One Irish Summer

by William Eleroy Curtis

The village of Swords, three miles distant, has another ancient castle, where the bodies of Brian Boru and his son Morrough rested the first night after the battle of Clontarf while they were being carried to their final tomb at Armagh.

All the little towns along the coast of the Irish Channel are associated with St. Patrick and St. Columba, who spent more or less time there, founding monasteries and building churches. One of the monasteries, called “the Golden Prebend” because it was so rich, was held by William of Wykeham in 1366 and was the seat of a cardinal for a century or two.

A mile and a half from the main line, beyond Swords, is the village of Portraine, where Dean Swift’s “Stella” lived for several years, and where a branch of the insane asylum he founded in Dublin has since been erected. It stands upon lands given by Sigtryg of the Silken Beard, the Danish king of Dublin, for the endowment of a Christian church. The house was occupied for many years by the nuns of St. Augustine, where “the womankind of the most part of the whole Englisher of this land are brought up in virtue, learning and in the English tongue and behaviour.”

The little town of Rush, famous for its early potatoes and its tulip bulbs, is called “Holland in Ireland.” It has an old church, with beautiful pointed arches, which dates back to the sixteenth century, and contains a richly decorated monument to Sir Christopher Barnwell and his beloved wife, who died in 1607.

Skerries is a fishing-town, where St. Patrick lived for several years, and a quaint little chapel, like many others in Ireland, is attributed to him, although it could not possibly have been built for several centuries after his time. But in the history of these ancient sanctuaries a few hundred years do not count.

While ruins are picturesque and ivy-clad castles that date back beyond the Middle Ages have a fascination for tourists from a new world like ours, it was a relief when the chauffeur brought us up to the entrance of an old-fashioned factory in the compact little town of Balbriggan, which has given its name to a certain kind of knitted goods that are worn the world over. It is a quaint mass of high houses, built of stone and brick on both sides of narrow but neatly kept streets, which seems unnecessary when miles of green fields and glowing gardens encircle them and give them every chance to spread out. But you will find the same tendency to snuggle up as closely as possible in all the manufacturing communities of Europe.

The men folks at Balbriggan fish and farm the soil, and the women work in the mills, but the law, which is strictly enforced there, prohibits child labor and compels the children to attend school for at least one hundred and twenty-eight days in the year until they pass their fourteenth birthday. The superintendents of the mills tell the same story that I heard in the cotton factories of South Carolina and Georgia, that they prefer adult operatives; that the children are careless and inefficient and seldom earn their wages, but they are compelled to employ them or lose the services of the parents. There are two factories in Balbriggan for the manufacture of knitted hosiery and underclothing by machinery invented here more than one hundred and fifty years ago and since imitated everywhere. Both factories still remain under the control of the families which founded them, but the shares are distributed among a larger number of people by inheritance from generation to generation.

Scattered along the coast at intervals of two or three miles, and generally at the summits of hills overlooking the sea, are “martello towers,” fifty, sixty, and sometimes ninety feet high, and from forty to a hundred feet in diameter. They were erected early in the nineteenth century as defensive watch-towers, when the country was in dread of an invasion by Napoleon. The name was taken from similar towers in Corsica and Sardinia, where they were erected for protection against pirates in the time of Charles V. These towers are said to have originally had bells which were struck by hammers to alarm the people in case of danger; hence they were called “martello” towers, that being the Italian word for “hammer.”

It makes a Protestant ashamed when he reads the history of Drogheda and sees the ruins that Cromwell left there. Thousands of men and women and children were butchered in the name of the Lord by Cromwell’s soldiers when he took that quaint old town by storm in September, 1649. It was a ferocious massacre, and Cromwell admitted the facts while proclaiming himself the agent of the Almighty to punish a rebellious people. This is what he wrote with his own hand:

“The governor, Sir Arthur Aston, and divers considerable officers being there, our men, getting up to them, were ordered by me to put them all to the sword, and, indeed, being in the heat of action, I forbade them to spare any that were in arms in the town; and I think that night they put to death about two thousand persons. Divers officers and soldiers being fled over the bridge into the other part of the town, where about a hundred of them possessed St. Peter’s Church steeple, some the West Gate, and others a strong round tower next to the gate called St. Sundays. These being summoned to yield for mercy refused. Whereupon I ordered the steeple of St. Peter’s Church to be fired. The next day the other two towers were summoned. When they submitted their officers were knocked on the head and every tenth man of the soldiers was killed. The rest shipped for the Barbadoes. The soldiers in the other tower were all spared as to their lives only and shipped likewise for the Barbadoes.