And then a gentleman named Oliver Cromwell went into the real estate business over in Ireland about the middle of the seventeenth century. He drove the inhabitants of a vast area from their farms and the towns in which they lived and compelled them to take refuge in other parts of the country, while he issued scrip that could be located upon the farms they left and paid his soldiers with it because he was short of cash. Many of his soldiers remained here and married and were the ancestors of the present population. Others sold their scrip to speculators who located upon large tracts and eventually disposed of them to men who had the money.
These real estate transactions of Henry VIII., Elizabeth, and Cromwell have been severely criticised, but they must have been right because we did very much the same thing with our Indians, the original owners of the “Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.” Whenever an Indian tribe has rebelled about something, just as the Irish have rebelled from time to time since the conquest of Henry II., we have driven them from the homes of their forefathers; have penned them up in reservations, and have sold their lands to immigrants from Ireland, Sweden, and other European countries, precisely as the English sovereigns disposed of the homes and the farms of the Irish. We did it in the name of civilization; they did it, very often, because they could not worship the same God in the same way.
About an hour by automobile from Dublin, beyond Bray and Greystone and other summer resorts, is a lovely place that you will be pleased to hear about because there is a pretty story attached to it. It is an old Tudor mansion of the seventeenth century, covered with luxuriant ivy and half concealed by ilex, arbutus, hawthorn, and rhododendron bushes that are all in bloom in May. They call it “Hollybrook” and it is the seat of Sir Robert Adair Hodson, whose great-grandfather, Sir Robert Adair, a dashing soldier, was knighted by his king on the field of battle for the handy way he had of amputating the heads of his majesty’s enemies. He afterward became a lieutenant-general and one of the most famous soldiers in the United Kingdom. But what interests us more is that he was the young gentleman for whom the song “Robin Adair” was written by Lady Katherine Keppel. She loved him very much, they say, and broke her heart for him.
Just beyond the railway station of Rathdrum is the Avondale estate, the seat of the family of the late Charles S. Parnell, the Irish political leader, which has recently been purchased by the new Irish department of agriculture, as a school for the training of foresters. Here we enter that romantic region known as the Vale of Avoca, which has been described in a pretty ballad by Tom Moore, called “The Meeting of the Waters”—the rivers Avonbeg and Avonmore. Here was a meeting place of the Druids in ancient times. Their altars and seats of judgment remain, and you can see the hurling stone of the great Finn McCool, which is fourteen feet long, ten feet wide, and seven feet thick, but he was so strong that he had no trouble in tossing it about like a football.
Beyond “The Meeting of the Waters,” seven or eight miles over a very attractive road, are the Woods of Shillelagh, which gave their name to the traditional weapon of offense and defense, formerly carried by every Irishman, but long ago obsolete. You can buy genuine shillalahs at the curio stores, those that have been in actual use and “have cracked many a head,” as the dealer will tell you. You will find them also put away in the cabins with other heirlooms, with the christening clothes of the gossoons and the confirmation dresses of the colleens, but that interesting and typical weapon of the Irish peasant has entirely disappeared. It was a blackthorn stick, about eighteen inches long, from an inch to an inch and a half thick and a knot at one end of it. The best material in Ireland was found in the woods that surround the ancient little village of Shillelagh—hence the name.
Wicklow is especially fascinating to the artist and the antiquarian. The scenery is not so wild nor on so large a scale as that of the Alps, but bits of Switzerland in miniature are scattered about among the Wicklow hills and, indeed, several other very respectable mountains. Douce is 2,384 feet high, Duffhill 2,364, Gravale, 2,352, and Kippure 2,473 feet, and they rise immediately from the level of tide water within a few miles of the sea, so that they seem much higher. There are twenty-one mountains more than two thousand feet high, three more than two thousand five hundred, and one more than three thousand (Lugnaynilla) in this immediate neighborhood and within twenty miles of the coast. Concealed among them are several charming little lakes and rugged canyons and glens and dense forests. Nearly all of these are associated with religious history, with the lives of several saints who went there in retreat for meditation or lived like hermits in the caves and dells and prayed for the salvation of the world.
This was the home of Laurence Sterne, author of “Uncle Toby” and “Corporal Trim.” The record of his baptism is inscribed upon the registry of a quaint old church, and in 1720, according to the local traditions, he accidentally fell into a mill race and narrowly escaped being crushed to death by the water wheel which was working at the time. This was the land of the O’Tooles. The ruins of Castle Keven, the stronghold of the clan, are visited daily in the summer by hundreds of people.
The Vale of Avoca, County Wicklow