“Ballydonnelly was assaulted by Niall Oge, the son of Art, who was the son of Con O’Neill. He demolished the castle, and having made a prisoner of the son of O’Neill, who was the foster-son of O’Donnelly, he carried him off, together with several horses and the other spoils of the place.”
We have felt it necessary to state the preceding facts relative to the ancient history of Ballydonnelly, or Castle-Caulfield, as it is now denominated, because an error of Pynnar’s, in writing the ancient name as Ballydonnell—not Ballydonnelly, as it should have been—has been copied by Lodge, Archdall, and all subsequent writers; some of whom have fallen into a still more serious mistake, by translating the name as “the town of O’Donnell,” thus attributing the ancient possession of the locality to a family to whom it never belonged. That Ballydonnelly was truly, as we have stated, the ancient name of the place, and that it was the patrimonial residence of the chief of that ancient family, previously to the plantation of Ulster, must be sufficiently indicated by the authorities we have already adduced; but if any doubt on this fact could exist, it would be removed by the following passage in an unpublished Irish MS. Journal of the Rebellion of 1641, in our own possession, from which it appears that, as usual with the representatives of the dispossessed Irish families on the breaking out of that unhappy conflict, the chief of the O’Donnellys seized upon the Castle-Caulfield mansion as of right his own:—
“October 1641. Lord Caulfield’s castle in Ballydonnelly (Baile I Donghoile) was taken by Patrick Moder (the gloomy) O’Donnelly.”
The Lord Charlemont, with his family, was at this time absent from his home in command of the garrison of Charlemont, and it was not his fate ever to see it afterwards; he was treacherously captured in his fortress about the same period by the cruel Sir Phelim O’Neill, and was barbarously murdered while under his protection, if not, as seems the fact, by his direction, on the 1st of March following. Nor was this costly and fairest house of its kind in “the north” ever after inhabited by any of his family; it was burned in those unhappy “troubles,” and left the melancholy, though picturesque memorial of sad events which we now see it.
P.
THE LAKE OF THE LOVERS,
A LEGEND OF LEITRIM.
How many lovely spots in this our beautiful country are never embraced within those pilgrimages after the picturesque, which numbers periodically undertake, rather to see what is known to many, and therefore should be so to them, than to visit nature, for her own sweet sake, in her more devious and undistinguished haunts! For my part, I am well pleased that the case stands thus. I love to think that I am treading upon ground unsullied by the footsteps of the now numerous tribe of mere professional peripatetics—that my eyes are wandering over scenery, the freshness of which has been impaired by no transfer to the portfolio of the artist or the tablets of the poetaster: that, save the scattered rustic residents, there is no human link to connect its memorials with the days of old, and, save their traditionary legends, no story to tell of its fortunes in ancient times. The sentiment is no doubt selfish as well as anti-utilitarian; but then I must add that it is only occasional, and will so far be pardoned by all who know how delightful it is to take refuge in the indulgent twilight of tradition from the rugged realities of recorded story. At all events, a rambler in any of our old, and especially mountainous tracts, will rarely lack abundant aliment for his thus modified sense of beauty, sublimity, or antiquarian fascination; and scenes have unexpectedly opened upon me in the solitudes of the hills and lakes of some almost untrodden and altogether unwritten districts, that have had more power to stir my spirit than the lauded and typographed, the versified and pictured magnificence of Killarney or of Cumberland, of Glendalough or of Lomond. It may have been perverseness of taste, or the fitness of mood, or the influence of circumstance, but I have been filled with a feeling of the beautiful when wandering among noteless and almost nameless localities to which I have been a stranger, when standing amid the most boasted beauties with the appliances of hand-book and of guide, with appetite prepared, and sensibilities on the alert. It is I suppose partly because the power of beauty being relative, a high pitch of expectancy requires a proportionate augmentation of excellence, and partly because the tincture of contrariety in our nature ever inclines us to enact the perverse critic, when called on to be the implicit votary. This in common with most others I have often felt, but rarely more so than during a casual residence some short time since among the little celebrated, and therefore perhaps a little more charming, mountain scenery of the county, which either has been, or might be, called Leitrim of the Lakes; for a tract more pleasantly diversified with well-set sheets of water, it would I think be difficult to name. Almost every hill you top has its still and solitary tarn, and almost every amphitheatre you enter, encompasses its wild and secluded lake—not seldom bearing on its placid bosom some little islet, linked with the generations past, by monastic or castellated ruins, as its seclusion or its strength may have invited the world-wearied anchorite to contemplation, or the predatory chieftain to defence.
