Yet, since I scorn to deceive, what endears Carrick to me is not its cliff scenery, but its little rivers and its people. I know the rivers are too small: you cannot seriously hope to kill salmon there except in a raging flood, and then your flood runs off in a couple of hours: I hooked four fish there inside the first hour after breakfast, killed two of them, and never touched another all day. But for sheer beauty; for infinite variety in the shape and colour of flowing water (the most beautiful thing to me on God's earth); for pools where the eddy swirls past clean rock with glossy ferns in every crevice; for banks where the scent of bog-myrtle is all about as you brush through the heather; for anything that can entice the eye of an angler, I never saw the equal of that main stream. The little Owen Buidhe, too, in its boggy glen, has attractions of its own, deeper pools and seductive corners; but it is the Glen River, flowing down from Meenaneary, that haunts my vision when in London I crave for the things that I desired in boyhood, and love more in middle age.
And of all the human beings whom I have known among the peasant folk of Ireland, none had ever quite the charm of old Charlie Carr, the gillie who fished with me at Carrick. By an odd chance, he was no sportsman. He would want you to be pleased, and to catch fish, if so you fancied it; but I remember how my vanity was hurt when, on a difficult day, I had hooked and landed a fine sea trout, the first that anyone had seen for a long time. "Them O'Hagans was great people too", he said as he shook the fish out of the net, calmly pursuing his discourse about the ancient days and the generations of old, and the lore of those few books which he had, and studied with passion. He was no true shanachie; what of Irish legend and song his memory kept had no real value. He was a lover of knowledge, not for vanity, not for the sense of power, but simply because it added to the richness of life—one of God's gifts that he welcomed as the sunshine. If ever I met a happy nature, a soul without spot, it was this Irish peasant; if ever I have seen letters full of grace and simplicity they were those that reached me once in a rare while from that lonely glen, asking, never for himself, but perhaps that I would give a prize to some school children, or the like, and always full of an affection that knew no difference between man and man. I can see now the wonderful blue eyes in that kind face, a handsome peasant face with its fringe of grey close-cropped whisker. If I remember a word of complaint from him, it was when he saw his neighbour go by on a car—a man no soberer, no more industrious, no better educated than himself, yet one who had had the instinct for buying and selling, for putting penny to penny and pound to pound. The neighbour was a good man too, in his way; kindly and friendly, prompt to do a service, yet not to be reckoned amongst those elect upon earth whom everyone using discernment will have recognized on his way through life, of whom not a few that I have known have been Donegal peasants. But none had quite the grace, the simplicity, and the distinction of this old dreamer and student who carries net and basket by the Glen River without repute among men.
For all my love of Carrick I could hardly conceive of living there. It is too bare, too vast. And though there is no frost, though every second bush you see in summer is crimson fuchsia full of blossoms, yet winter must be of a terrible loneliness. But the Donegal that I was brought up in—Donegal of more inhabited and habitable shores by Lough Swilly and Sheephaven and Mulroy—does seem to me a place not for summer visitants only. However, this book concerns itself with summer, and nowhere is summer more delightful. Of course it rains often, and sometimes hard. "Did it rain ony wi' ye?" "It didna tak time to rain; it just cam doun buckets," is a fragment of descriptive dialogue. But take the country as I saw it in mid-July, when London was stewing on a griddle of asphalt and flags, and when English country was all one monotonous deadened green with heavy haze dimming the blueness. Out at Bunlin, beyond Milford, all was green too; I looked from the steep road across a glen breast-deep in bracken, with the curve of Cratlagh wood beyond, and nearer me trim fields of green oats and turnips. There was beauty of line there in Mulroy with its score of scattered islands, in the hills, not very high, but very mountainous, bold, and jagged, falling from the peak of Lough Salt to the glen, and to the Mulroy water, crest by crest, sharp to the last little rocky hillock. There was beauty of colour too, for the green of the bracken was broken by silvery grey stone, with glint of mica in it, showing up through the fern, and crowned or set about with purple cushions of heath, here and there a foxglove adding another and a brighter purple. There was wonderful beauty of detail in the wooding nestled into the hills—wild growth, scrub oak, light, feathery ash and birch, with the gleam of silvery stems, Scotch fir and larch—planted trees, yet falling naturally into forestation which had none of the heaviness, the citizen look of elm and sycamore. All was light, hardy and strong—not a wilderness, but a cared-for country where the eye wandered over a fair expanse of varied beauty, lying there in full summer without summer's drowsiness or blowsiness. Lightness, airiness, was the note of it all—light air, breath of bog-myrtle across the salt of the sea; and even the decent homely people, lacking the graces of Cork and Kerry, had yet in their motion and in their eye just the dash of wildness which marks the Celtic strain.
