocrat he is to the finger tips—saddened indeed because those fine finger tips have been coarsened by spade labour. "Look," he said to me; "can there be any music in these hands?" He told me his own generations, connecting him back with the hereditary bards of the M'Swineys, and I said that he must know the history of the county better than most. "No," he answered; "I was never curious of these things, except just as they concerned myself and my own people."
Mr. Williams's picture shows Errigal where it rises by Gweedore over Dunlewy Lake—one of the grandest among Ireland's mountains. But the most striking view of it is east of Gweedore, where the little river flows out by Gortahork; and here is a thing of much interest, the Cloghaneely College, where folk go to study Ulster Irish amongst those who have it for their native speech. Still farther east is Falcarragh, and the view which Mr. Williams has given adds less than due emphasis to the astonishing castellated outline of Tory where it rises out of a tremendous depth of water. I never landed there, though I often talked with the Tory fishers, including one who had made his fortune at the goldfields and come back to the place of his birth among the rocks and the fish heads. There is one sheltered spot, one growing bush, and one only, on Tory. There, of course, Irish is the language, and they maintain the practice of verse, chiefly for purposes of satire; quarrels are revenged in rhyme. I talked to a red-bearded mountainy man near Gortahork about this, but he said it was a peevish thing to do; he would rather have a skelp at a man. In truth there is an old feud between Tory and the shore, and fierce battles have been waged. I do not know why so few people stop at Falcarragh: there is a good little hotel, the views are beautiful, there are three little rivers, all holding salmon, and, at the point where the longest of them flows out across the long range of sand beach west of Horn Head, there is a view of Tory and of Horn Head that passes all I know. Running water across sand, clean sand dunes and grey bent, pure illimitable sea and high cliffs, sunsmitten or in shadow—there is landscape reduced to the simplest terms of a broad elemental beauty.
Also at Falcarragh there must be the makings of a links equal to any in Ireland. The line of dunes runs for several miles along the sea, ending in one of the strangest natural features I know, the huge mountain of clean sand which centuries of westerly gales have piled up against the rocky mass of Horn Head. That famous head is in truth an island, the counterpart of Tory on its seaward face, yet in the gap between it and Dunfanaghy such a deposit of sand has accumulated that only a small causeway has been needed to give access from the mainland to the tiny farms and the one demesne.
If in Donegal you want to buy Donegal homespun, Falcarragh is a good market for the product, since some weaving is done about there with an eye to local wear; and what the Donegal man means to wear, the Donegal housewife "tramps" in soapsuds and water till the web thickens into a fabric fit to turn weather. On the western shore, by Carrick and Ardara, where is now the headquarters of this industry, cloth is produced solely for export, and the English ladies and gentlemen for whom it is designed seek softness and fineness rather than solidity. Indeed the countryfolk themselves treat this merchandise with frank scorn: they fancy something far less flimsy for their own use, and in old days, when nothing but homespun was worn, it used to be sent to a tacking mill and battered till the cloth had the thickness of felt. But the tacking mill at Bunlin, whose big wooden mallets rising and falling used to interest us children, is a ruin now; and the homespun of to-day, with its multitude of pleasant colours, is very different from the massive greys or heavy indigo-dyed frieze which used to come from that mill.
The industry has been a godsend to that country, and one wet day in the little village of Carrick was redeemed to me by the chance of seeing all these folk, men and women, come marching over the hills with the baled cloth on their backs, and then watching the bargaining that proceeded among the various buyers. I bought, too, but I believe the merchants will not allow the people to sell to tourists any more.