One Irish Summer

by William Eleroy Curtis

Macroom is a pretty village with a castle, of which Admiral Penn, father of the founder of Pennsylvania, was once in command, and where William Penn is said to have been born. The venerable old pile was built originally in the time of King John, more than seven hundred years ago, has been burned down no less than four times, and was besieged and plundered in the wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries again and again. It now belongs to Lord Ardilaun, one of the sons of Benjamin Guinness, the greatest brewer in the world, who has erected a beautiful modern residence near by and occasionally occupies it. Lord Ardilaun owns so many castles that he would find it difficult to live in all of them the same year. He would be kept moving about like a commercial traveler. He has a beautiful estate on one side of Glengariff and a shooting lodge on the other, and his favorite residence is a stately château near Muckross Abbey on the shores of the Lakes of Killarney. He has a shooting lodge at Ashford, and another at Ross Hill in Central Ireland, a fishing lodge at Kylemon Pass in Connemara, and city residences on Stephens Green, Dublin, and at No. 11 Carleton House Terrace, London.

The traveler bound for Glengariff changes from the railway train to an open coach at the railway station of Macroom. The coach is built for mountain travel, strong and heavy, and the seats, which extend from side to side, accommodate four people of ordinary dimensions. The handbags are stowed away under the seats and in a cavern which opens from the rear. A couple of steamer trunks can be taken along also. There is a roof to the stage, which is very much needed to keep off the rain, and it can be rolled up into a ridge in the middle of the supporting hoops in the sunshine.

Lake Gougane-Barra, County Cork

The driver of a stage in Ireland doesn’t flourish and crack his whip like the gentlemen who pursue that line of business in Montana and Colorado. He is usually a talkative chap, and tells interesting stories with a deep, rich brogue and quaint wit that is charming, but he drives quietly through the villages and pulls up at his destination as modestly as if he were on a cart instead of a coach full of tourists. In the Rocky Mountains the stage driver always “shows off” at the end of his journey, but he never tries to do anything of that sort in Ireland.

The road follows along the banks of the Sullane River until it reaches a string of lakes called Inchageela, which are dotted with lovely little islands, and are said to be full of fish. There is not a tree to be seen, but the ground is covered with a rich, thick, velvet turf, and myriads of wild flowers of all colors and all varieties—a crazy quilt of bloom. No one ever imagined that there could be so many wild flowers or such beautiful ones.

The little town of Inchageela is the lunch station, where we were served with a wholesome meal of roast mutton, potatoes, lettuce, and gooseberry tart that tasted as good as anything I ever had at the Waldorf, and the buxom, red-faced landlady gave us a hearty, cordial blessing as we climbed back into our seats to continue the journey. We passed several ruined castles, some of them near the roadside and the others picturesquely situated on the mountain slopes among the rocks. They all once belonged to the MacCarthys, who were kings in this country until they lost their power by foolish fighting, and to-day I have been assured that not one foot of sod in the County of Cork or in the County of Kerry is owned by a man of that name or clan.

After a while we turned from the main road at a little village called Carrinacurrah, which is hardly as big as its name, and slowly climbed a picturesque hill to the mystic lake of Gougane-Barra, and stopped to rest the horses and ourselves at a neatly kept inn. As it was a holiday, all the people in the neighborhood were gathered at Cronin’s Inn when the two coachloads of passengers drove in from Macroom, and several of them accompanied us across to Gougane Island and told us the history of that sacred place. There was an old man with bog-oak walking sticks to sell, and boys with post cards, for there isn’t a spot in Ireland that hasn’t been photographed and transferred to a post card in hideous colors. Mr. Benjamin Shorten, a man of importance in the community, had hailed the coach when it passed his house, and was therefore not only an entertainer but a fellow-passenger of the strangers within his gate. And it was a strange story that he told us of the restoration of the ruins and the erection, by Mr. John R. Walsh of Chicago, in memory of his parents, of the little shrine on the site of St. Fin-Barre’s oratory which had been blessed by St. Patrick fourteen hundred years ago.

Mr. Walsh could not have chosen a more beautiful or a more appropriate place for a memorial to his parents, and the work has been well done. It is a sacred as well as a most romantic spot. Gougane-Barra is what they call a “tarn,” a jagged glen in the mountains nearly a mile long and about a quarter of a mile wide, almost entirely filled with water like a Norwegian fiord and entirely inclosed with walls of rock rising to a height of nearly eighteen hundred feet. The principal peaks are called Conicar (1,886 feet), Bealick (1,762 feet), and Foilasteokeen (1,698 feet). The cliffs cast a deep shadow over the water and add to the solemnity and mystery with which the place has been invested from its association with the patron saint of the city of Cork and one of the earliest apostles in Ireland. After heavy rains each mountain side becomes a foaming cataract, and the natives say that the sound of the water pouring down the rocks may be heard for miles. The lake is very deep and is the source of the River Lee, which runs sixty-five miles from here to the Bay of Cork.