“They call it Mr. Stubber’s Cairn,” said the jarvey; “and a sorrowful sight it is, to think of the work it would have given the people, building the big house that’ll never be built now, I’m thinking.” If Mr. Stubber should become an “absentee,” he can hardly, I think, be blamed for it.
His property marches with that of Mr. Robert Staples, who comes of a Gloucestershire family planted in Ireland under Charles I.
“Mr. Staples is farming his own lands,” said our jarvey, when I commented on the fine appearance of some fields as we drove by; “and he’ll be doing very well this year. Ah! he comes and goes, but he’s here a great deal, and he looks after everything himself; that’s the reason the fields is good.”
This is a property of some 1500 statute acres. Only last March the landlord took over from one tenant, who was in arrears of two years and a half and owed him some £300, a farm of 90 acres, giving the man fifty pounds to boot, and bidding him go in peace. I wonder whether this proceeding would make the landlord a “land-grabber,” and expose him to the pains and penalties of “boycotting”?
On this place, too, it seems that Mr. Staples’s grandfather put up many houses for the tenants; a thing worth noting, as one of not a few instances I have come upon to show that it will not do to accept without examination the sweeping statements so familiar to us in America, that improvements have never been made by the landlord upon Irish estates.
My companion had meant to put me down at the railway station of Attanagh, there to catch a good train to Kilkenny.
But we had a capital nag, and reached Attanagh so early that we determined to drive on to Ballyragget.
From Attanagh to Ballyragget the road ran along a plateau which commanded the most beautiful views of the valley of the Nore and of the finely wooded country beyond. Ballyragget itself is a brisk little market town, the American influence showing itself here, as in so many other places, in such trifles as the signs on the shops which describe them as “stores.” My salmon-fishing companion put me down at the station and went off to the river, which flows through the town, and is here a swift and not inconsiderable stream.
An hour in the train took me to Kilkenny, where I met by appointment several persons whom I had been unable to see during my previous visit in March.
These gentlemen, experienced agents, gave me a good deal of information as to the effect of the present state of things upon the “moral” of the tenantry in different parts of Ireland. On one estate, for example, in the county of Longford, a tenant has been doing battle for the cause of Ireland in the following extraordinary fashion.