One Irish Summer

by William Eleroy Curtis

Ross Castle, Killarney

Ross Castle was the stronghold of the O’Donaghues. It was built somewhere about the twelfth century by the celebrated Hugh O’Donaghue, who lives in the lake and rides about the country every seven years. It is an historic fact that he lived there once, although the legends that are told of him go back for centuries before its foundation. There is a massive tower or keep, about one hundred feet high and one hundred feet square, “and ivy clasps the fissured stones with its entwining arms.” The walls of the tower are almost perfect. There is a long extension, however, entirely in ruins, but it gives an idea of the enormous dimensions of the castle. It was surrounded by outworks of great strength, and you can see traces of the round watch towers at the angles. A stone staircase leads to the top of the tower, where a beautiful view of the country can be obtained. Few ruins in Ireland are so extensive and so well kept.

Everybody has to pay a sixpence to see Ross Castle, and the money goes into the empty pocket of the Earl of Kenmare. You have to pay to see everything in this country, however, and sometimes the petty hotel charges are exasperating. They are insignificant, but everything goes in the bill; every time you draw a breath or ask a question it costs twopence. If the hotel managers would make a straight rate per day to cover all these trifles they would make a great deal more money and save a great deal of temper. The only free ruins are those of the ancient Abbey of Agahadoe, which occupy a conspicuous site on the ridge back of the town where they were built in the eighth century by Finian, the leper saint.

Ross Castle has withstood many a siege in its time, but was finally captured, dismantled, and left in its present condition during the civil war in 1652. It was attacked by General Ludlow with an army of four thousand footmen and two hundred horse, and defended by The O’Donaghue of that time. Finding it impregnable by land, Ludlow left a portion of his force to hold it in a state of siege, while he retired to Castlemaine and built a fleet of boats with which he made an attack by water. There was an ancient proverb that “Ross Castle will never fall until ships float in the Lake of Killarney,” hence, the garrison remembered that saying when they saw Ludlow’s flotilla approaching, and were so demoralized by the superstition that they abandoned it and laid down their arms. It was the last of the O’Donaghues. Their power and glory have never been regained.

The village of Killarney is unattractive and untidy, but it is a busy place. One doesn’t understand why in a country where there is so much room to spare, the villages should not be made up of detached cottages with gardens and lawns, hedges and shade trees, instead of sections of solid blocks that look as if they had been cut out of the tenement house districts of crowded cities. Killarney is a solid mass of brick and mortar, with stuccoed fronts, painted a dingy yellow, without the slightest thing to relieve the monotony until you suddenly pass the last house and the green fields begin.

It is a great tourist center, and there are a dozen hotels and boarding-houses of different pretensions and prices. There are “licensed houses” and “unlicensed houses” and some of them are licensed for seven days in a week, which means that the proprietor has permission to sell whisky and beer from two to five o’clock on the Sabbath day. Cook’s excursion parties come in like swarms of bees, buzzing around the hotels and shops where laces and other curiosities are for sale and carry off loads of queer things as souvenirs. They breakfast at seven o’clock in the morning and are piled into great four-horse coaches by nine and start off on excursions with their luncheons in baskets under the seats. They return at sunset completely tired out, but the next morning are off for Dublin or Glengariff. It is about as hard work to travel with an excursion party as anything I know of, for every moment must be economized and everybody feels under obligations to see everything.

Killarney is quite an educational center also. There are several popular schools there and several monasteries. The Franciscans conduct a theological seminary and the Christian Brothers have a college in connection with the cathedral. There are two or three convents where young ladies are educated, and a large institution in which two hundred and ten girls are being taught by the nuns to make lace, which is one of the most profitable occupations an Irish woman can engage in. And they have a School of Housewifery, conducted by the British government under the supervision of the minister of agriculture at Dublin. Paternalism is carried farther in Ireland than in Switzerland, Germany, or any other place I know of, as you will admit when you hear that twenty-three rosy-cheeked, blue-eyed mavourneens are being educated at the expense of the taxpayers as domestic servants. They are rescued from the filthy cabins in the mountains, washed, and clothed in neat liveries, natty little muslin caps are pinned to their raven tresses, frilled muslin aprons are fastened to their frocks, and they are taught how to wash dishes and cook and make beds and do plain sewing, and dust the bric-a-brac in the drawing-room and say, “Yes, me lady,” and “Yes, me lord,” and courtesy when they are spoken to. They learn to mend and embroider, to do up hair, to fasten dresses and other duties pertaining to the jurisdiction of a lady’s maid, and, after a year or so of this training, they are found positions in the households of the nobility, where they will spend their lives as servants and marry a footman or a gamekeeper, as will their children and grandchildren generations to come after them, because domestic service is a profession in Great Britain, and is followed by families who are trained for their work.

This school is a great thing for the Irish girls in the mountain cabins, whose lives might otherwise be hopelessly sunk in squalor and filth that seem to be inseparable from the peasant population. I have never been able to find anybody to explain why an Irish farmer piles his manure in front of the only door to his cabin. It is an habitual subject of witticism, just as it is in Switzerland, where similar customs prevail, but with thousands of acres of bare ground all around the cabin, it would seem that some other place might be found.