Though annoying at the time, we now have no regret for the many miles we went astray; we saw much of rural life along these lonely little lanes. We passed tiny huts as wretched as any we saw in Ireland, which is to say they were wretched beyond description; but in them were cheery, good-natured people whose efforts to tell us the way to Blarney only got us farther from it.
Blarney Castle to some extent deserves the encomiums that have been so lavishly heaped upon it. It is the one place in Ireland that every tourist is expected to see; and its fame is probably due more to its mythical Blarney stone than to its historical importance. As we saw it on a perfect summer day, the great square tower with overhanging battlements rising out of the dense emerald foliage and darkly outlined against the bluest of Irish skies, it seemed to breathe the very spirit of chivalry, but a rude, barbarous chivalry, for all that. From the tower, which we ascended by ruinous and difficult stairs, the view was magnificent, though the groves, famous in song and story, have been largely felled. And after all, Blarney seems rather “blase” on close acquaintance, with its throngs of trippers and souvenir hawkers at every turn. Even the Blarney stone is a sham, a new one having been placed in a rebuilt portion of the wall knocked down by Cromwell’s cannon; the original is said to be quite inaccessible.
During the afternoon we follow the valley of the Lee over a road that averages fairly good and that seldom takes us out of sight of the river. In many places it ascends the rugged hills and affords a far-reaching prospect over the valley. At Macroom, the only town of any size, the road branches; one may cross the hills and reach Killarney in only twenty miles or may follow the coast along Kenmare River and Dingle Bay, a total of about one hundred and twenty miles. While we pause in the village street, a respectable-looking citizen, divining the cause of our hesitation, approaches us. He urges us to take the coast route, for there is nothing finer in Ireland. We can heartily second his enthusiastic claims, but would go farther—there is nothing finer in the world.
The Eccles Hotel is a rambling old house, situated at the head of Bantry Bay on Glengariff Harbor. It stands beneath the sharply rising hill and only the highway lies between it and the water’s edge; the outlook from its veranda is not surpassed by any we saw in the Kingdom, not even by the enchanting harbor of Oban or the glorious surroundings of Tintagel. True, we saw it at its best, just as the sun was setting and transforming the blue waters into a sheet of burnished gold. As far as the eye can reach the long inlet lies between bare granite headlands, interspersed here and there with verdant banks, while the bright waters were dotted with wooded islets. The sun sank beneath the horizon, purple shadows gathered in the distance, and the harbor gleamed mirrorlike in the twilight. An old coast-defense castle, standing on a headland near the entrance, lent the needed touch of human interest to the scene. Well might Thackeray exclaim, “Were such a bay lying upon English shores it would be a world’s wonder. Perhaps if it were on the Mediterranean or Baltic, English travellers would flock to it by the hundreds. Why not come and see it in Ireland?” Indeed, more are coming to see it today; the hotel was crowded almost to our exclusion and we had to take what was left. The motor is bringing many, for it is more than ten miles from Bantry, the nearest railway station, and is not easily accessible to travelers whose time is somewhat limited.
Our route from Glengariff leads directly over the hills to Kenmare. The ascent is steep in places and a long tunnel pierces the crest of the hill. We see much weather-beaten country, stretches of purple granite boulders devoid of vegetation and bleak beyond description. From the summit of the hills we glide down a winding and stony road into Kenmare, passing with considerable difficulty many coaches loaded with trippers, for this is a favorite coaching route.
Someone has said that Ireland is like an ugly picture set in a beautiful frame. We may dissent from the view that the interior is ugly; we have seen much charming country, though on the whole not the equal of England or Scotland. The vast peat bogs are dreary, the meadowlands monotonous, the villages, if interesting, far from beautiful, and the detached cottages often positively painful in their filth and squalor. But the frame of the picture—the glorious coast line—surely, mile for mile, its equal may hardly be found on the globe. One will behold every mood of sea and shore and sky; beauty and grandeur combined and every range of coloring, from the lucent gold of the sunset and the deep blue stillness of the summer noonday to the gray monotone of the storm-swept granite waste.
Out of Kenmare, we follow the wide estuary of the river, leaving it only when the road sweeps a few miles inland to the village of Sneem. And we behold this Sneem in astonishment; we have seen nothing so primitive and poverty-stricken since we landed in Ireland, nor do we see anything later that may match it in apparent wretchedness. Two or three long rows of low thatched-covered cottages—the thatch green with weeds—of one or two rooms each, with sagging doors and tiny windows, make up the village. The interior of the huts is the plainest imaginable; earthen floors, rough stone walls and open roof under the rotting thatch. The cottages surround a weed-grown common where the domestic animals roam at will. A native approaches us, a man of fair intelligence, who talks freely of the wretched condition of the people. All who were able to get away have gone to America; only the old, the desperately poor, and the incompetent remain, and what can one expect under such conditions? Many eke out their existence on the money that comes from over the sea. There is no use trying to improve the situation; if anyone has any ambition, there is no chance for him in Ireland, and the speaker illustrates with concrete instances. No doubt Sneem is typical of many retired villages. It is twenty-five miles to the nearest railroad, and to see this phase of Ireland the motor is indispensible.
The road soon takes us again to the estuary of the Kenmare, following it to the extreme western point of Kerry, with views of river and ocean on one hand and the stern granite hills on the other. Cahersiveen is the terminus of the railway and famous in Ireland as the birthplace of Daniel O’Connell. A memorial chapel of gray granite overshadows everything else in the village, which, mean and dirty as it is, looks live and prosperous to one coming from Sneem. Just out of the town is the ivy-covered ruin of Carhan House, where O’Connell was born.
I would that the language were mine to even faintly portray the transcendent beauty of Dingle Bay, along which we course most of the afternoon. The day is serenely perfect and the sky is clear save for a few fleecy clouds that drift lazily along the horizon. Our road climbs the hills fronting on the bay—in places the water lies almost sheer beneath us—and the panorama that lies before us is like a fairyland. Of the deepest liquid blue imaginable, the still water stretches out to the hills beyond the bay, which fade away, range after range, into the dun and purple haze of the distance; in places their tops are swept by low-hung clouds of dazzling whiteness—an effect of light and color indescribably glorious. We have seen the Scotch, Swiss and Italian lakes, and, second to none of them, our own Lake George, but among them all there is no match for this splendid ocean inlet on such a day as this. And truly, the day is the secret of the beauty; the color and the distant hills vanish in the gray mists that so often envelop the Irish coast.
It is a jar to one’s sensibilities to pass from such lofty and inspiring scenes into Killorglin, the shabbiest, filthiest, most utterly devil-may-care village we see in the Island. It does not show the almost picturesque poverty of Sneem, but for sheer neglect and utter lack of anything in the nature of civic pride, we must give Killorglin the supremacy among numerous competitors for the honor—or rather, dishonor. The market square is covered with masses of loose stone intermingled with filth; the odors are what might be expected from the general condition of the town. There is little temptation to linger here, and we make hasty inquiries for the Killarney road. It proves dreadfully rough and stony, a broad and apparently once excellent highway, but now quite neglected. There is nothing to detain us on the way and we soon turn into the grounds of the Victoria Hotel just before we reach Killarney.