Ireland Under Coercion: The Diary of an American (1 of 2) / (2nd ed.) (1888)

by William Henry Hurlbert

The town was gay with soldiers and police—whose advent had created such a demand for bread and meat, a man told us, that all the butchers and bakers in Letterkenny and Dunfanaghy were at their wits’ ends to meet it. “But they don’t complain of that!” We reached Newtown-Stewart by railway after dark. As we passed Sion the mills were all lighted up, giving it the look of an English or New England town. A New England snow-storm, too, awaited us at our journey’s end; and, after a wild drive of several miles through the whirling white mists, it was a delectable thing to find ourselves welcomed in a hall full of light and warmth and flowers by merry children and lively dogs, the guard of honour of the most gracious and charming of hostesses.

BARON’S COURT, Thursday, Feb. 9.—Among a batch of letters received this morning I find one from a most estimable and accomplished priest in the West of Ireland, to whom I wrote from Dublin announcing my intention of visiting the counties of Clare and Kerry. “I shall be very glad,” he says, “to learn that no evil hath befallen you during your visit to that solitary plague-spot, where dwell the disgraceful and degraded ‘Moonlighters.’ Would not ‘martial law,’ if applied to that particular spot, suffice to stamp out, these-insensate pests of society?” This language, strong, but not too strong in view of the hideous murder last week near Lixnaw of a farmer in the presence of his daughter for the atrocious crime of taking a farm “boycotted” by the National League, shows that the open alliance between this organisation and the criminal classes in certain parts of Ireland is beginning (not a day too soon) to arouse the better order of priests in Ireland to the peril of playing with edged tools. For my correspondent is not only a priest, but a Nationalist. I have sent him in reply a letter received by me, also to-day, touching the conduct in connection with the Lixnaw murder of a priest, a curate, I think, comparatively new to the place, who, standing by the corpse of the murdered man, endeavoured, so my informant states, to make his unfortunate daughter give up the names of the murderers, the effect of which would have been to put them on their guard, and “under the protection of that public conspiracy of silence, which is the shield of all such criminals in these parts!” Baron’s Court is a very large, stately mansion, lacking elevation perhaps like Blenheim, but imposing by its mass and the area it covers. It was rebuilt almost entirely by the late Duke of Abercorn, who also made immense plantations here which cover the country for miles around. His grandfather, the handsome Marquis of the days of the Prince Regent, came here a great deal towards the end of his life, but did little towards making the mansion worthy of its site. Two very good portraits of him here show that he deserved his reputation as the finest-looking man of his day, a reputation attested by a diamond ring, the history of which is still preserved in the family. A fine though irregular pearl given by Philip of Spain to his hapless spouse, Mary Tudor, is another of the heirlooms of Baron’s Court; but the ring and the note left by Mary Stuart to Claud Hamilton, Lord Paisley, mysteriously disappeared during the long minority of the late Duke under the trusteeship of the fourth Earl of Aberdeen, and have since, it is said, come into the possession of the Duke of Hamilton.

Of the three castles given to Lord Claud Hamilton by James I., to enable him to hold this country, one which stood at Strabaue has disappeared, the memory of it surviving only in the name of Castle Street in that town. The ivy-clad ruins of another adorn a height in this beautiful park. They are “bosomed high in tufted trees,” and overlook one of three most lovely lakes, stretching in a shining chain through the length of the demesne.

Another ruined tower of the time of King John stands on an island in one of these lakes. When the Ulster settlement was made, these lands with all the countryside were held by the O’Kanes. With the other Celtic and Catholic inhabitants, they were driven by the masterful invaders into the mountains and bogs. There still remain their descendants, still Celtic and still Catholic, and still dreaming of the day when they shall descend into the low country and drive the Protestant Scotch and English from the “fat lands” which they occupy. In this way the racial and religious animosities are kept alive, which have died out in Tipperary and Waterford, for example, where the Cromwellian English have become more Irish and often more Catholic than the Irish themselves.

I took a long drive and walk with Lord Ernest this afternoon through the park, which rivals Curraghmore in extent. It is nowhere divided from the lands of the adjoining tenants, and with great liberality is thrown open to the people, not only of Newtown-Stewart and Strabane, but of all the country. Parties, sometimes of seven hundred people, from Belfast come down to pass the day in these sylvan solitudes, and it is to be recorded to the praise of Ireland that these visitors always behave with perfect good sense and good feeling.

The “terrible trippers” of the English midlands, as I once heard an old verger in a northern Cathedral call them, who chip off relics from monuments, pull up flowers by the roots, and scatter sandwich papers and empty gingerbeer bottles broadcast over well-rolled lawns, are not known, Lord Ernest tells me, in this island. As he neatly puts it, the Irishman, no matter what his station in life may be, or how great a blackguard he may really be, always instinctively knows when he ought to behave like a gentleman, and knows how to do so. In the lakes were hundreds of wild fowl. The sky was a sky of Constable—silvery-white clouds, floating athwart a dome of clear Italian blue. The soil here must be extraordinarily fertile. The woods and groves are dense beyond belief. Cut down what you like, the growth soon overtakes you, as lush almost as in the tropics.

There was a great cyclone here a year or two ago, which prostrated in a night over a hundred thousand trees. You see the dentated gaps left by this disaster in the great circle of firs and birches on the surrounding hills, but they make hardly a serious break in the thoroughly sylvan character of the landscape. We visited the centre of the devastation, where I found myself in what seemed to be a backwoods clearing in America. An enterprising Scot, Kirkpatrick by name, has taken a contract under the Duke, built himself a neat wooden cabin and stables, set up a small saw-mill driven by steam, and is hard at work turning the fallen trees into timber, and making a very good thing of it, both for the Duke and for himself. He has one or two of his own people with him, but employs the labour of the country, and has no fear of disturbance. He thinks, however, that he must get “a good wicked dog” to frighten away the tramps, who sometimes stray into his woodland, and put the enterprise in peril by smoking and drowsing under haystacks.

Near this clearing is a model village, the houses scrupulously neat, with trees and flowers, and here we met the Duchess with her devoted dog walking briskly along to visit one of her people, a wonderful old man, bearing the ancient name of the O’Kanes, and five years older than the Kaiser William. Until six months ago this veteran was an active carpenter, coming and going, about his work at ninety-six like a man in middle age. Then he went to bed with a bad cold, and will probably never rise again. In all his life he never has touched meat or soup, and when they are now offered him rejects them angrily. He has lived, and preferred to live, entirely on oatmeal in the form of cakes and porridge, and on potatoes; so I make a present of him as a glorious example to the vegetarians. As in so many other cases, his memory of recent events is dim and clouded—of events long past, clear and photographic: the negatives taken in youth quite perfect, the lenses which now take, dimmed and fractured.

He perfectly recollects, for example, the assembling here of the recruits going out to the Continent before the battle of Waterloo, and can give the names and describe the peculiarities of stalwart lads long since crumbled into dust around Mont St. Jean. With the curious unconcern about death which marks his people, this expectant emigrant into the unknown world chats about his departure as if it were for Dublin, and his kinsfolk chat with him.

“Ye’ll be going soon!”