Meanwhile, asking pardon for this double digression, which has been made while the guard-coachman is delivering his mail-bags—while the landlady stands looking on in the sun, her hands folded a little below the waist—while a company of tall burly troops from the castle has passed by, ‘surrounded’ by a very mean, mealy-faced, uneasy-looking little subaltern—while the poor, epileptic idiot of the town, wallowing and grinning in the road, and snorting out supplications for a halfpenny, has tottered away in possession of the coin;—meanwhile, fresh horses are brought out, and the small boy who acts behind the coach, makes an unequal and disagreeable tootooing on a horn kept to warn sleepy carmen and celebrate triumphal entries into and exits from cities. As the mist clears up, the country shows round about wild but friendly; at one place we passed a village where a crowd of well-dressed people were collected at an auction of farm-furniture, and many more figures might be seen coming over the fields and issuing from the mist. The owner of the carts and machines is going to emigrate to America. Presently we come to the demesne of Red Hall, ‘through which is a pretty drive of upwards of a mile in length: it contains a rocky glen, the bed of a mountain stream—which is perfectly dry, except in winter—and the woods about it are picturesque, and it is occasionally the resort of summer-parties of pleasure.’ Nothing can be more just than the first part of the description, and there is very little doubt that the latter paragraph is equally faithful;—with which we come to Larne, a ‘most thriving town,’ the same authority says, but a most dirty and narrow-streeted and ill-built one. Some of the houses reminded one of the south, as thus—
A benevolent fellow-passenger said that the window was ‘a convanience’; and here, after a drive of nineteen miles upon a comfortable coach, we were transferred with the mail-bags to a comfortable car that makes the journey to Ballycastle. There is no harm in saying that there was a very pretty smiling buxom young lass for a travelling companion; and somehow, to a lonely person, the landscape always looks prettier in such society. The ‘Antrim coast road,’ which we now, after a few miles, begin to follow, besides being one of the most noble and gallant works of art that is to be seen in any country, is likewise a route highly picturesque and romantic; the sea spreading wide before the spectator’s eyes upon one side of the route;—the tall cliffs of limestone rising abruptly above him on the other. There are in the map of Curry’s Guide-book points indicating castle and abbey ruins in the vicinity of Glenarm; and the little place looked so comfortable as we abruptly came upon it round a rock, that I was glad to have an excuse for staying, and felt an extreme curiosity with regard to the abbey and the castle.
The abbey only exists in the unromantic shape of a wall; the castle, however, far from being a ruin, is an antique in the most complete order—an old castle repaired so as to look like new, and increased by modern wings, towers, gables, and terraces, so extremely old that the whole forms a grand and imposing-looking baronial edifice, towering above the little town which it seems to protect, and with which it is connected by a bridge and a severe-looking armed tower and gate. In the town is a town-house, with a campanile in the Italian taste, and a school or chapel opposite, in the Early English; so that the inhabitants can enjoy a considerable architectural variety. A grave-looking church, with a beautiful steeple, stands amid some trees hard by a second handsome bridge and the little quay; and here, too, was perched a poor little wandering theatre (gallery 1d., pit 2d.), and proposing that night to play ‘Bombastes Furioso, and the Comic Bally of Glenarm in an Uproar.’ I heard the thumping of the drum in the evening; but, as at Roundwood, nobody patronised the poor players: at nine o’clock there was not a single taper lighted under their awning, and my heart (perhaps it is too susceptible) bled for Fusbos.
The severe gate of the castle was opened by a kind, good-natured old porteress, instead of a rough gallowglass with a battle-axe and yellow shirt (more fitting guardian of so stern a postern), and the old dame insisted upon my making an application to see the grounds of the castle, which request was very kindly granted, and afforded a delightful half-hour’s walk. The grounds are beautiful, and excellently kept; the trees in their autumn livery of red, yellow, and brown, except some stout ones that keep to their green summer clothes, and the laurels and their like, who wear pretty much the same dress all the year round. The birds were singing with most astonishing vehemence in the dark glistening shrubberies; but the only sound in the walks was that of the rakes pulling together the falling leaves. There was of these walks one especially, flanked towards the river by a turreted wall covered with ivy, and having on the one side a row of lime-trees that had turned quite yellow, while opposite them was a green slope, and a quaint terrace-stair, and a long range of fantastic gables, towers, and chimneys;—there was, I say, one of these walks which Mr. Cattermole would hit off with a few strokes of his gallant pencil, and which I could fancy to be frequented by some of those long-trained, tender, gentle-looking young beauties whom Mr. Stone loves to design. Here they come talking of love in a tone that is between a sigh and a whisper, and gliding in rustling shot silks over the fallen leaves.
