We were told the Connemara was very picturesque, and the most interesting section of Ireland, both in scenery, in local color, and in costumes, but it is a disappointment in all three respects. The scenery is grand, as mountains always are, but it is very monotonous; the people are so poor and so dirty that they repel, and we seldom see them at work, except in the peat fields as we pass. The Connemara peasant woman always wears a red skirt, goes barefooted, and covers her tousled head under a heavy shawl. She works alongside of the men and does her share of the heavy as well as the light labor. She is expected to do as much manual labor as her husband or her brother, and judging from what we observed in the peat bogs, they give her the heavy end of the load.
We spent the night at Leenane, a little fishing village at the head of a fiord that comes up nine miles from the Atlantic into the mountains. There is a plain but good hotel, much patronized by fishermen. In the morning we continued our journey over the mountains through some very rugged country. We drove through the famous Pass of Kylemore, one of the most beautiful pieces of scenery in Ireland, and called “The Gem of Connemara.” It was particularly interesting to us because Kylemore Castle is the home of an American girl, the Duchess of Manchester, who was formerly Miss Helena Zimmerman of Cincinnati and is now the wife of the Duke of Manchester. It is one of the most beautiful residences in Ireland, and is situated upon the banks of a lovely little lake and at the base of a mountain called Doughraugh, which rises 1,736 feet behind it as a background and is covered with the most beautiful foliage. The castle is in the center of the pass, between two lofty mountains, and the roadway for miles passes through a forest and between fields that are inclosed with fuchsia hedges.
A Scene in the West of Ireland; Lenane Harbor
Kylemore Castle was built by Mr. Mitchell Henry, a home rule member of parliament in the ’60’s, about a hundred years ago, and cost him more than a million dollars. The chapel, which cost more than a hundred thousand dollars, was built by his son, who sold the place to the Duke of Manchester. As the latter was not able to pay for it, his father-in-law, Mr. Zimmerman, a railroad magnate of Cincinnati, president of the Cincinnati, Hamilton & Dayton Railroad, took it off his hands for £69,000 and presented it to his daughter, who spends most of her time there, because the climate is very agreeable throughout the entire year and she loves the seclusion. There isn’t a neighbor for several miles, except the people employed on the place. There are fourteen thousand acres of shooting, several small lakes, and about forty acres in garden.
This is the kingdom of Grace O’Malley, the famous Amazon daughter of Owen O’Malley, King of Connaught. She lived and reigned here in the time of Queen Elizabeth, and her castle is now used as a police barracks. While some of the legends of Grace O’Malley are doubtless fiction, many of them are founded upon fact. She was a real woman and a real queen with pride and power and all the other qualities that are attached to royalty. Queen Elizabeth, to whom she once paid a visit, offered to make her a countess, but Grace declined on the ground that the Queen of Connaught was the equal of the Queen of England, and could accept no favors. Her first husband was an O’Flaherty and her second was Sir Richard Burke. The second was a “trial marriage,” and it was agreed that after the end of one year the union could be dissolved by either husband or wife saying, “I dismiss you,” to the other, and Grace said it first.
We passed around the base of the mountain Crough Patrick, which rises with great abruptness to a height of 2,510 feet, almost directly from the Atlantic Ocean, and has a flat plain about half a mile square upon its summit. There are the remains of an ancient chapel, and a large Celtic cross stands boldly in the foreground, where it can be seen from all the country round. This is one of the most sacred spots in Ireland, because, according to Monk Jocelyn, who wrote a life of St. Patrick in the twelfth century, and other historians, that most venerated saint “brought together here all the demons, toads, serpents, creeping things, and other venomous creatures in Ireland and imprisoned them in a deep ravine on the sea front of the mountain known as Lugnademon (the pen of the demons) as fast as they came in answer to his summons, and kept them safely there until he was ready to destroy them. Then, standing upon the summit of the Crough, St. Patrick, with a bell in hand, cursed them and expelled them from Ireland forever. And every time he rang the bell thousands of toads, adders, snakes, reptiles, and other noisome things went down, tumbling neck and heels after each other, and were swallowed up forever in the sea.” A less reverent writer says:
“’Twas on the top of the high hill
St. Patrick preached his sarmints;