In the churchyard is a hillock, bare of grass, about a tomb. There lies buried, according to tradition, a public functionary who attested a statement by exclaiming, “If I speak falsely, may grass never grow on my grave.” One of his descendants is doubtless now an M.P. Mr. Cameron had kindly written from Cork to the officer in charge of the constabulary here asking him to get me a good car for Lismore. So Father Keller very kindly walked with me through the town to the “Devonshire Arms,” a very neat and considerable hotel, in quest of him. On the way he pointed out to me what remains of a house which is supposed to have served as the headquarters of Cromwell while he was here, and a small chapel also in which the Protector worshipped after his sort. Off the main street is a lane called Windmill Lane, where probably stood the windmill from which in 1580 a Franciscan friar, Father David O’Neilan, was hung by the feet and shot to death by the soldiers of Elizabeth because he refused to acknowledge the spiritual supremacy of the Queen. He had been dragged through the main street at the tail of a horse to the place of execution. His name is one of many names of confessors of that time about to be submitted at Rome for canonisation. We could not find the officer I sought at the hotel, but Father Keller took me to a livery-man in the main street, who very promptly got out a car with “his best horse,” and a jarvey who would “surely take me over to Lismore inside of two hours and a half.” He was as good as his master’s word, and a delightful drive it was, following the course of Spenser’s river, the Awniduffe, “which by the Englishman is called Blackwater.” Nobody now calls it anything else. The view of Youghal Harbour, as we made a great circuit by the bridge on leaving the town, was exceedingly fine. Lying as it does within easy reach of Cork, this might be made a very pleasant summer halting-place for Americans landing at Queenstown, who now go further and probably fare worse. One Western wanderer, with his family, Father Keller told me, did last year establish himself here, a Catholic from Boston, to whom a son was born, and who begged the Father to give the lad a local name in baptism, “the oldest he could think of.”
I should have thought St. Declan would have been “old” enough, or St. Nessan of “Ireland’s Eye,” or Saint Cartagh, who made Lismore a holy city, “into the half of which no woman durst enter,” sufficiently “local,” but Father Keller found in the Calendar a more satisfactory saint still in St. Goran or “Curran,” known also as St. Mochicaroen de Nona, from a change he made in the recitation of that part of the Holy Office.
The drive from Youghal to Lismore along the Blackwater, begins, continues, and ends in beauty. In the summer a steamer makes the trip by the river, and it must be as charming in its way as the ascent of the Dart from Dartmouth to Totness, or of the Eance from Dinard to St. Suliac. My jarvey was rather a taciturn fellow, but by no means insensible to the charms of his native region. About the Ponsonby estate and its troubles he said very little, but that little was not entirely in keeping with what I had heard at Youghal. “It was an old place, and there was no grand house on it. But the landlord was a kind-man.” “Father Keller was a good man too. It was a great pity the people couldn’t be on their farms; and there was land that was taken on the hills. It was a great pity. The people came from all parts to see the Blackwater and Lismore; and there was money going.” “Yes, he would be glad to see it all quiet again. Ah yes! that was a most beautiful place there just running out into the Blackwater. It was a gentleman owned it; he lived there a good deal, and he fished. Ah! there’s no such river in the whole world for salmon as the Blackwater; indeed, there is not! Everything was better when he was a lad. There was more money going, and less talking. Father Keller was a very good man; but he was a new man, and came to Youghal from Queenstown.”
We passed on our way the ruins of Dromaneen Castle, the birthplace of the lively old Countess of Desmond, who lies buried at Youghal. Here, too, according to a local tradition, she met her death, having climbed too high into a famous cherry-tree at Affane, near Dromaneen, planted there by Sir Walter Raleigh, who first introduced this fruit, as well as the tobacco plant and the potato, into Ireland. At Cappoquin, which stands beautifully on the river, I should have been glad to halt for the night, in order to visit the Trappist Monastery there, an offshoot of La Meilleraye, planted, I think, by some monks from Santa Susanna, of Lulworth, after Charles X. took refuge in the secluded and beautiful home of the Welds. The schools of this monastery have been a benediction to all this part of Ireland for more than half a century.