There seemed to be a good deal of stir in the little port, where, says the Guide-book, a couple of hundred vessels take in cargoes annually of the produce of the district. Stone and lime are the chief articles exported, of which the cliffs for miles give an unfailing supply; and, as one travels the mountains at night, the kilns may be seen lighted up in the lonely places, and flaring red in the darkness.
If the road from Larne to Glenarm is beautiful, the coast route from the latter place to Cushendall is still more so; and, except peerless Westport, I have seen nothing in Ireland so picturesque as this noble line of coast-scenery. The new road, luckily, is not yet completed, and the lover of natural beauties had better hasten to the spot in time, ere, by flattening and improving the road, and leading it along the sea-shore, half the magnificent prospects are shut out, now visible from along the mountainous old road; which, according to the good old fashion, gallantly takes all the hills in its course, disdaining to turn them. At three miles’ distance, near the village of Cairlough, Glenarm looks more beautiful than when you are close upon it; and, as the car travels on to the stupendous Garron Head, the traveller, looking back, has a view of the whole line of coast southward as far as Isle Magee, with its bays and white villages, and tall precipitous cliffs, green, white, and grey. Eyes left, you may look with wonder at the mountains rising above, or presently at the pretty park and grounds of Drumnasole. Here, near the woods of Nappan, which are dressed in ten thousand colours—ash-leaves turned yellow, nut-trees red, birch-leaves brown, lime-leaves speckled over with black spots (marks of a disease which they will never get over)—stands a school-house that looks like a French château, having probably been a villa in former days, and discharges, as we pass, a cluster of fair-haired children that begin running madly down the hill, their fair hair streaming behind them. Down the hill goes the car madly too, and you wonder and bless your stars that the horse does not fall, or crush the children that are running before, or you that are sitting behind. Every now and then, at a trip of the horse, a disguised lady’s-maid, with a canary-bird in her lap and a vast anxiety about her best bonnet in the bandbox, begins to scream; at which the car-boy grins, and rattles down the hill only the quicker. The road, which almost always skirts the hillside, has been torn sheer through the rock here and there; and immense work of levelling, shovelling, picking, blasting, filling, is going on along the whole line. As I was looking up a vast cliff, decorated with patches of green here and there at its summit, and at its base, where the sea had beaten until now, with long, thin, waving grass, that I told a grocer, my neighbour, was like mermaids’ hair (though he did not in the least coincide in the simile)—as I was looking up the hill, admiring two goats that were browsing on a little patch of green, and two sheep perched yet higher (I had never seen such agility in mutton)—as, I say once more, I was looking at these phenomena, the grocer nudges me and says, ‘Look on to this side—that’s Scotland yon,’ If ever this book reaches a second edition, a sonnet shall be inserted in this place, describing the author’s feelings on his first view of Scotland. Meanwhile, the Scotch mountains remain undisturbed, looking blue and solemn far away in the placid sea.
Rounding Garron Head, we come upon the inlet which is called Red Bay, the shores and sides of which are of red clay, that has taken the place of limestone, and towards which, between two noble ranges of mountains, stretches a long green plain, forming, together with the hills that protect it and the sea that washes it, one of the most beautiful landscapes of this most beautiful country. A fair writer, whom the Guide-book quotes, breaks out into strains of admiration in speaking of this district; calls it ‘Switzerland in miniature,’ celebrates its mountains of Glenariff and Lurgethan, and lauds, in terms of equal admiration, the rivers, waterfalls, and other natural beauties that lie within the glen.