And so, after a few more such great cases, the court rose; and I had leisure to make moral reflections, if so minded—and sighing to think that cruelty and falsehood, selfishness and rapacity, dwell not in crowds alone, but flourish all the world over: sweet flowers of human nature, they bloom in all climates and seasons, and are just as much at home in a hothouse in Thavies’ Inn, as on a lone mountain or a rocky sea-coast in Ireland, where never a tree will grow!
We walked along this coast, after the judicial proceedings were over, to see the country, and the new road that the Board of Works is forming—such a wilderness of rocks I never saw! The district for miles is covered with huge stones, shining white in patches of green, with the Binabola on one side of the spectator, and the Atlantic running in and out of a thousand little bays on the other. The country is very hilly, or wavy rather, being a sort of ocean petrified; and the engineers have hard work with these numerous abrupt little ascents and descents, which they equalise as best they may, by blasting, cutting, filling cavities, and levelling eminences. Some hundreds of men were employed at this work, busy with their hand-barrows, their picking and boring. Their pay is eightpence a day.
There is little to see in the town of Roundstone, except a Presbyterian Chapel in process of erection, that seems big enough to accommodate the Presbyterians of the county; and a sort of lay convent, being a community of brothers of the third order of St. Francis. They are all artisans and workmen, taking no vows, but living together in common, and undergoing a certain religious regimen. Their work is said to be very good, and all are employed upon some labour or other. On the front of this unpretending little dwelling is an inscription with a great deal of pretence, stating that the establishment was founded with the approbation of ‘His Grace, the most Reverend the Lord Archbishop of Tuam.’
The most Reverend Doctor MacHale is a clergyman of great learning, talents, and honesty; but His Grace the Lord Archbishop of Tuam strikes me as being no better than a mountebank; and some day I hope even his own party will laugh this humbug down. It is bad enough to be awed by big titles at all; but to respect sham ones! O stars and garters! We shall have his Grace the Lord Chief-Rabbi next, or his Lordship the Arch-Imaum!
CHAPTER XIX
CLIFDEN TO WESTPORT
ON leaving Ballynahinch (with sincere regret, as any lonely tourist may imagine, who is called upon to quit the hospitable friendliness of such a place and society), my way lay back to Clifden again, and thence through the Joyce country, by the Killery mountains, to Westport in Mayo. The road, amounting in all to four-and-forty Irish miles, is performed in cars, in different periods of time, according to your horse and your luck. Sometimes, both being bad, the traveller is two days on the road; sometimes a dozen hours will suffice for the journey—which was the case with me, though I confess to having found the twelve hours long enough. After leaving Clifden, the friendly look of the country seemed to vanish; and, though picturesque enough, was a thought too wild and dismal for eyes accustomed to admire a hop-garden in Kent, or a view of rich folly meadows in Surrey, with a clump of trees and a comfortable village spire. ‘Inglis,’ the Guide-book says, ‘compares the scenes to the Norwegian Fiords.’ Well, the Norwegian Fiords must, in this case, be very dismal sights; and I own that the wildness of Hampstead Heath (with the imposing walls of Jack Straw’s Castle rising stern in the midst of the green wilderness) are more to my taste than the general views of yesterday.
We skirted by lake after lake, lying lonely in the midst of lonely boglands, or bathing the sides of mountains robed in sombre rifle green. Two or three men, and as many huts, you see in the course of each mile perhaps, as toiling up the bleak hills, or jingling more rapidly down them, you pass through this sad region. In the midst of the wilderness, a chapel stands here and there, solitary, on the hillside; or a ruinous, useless school-house, its pale walls contrasting with the general surrounding hue of sombre purple and green. But though the country looks more dismal than Connemara, it is clearly more fertile: we passed miles of ground that evidently wanted but little cultivation to make them profitable; and along the mountain-sides, in many places, and over a great extent of Mr. Blake’s country especially, the hills were covered with a thick, natural plantation, that may yield a little brushwood now, but might in fifty years’ time bring thousands of pounds of revenue to the descendants of the Blakes. This spectacle of a country going to waste is enough to make the cheerfullest landscape look dismal; it gives this wild district a woeful look indeed. The names of the lakes by which we came I noted down in a pocket-book as we passed along; but the names were Irish, the car was rattling, and the only names readable in the catalogue is Letterfrack.
The little hamlet of Leenane is at twenty miles’ distance from Clifden; and to arrive at it, you skirt the mountain along one side of a vast pass, through which the ocean runs from Killery Bay, separating the mountains of Mayo from the mountains of Galway. Nothing can be more grand and gloomy than this pass; and as for the character of the scenery, it must, as the Guide-book says, ‘be seen to be understood.’ Meanwhile, let the reader imagine huge, dark mountains in their accustomed livery of purple and green, a dull grey sky above them, an estuary silver-bright below: in the water lies a fisherman’s boat or two; a pair of sea-gulls, undulating with the little waves of the water; a pair of curlews wheeling overhead and piping on the wing; and on the hillside a jingling car, with a cockney in it, oppressed by and yet admiring all these things. Many a sketcher and tourist, as I found, has visited this picturesque spot; for the hostess of the inn had stories of English and American painters, and of illustrious book-writers, too, travelling in the services of our Lords of Paternoster Row.