On such a remote and lonely spot I lately chanced to alight, in the course of a long summer day’s ramble among the heights and hollows of that lofty range which for a considerable space abuts upon the borders of Sligo and Roscommon. The ground was previously unknown to me, and with all the zest which novelty and indefiniteness can impart, I started staff in hand with the early sun, and ere the mists had melted from the purple heather of their cloud-like summits, was drawing pure and balmy breath within the lonely magnificence of the hills. About noon, as I was casting about for some pre-eminently happy spot to fling my length for an hour or two’s repose, I reached the crest of a long gradual ascent that had been some time tempting me to look what lay beyond; and surely enough I found beauty sufficient to dissolve my weariness, had it been tenfold multiplied, and to allay my pulse, had it throbbed with the vehemence of fever. An oblong valley girdled a lovely lake on every side; here with precipitous impending cliffs, and there with grassy slopes of freshest emerald that seemed to woo the dimpling waters to lave their loving margins, and, as if moved with a like impulse, the little wavelets met the call with the gentle dalliance of their ebb and flow. A small wooded island, with its fringe of willows trailing in the water, stood about a furlong from the hither side, and in the centre of its tangled brake, my elevation enabled me to descry what I may call the remnants of a ruin—for so far had it gone in its decay—here green, there grey, as the moss, the ivy, or the pallid stains of time, had happened to prevail. A wild duck, with its half-fledged clutch, floated fearless from its sedgy shore. More remote, a fishing heron stood motionless on a stone, intent on its expected prey; and the only other animated feature in the quiet scene was a fisherman who had just moored his little boat, and having settled his tackle, was slinging his basket on his arm and turning upward in the direction where I lay. I watched the old man toiling up the steep, and as he drew nigh, hailed him, as I could not suffer him to pass without learning at least the name, if it had one, of this miniature Amhara. He readily complied, and placing his fish-basket on the ground, seated himself beside it, not unwilling to recover his breath and recruit his scanty stock of strength almost expended in the ascent. “We call it,” said he in answer to my query, “the Lake of the Ruin, or sometimes, to such as know the story, the Lake of the Lovers, after the two over whom the tombstone is placed inside yon mouldering walls. It is an old story. My grandfather told me, when a child, that he minded his grandfather telling it to him, and for anything he could say, it might have come down much farther. Had I time, I’d be proud to tell it to your honour, who seems a stranger in these parts, for it’s not over long; but I have to go to the Hall, and that’s five long miles off, with my fish for dinner, and little time you’ll say I have to spare, though it be down hill nearly all the way.” It would have been too bad to allow such a well-met chronicler to pass unpumped, and, putting more faith in the attractions of my pocket than of my person, I produced on the instant my luncheon-case and flask, and handing him a handsome half of the contents of the former, made pretty sure of his company for a time, by keeping the latter in my own possession till I got him regularly launched in the story, when, to quicken at once his recollection and his elocution, I treated him to an inspiring draught. When he had told his tale, he left me with many thanks for the refection; and I descending to his boat, entered it, and with the aid of a broken oar contrived to scull myself over to the island, the scene of the final fortunes of Connor O’Rourke and Norah M’Diarmod, the faithful-hearted but evil-fated pair who were in some sort perpetuated in its name. There, in sooth, within the crumbled walls, was the gravestone which covered the dust of him the brave and her the beautiful; and seating myself on the fragment of a sculptured capital, that showed how elaborately reared the ruined edifice had been, I bethought me how poorly man’s existence shows even beside the work of his own hands, and endeavoured for a time to make my thoughts run parallel with the history of this once-venerated but now forsaken, and, save by a few, forgotten structure; but finding myself fail in the attempt, settled my retrospect on that brief period wherein it was identified with the two departed lovers whose story I had just heard, and which, as I sat by their lowly sepulchre, I again repeated to myself.
