Ulster

by Stephen Lucius Gwynn

This Antrim coast has one charm distinguishing it above the rest of Ireland—its variety of geological formation. At the foot of Glen Ariff, Red Bay is called after the sandstone cliffs past which the road is cut, and in one place the rock makes an arch near an old castle. There is a cave, too, at various times inhabited. At Fair Head one reaches the basalt, and this huge promontory faces the sea with cliffs whose columnar formation gives that odd suggestion of human workmanship which reaches its climax at the Causeway. This black basalt with the numberless fissures is a good rock for birds to build in, but a very bad and treacherous dependence for those who climb to pry after their nests. Beyond the Causeway comes a line of white chalk cliff, such as is familiar to all in the south of England, but very strange to us in Ireland; though the sea off the Antrim coast is too deep to have that opaline appearance—as though milk were spilt into it—which the Margate tripper knows.

I have never yet been able to bring myself to write about the Causeway, which is a geological freak very curious to look at, and quite worth the sixpence you have to pay for admission, since a company enclosed it some years ago. But in Ireland we expect to have our cliff scenery free. The guides there will tell visitors plenty of comic stories about Finn MacCool. But Finn, in authentic Irish legend, is not a comic figure: he is the centre of the Ossianic tales.

That country north of the glens—which stop at Ballycastle, where Glen Shesk and Glen Tow have their meeting—is called the Route, and so keeps alive a memory of a period older than the Ossianic legends. Dal Riada, or Dal Reuda, that is, the "Portion of Reuda", was the name given to a principality established by one Reuda, who about the second century broke off with a body of followers from the kingdom of Ulster, and established rule on both sides of the narrow seas. Reuda was of the Pictish race, probably; and here in the north the Picts held out longest against the invading Milesians, who came (according to modern theories) drilled foot soldiers, to defeat the earlier chariot-fighting warriors. But the Milesians pushed their conquest here also in about the sixth century, and Fergus, an offshoot of the northern Hy-Neill (Sons of Niall), the dominant Milesian house, made a petty kingdom for himself on both shores; and from him the kings of Scotland traced their descent. This prince, Fergus Mac Erc, has left his name on the Irish coast, for Carrickfergus is shown as the rock on which he came to wreck, when sent adrift by tempest in one of his crossings between the two portions of his kingdom.

Shortly after its establishment, this kingship, or chieftainship, lost its Irish character and centred in Scotland. But relations were constant—though by no means constantly friendly—and the Lords of the Isles held Rathlin Island for many centuries. However near the Irish coast this island lies—only divided by some five miles from the base of Fair Head—the sound between it and the mainland is so dangerous, with its racing tides, as to be an effectual barrier; and very often passage may be easier made from the Scotch coast than from the bay of Ballycastle. At all events, the Mac Donnells owned Rathlin when Robert Bruce needed a refuge, and the castle is still there in which the Bruce sheltered for seven years—and in which it was that he watched the spider's patience and drew the moral for his own far-off designs.

The Mac Donnells were one of three great clans who divided a disputed lordship in Ulster before Ulster (last of the provinces) was finally subdued. The Mac Donnell lordship was the least authoritative and (although it traced descent to the sixth century) the latest in date. O'Neill and O'Donnell, the true Gaelic overlords of Ulster, sprang from two sons of Niall of the Nine Hostages, High King of Ireland from 379 to 405. Of their sons, Conall settled himself on Donegal Bay, and Eoghan (or Owen) on the Inishowen hills. Tyrconnell—Tir Chonaill—takes its name from the one son; Tyrone—Tir Eoghain—from the other. About these centres power grouped itself, each chief having sub-chiefs or urraghts under him, each with his own sept. It was only in the tenth century when Brian Boru was High King that the hereditary surnames came to be adopted—O'Neill for the lord of Tyrone, O'Donnell for the princes of Tyrconnell.

Their country was remote of access, difficult of passage for troops; their people were hardy; and so it happened that in the reign of Henry VIII, and even of Elizabeth, when all else in Ireland had been fairly brought within British sovereignty (even the O'Briens of Thomond submitting) O'Neill and O'Donnell could still hold their own. But mutual jealousies and border feuds weakened the Gael; the O'Neills were the strongest people, yet the O'Donnells on one flank and the Mac Donnells on the other often sought advantage by English alliance. Shane O'Neill, perhaps the most dangerous foe that Elizabeth had to meet in Ireland, of whom Sir Henry Sidney wrote that "this man could burn, if he liked, up to the gates of Dublin, and go away unfought", met his crushing defeat at the hand of Irish enemies, the O'Donnells, who routed him on the Swilly river near Letterkenny; and in his trouble he fled to unfriends on the other side, the Mac Donnells, in whose camp at Cushendun he was poniarded, and his head sold to the English.

Yet after his day another O'Neill, Hugh the great Earl of Tyrone, levied desperate war on the English, in close league with a successor of the O'Donnell who defeated Shane; and though the Mac Donnells gave them no direct assistance, they also made an effort at that time to throw off the invader's yoke. The history of Ireland under Elizabeth is largely the history of war with these three clans—and a shameful history it is, full of horrible records of treachery and cruelty.

Each of the three peoples threw up remarkable leaders in the final struggles under the Tudors, and no figure of those days is more notable than the MacDonnell chief, Somhairle Buidhe, "Yellow Charles", Sorley Boy, as the English wrote him: and often the State Papers had occasion to write his name between 1558, when he came to lordship of the North, and 1590, when he died (singularly enough) a natural death in his own castle of Duneynie and was buried among all the Mac Donnells in the Abbey at Bonamargy near Ballycastle. Two sayings of his are memorable. They showed him the head of his son impaled above the gate of Dublin Castle. "My son," he retorted, "has many heads." And in truth that stock sprung up like nettles after cutting.—Elizabeth, in one of the phases of her diplomacy, sought to enlist this warrior on her side, and sent him a patent for his estates and chieftaincy as Lord of the Pale, engrossed on parchment. They brought him the writing to his castle of Dunluce, and he hacked the scroll to shreds. "With the sword I won it," he said; "I will never keep it with the sheepskin."

Nevertheless, time brought him counsel, and when Sir John Perrot, Henry VIII's bastard, came and battered Dunluce with cannon, Sorley, now eighty years of age, made his submission and travelled to Dublin, to pay his homage to the Queen's picture, going on his knees to kiss the embroidered pantoufle on the royal foot. After his death, his son Randal joined the rising of Hugh O'Neill and Hugh O'Donnell; but when that last great effort to throw off England's power was foiled by the defeat at Kinsale, the Mac Donnell made submission, and Elizabeth's successor, James, who after all had a natural kindness for the Mac Donnells (seeing that they were to the last Scotch rather than Irish) accepted his submission and endowed him with the whole territory from the Cutts of Coleraine to the Curran of Larne.