Lismore has nothing now to show of its ancient importance save its castle and its cathedral, both of them absolutely modern! A hundred years ago the castle was simply a ruin overhanging the river. It then belonged to the fifth Duke of Devonshire, who had inherited it from his mother, the only child and heiress of the friend of Pope, Richard, fourth Earl of Cork, and third Earl of Burlington. It had come into the hands of the Boyles by purchase from Sir Walter Ealeigh, to whom Elizabeth had granted it, with all its appendages and appurtenances. The fifth Duke of Devonshire, who was the husband of Coleridge’s “lady nursed in pomp and pleasure,” did little or nothing, I believe, to restore the vanished glories of Lismore; and the castle, as it now exists, is the creation of his son, the artistic bachelor Duke, to whom England owes the Crystal Palace and all the other outcomes of Sir Joseph Paxton’s industry and enterprise. His kinsman and successor, the present Duke, used to visit Lismore regularly down to the time of the atrocious murder of Lord Frederick Cavendish, and many of the beautiful walks and groves which make the place lovely are due, I believe, to his taste and his appreciation of the natural charms of Lismore. I dismissed my car at the “Devonshire Arms,” an admirable little hotel near the river, and having ordered my dinner there, walked down to the castle, almost within the grounds of which the hotel stands. It is impossible to imagine a more picturesque site for a great inland mansion. The views up and down the Blackwater from the drawing-room windows are simply the perfection of river landscape. The grounds are beautifully laid out, one secluded garden-walk, in particular, taking you back to the inimitable Italian garden-walks of the seventeenth century. In the vestibule is the sword of state of the Corporation of Youghal, a carved wooden cradle for which still stands in the church at that place, and over the great gateway are the arms of the great Earl of Cork, but these are almost the only outward and visible signs of the historic past about the castle. Seen from the graceful stone bridge which spans the river, its grey towers and turrets quite excuse the youthful enthusiasm with which the Duke of Connaught, who made a visit here when he was Prince Arthur, is said to have written to his mother, that Lismore was “a beautiful place, very like Windsor Castle, only much finer.”
Lismore Cathedral was almost entirely rebuilt by the second Earl of Cork three or four years after the Restoration, and has a handsome marble spire, but there is little in it to recall the Catholic times in which Lismore was a city of churches and a centre of Irish devotion.
The hostess of the “Devonshire Arms” gave me some excellent salmon, fresh from the river, and a very good dinner. She bewailed the evil days on which she has fallen, and the loss to Lismore of all that the Castle used to mean to the people. Lady Edward Cavendish had spent a short time here some little time ago, she said, and the people were delighted to have her come there. “It would be a great thing for the country if all the uproar and quarrelling could be put an end to. It did nobody any good, least of all the poor people.”
From Lismore I came back by the railway through Fermoy.
CHAPTER IX.
PORTUMNA, GALWAY, Feb. 28.—I left Cork by an early train to-day, and passing through the counties of Cork, Limerick, Tipperary, Queen’s, and King’s, reached this place after dark on a car from Parsonstown. The day was delightfully cool and bright. I had the carriage to myself almost all the way, and gave up all the time I could snatch from the constantly varying and often very beautiful scenery to reading a curious pamphlet which I picked up in Dublin entitled Pour I’Irlande. It purports to have been written by a “Canadian priest” living at Lurgan in Ireland, and to be a reply to M. de Mandat Grancey’s volume, Chez Paddy. It is adorned with a frontispiece representing a monster of the Cerberus type on a monument, with three heads and three collars labelled respectively “Flattery,” “Famine,” and “Coercion.” On the pedestal is the inscription—“1800 to 1887. Erected by the grateful Irish to the English Government.” The text is in keeping with the frontispiece. In a passage devoted to the “atrocious evictions” of Glenbehy in 1887, the agent of the property is represented as “setting fire with petroleum” to the houses of two helpless men, and turning out “eighteen human beings into the highway in the depth of winter.” Not a word is said of the agent’s flat denial of these charges, nor a word of the advice given to the agent by Sir Redvers Buller that the mortgagee ought to level the cottages occupied by trespassers, nor a word about Father Quilter’s letter to Colonel Turner, branding his flock as “poor slaves” of the League, and turning them over to “Mr. Roe or any other agent” to do as he liked with them, since they could not, or would not, keep their plighted faith given through their own priest.