This lake, as my informant told me, once formed a part of the boundary between the possessions of O’Rourke the Left-handed and M’Diarmod the Dark-faced, as they were respectively distinguished, two small rival chiefs, petty in property but pre-eminent in passion, to whom a most magnificent mutual hatred had been from generations back “bequeathed from bleeding sire to son”—a legacy constantly swelled by accruing outrages, for their paramount pursuits were plotting each other’s detriment or destruction, planning or parrying plundering inroads, inflicting or avenging injuries by open violence or secret subtlety, as seemed more likely to promote their purposes. At the name of an O’Rourke, M’Diarmod would clutch his battle-axe, and brandish it as if one of the detested clan were within its sweep: and his rival, nothing behind in hatred, would make the air echo to his deep-drawn imprecation on M’Diarmod and all his abominated breed when any thing like an opportunity was afforded him. Their retainers of course shared the same spirit of mutual abhorrence, exaggerated indeed, if that were possible, by their more frequent exposure to loss in cattle and in crops, for, as is wont to be the case, the cottage was incontinently ravaged when the stronghold was prudentially respected. O’Rourke had a son, an only one, who promised to sustain or even raise the reputation of the clan, for the youth knew not what it was to blench before flesh and blood—his feet were over foremost, in the wolf-hunt or the foray, and in agility, in valour, or in vigour, none within the compass of a long day’s travel could stand in comparison with young Connor O’Rourke. Detestation of the M’Diarmods had been studiously instilled from infancy, of course; but although the youth’s cheek would flush and his heart beat high when any perilous adventure was the theme, yet, so far at least, it sprang more from the love of prowess and applause than from the deadly hostility that thrilled in the pulses of his father and his followers. In the necessary intervals of forbearance, as in seed-time, harvest, or other brief breathing-spaces, he would follow the somewhat analogous and bracing pleasures of the chase; and often would the wolf or the stag—for shaggy forests then clothed these bare and desert hills—fall before his spear or his dogs, as he fleetly urged the sport afoot. It chanced one evening that in the ardour of pursuit he had followed a tough, long-winded stag into the dangerous territory of M’Diarmod. The chase had taken to the water of the lake, and he with his dogs had plunged in after in the hope of heading it; but having failed in this, and in the hot flush of a hunter’s blood scorning to turn back, he pressed it till brought down within a few spear-casts of the M’Diarmod’s dwelling. Proud of having killed his venison under the very nose of the latter, he turned homeward with rapid steps; for, the fire of the chase abated, he felt how fatal would be the discovery of his presence, and was thinking with complacency upon the wrath of the old chief on hearing of the contemptuous feat, when his eye was arrested by a white figure moving slowly in the shimmering mists of nightfall by the margin of the lake. Though insensible to the fear of what was carnal and of the earth, he was very far from being so to what savoured of the supernatural, and, with a slight ejaculation half of surprise and half of prayer, he was about changing his course to give it a wider berth, when his dogs espied it, and, recking little of the spiritual in its appearance, bounded after it in pursuit. With a slight scream that proclaimed it feminine as well as human, the figure fled, and the youth had much to do both with legs and lungs to reach her in time to preserve her from the rough respects of his ungallant escort. Beautiful indignation lightened from the dark eyes and sat on the pouting lip of Norah M’Diarmod—for it was the chieftain’s daughter—as she turned disdainfully towards him.
“Is it the bravery of an O’Rourke to hunt a woman with his dogs? Young chief, you stand upon the ground of M’Diarmod, and your name from the lips of her”—she stopped, for she had time to glance again upon his features, and had no longer heart to upbraid one who owned a countenance so handsome and so gallant, so eloquent of embarrassment as well as admiration.