THE ENTRANCE TO MULROY BAY, DONEGAL
Next day was Donegal all over—fresh breeze, clouds driving swiftly, and then bright sun, lighting up a lovely blueness. We were out on small lakes up among the hills, two of us who fancied ourselves not a little as fishermen, and got no encouragement for that faith; but after all what could be pleasanter, airier, or more resting and more bracing at once? and how good one's lunch is on the stones by a reedy shore! I had to go back to London, and the car took me to Rathmullen on the Swilly shore; and when the little steamer put out from the pier it seemed to me that of these lovely loughs this is after all the most beautiful. All was grey and green in the westering light; the hills on the Inishowen shore opposite showed softer than the crags by Mulroy. They were green now, with the olive green of young heather; in another month they would be glowing purple. The lough as we crossed it was a great round lake throwing arms west and south-west to Ramelton and Letterkenny, beyond which all was bathed in a sunny haze. As we ran farther out, the western mountains of Inishowen came in sight, then suddenly beyond Dunree the sea gap opened, letting the eye out to limitless ocean; and soon the sheer crag of the Binn of Fanad was disclosed flanking that portal on the west. Looking back to the shore we left, the Devil's Backbone writhed sinister and jagged along the crest of the Knockalla range behind Rathmullen; and away to the west in the sun haze, accustomed eyes could make out the faint shapes of Errigal and Dooish.
History was all about us, evident in actual landmarks. On the hills which divide the lough from Derry stood out boldly the ring of stone, the great circular fort, which was the Grianan of Aileach, chief seat of the northern Hy Niall, whose kinsfolk reigned in Tara. Here Patrick preached about 450 A.D., baptized Eoghan, founder of the great Tyrone clan, the O'Neills. Here, in a later age, came an O'Brien of Thomond, one of Brian Boru's earliest successors, to avenge a raid of these Northerners on Clare, and the stones of Aileach were carried away to be built into the cathedral at Limerick. Over at Rathmullen is the beach from which the boy Hugh O'Donnell was rowed out to see the English ship which lay at anchor, offering hospitality with black treachery behind; for the crew cut their cables while the young chief and his company were below seeing the vessel's stores, and sailed off with the prisoner so dishonourably made, to the Castle of Dublin, where Hugh lay for years immured, captured but not submissive; attempting escape after escape with unfailing heart till at last he got loose, and after bare deliverance from death in the snow-covered hills was free to exact a reckoning for the wrongs he had suffered.
On a low hill beyond Inch Island rises the square town of Birt, which has memories of another chief, Cahir O'Dogherty, lord of Inishowen. Cahir was fostered by the M'Devitts of Birt, and when Red Hugh claimed lordship over Inishowen, the M'Devitts sought English protection for their foster-brother and got it. The O'Dogherty became the Englishmen's ally and helped to pronounce forfeiture on O'Donnell and O'Neill after the two great earls took their flight in 1607—setting out from this same ill-omened port of Rathmullen. But a new governor of Derry arrived, quarrelled with Cahir O'Dogherty and struck him. The blow was dearly paid for. Cahir went back to Birt, called out the M'Devitts, and sacked and burnt Derry. But the Irish power had been broken beyond retrieving when the earls fled, and O'Dogherty was soon a mere outlaw on his keeping. They ran him to earth finally by Doon Well, near Kilmacrenan, where he was shot dead in the encounter. Doon Well is famous to-day, but I doubt if many there remember Cahir O'Dogherty's fate, or even that on the Rock of Doon took place the installation of each O'Donnell prince. What is remembered is the sanctity of the holy well, whose water still draws thousands of pilgrims and still works miracles of healing.
History more modern is in view at Lough Swilly, for here the English fleet brought in their prizes after the action with Bonaparte in 1798, and brought more than they knew, for they had captured Theobald Wolfe Tone, the most dangerous enemy to England that Ireland had in those or perhaps any other days. To-day there is a strong guard on Lough Swilly. Dunree—Dun Riogh—means the King's Fort and the king has his fort there, of the most modern type, commanding the entrance to this great haven, with an armament very unlike that of the martello towers which are dotted about, marking another of England's recurring scares—the scare of the "French colonels" under the lesser Napoleon.