That part of Mayo which adjoins Joyce country and Connemara is most easily reached by the coast road from Clifden by Leenane; and the drive from Leenane to Westport is famous. You pass through the defile of the Bundorragha river flowing into the north of Killary Bay—a mountain pass with Mweelrea gigantic on your left; and beyond that, farther along the same route, Croaghpatrick divides you from the sea, while inland is Nephin, the great cone that rises above Lough Conn.

All this very wild district was the territory of the O'Malleys, just as Connemara was of the O'Flahertys, but the O'Malleys have left a greater name in history—and a stronger stock, for to-day they have overflowed into the country of the other clan and dominate Connemara and Joyce country alike. But they have departed from their old tradition which linked them to the sea: and the most famous of all these western sea-rovers was a woman, Grace O'Malley, Granuaile, whose name has become one of the titles by which the spirit of nationalist Ireland is known in song. "Poor old Granuaile" is another appellation of the Shan van Vocht. This ruler of men and warrioress was a contemporary of Elizabeth's, and no mean opponent of Gloriana's power in the west. She married, diplomatically, first an O'Flaherty by whom she spread her influence over the shores of Galway as well as of Mayo, and what was more to her purpose, got control of his galleys as well as hers, and with them raided so far, that she carried over Lord Howth's heir from the strong castle a bare ten miles from Dublin. O'Flaherty dying, she bestowed her hand on a man of Norman stock, one of the Burkes, the MacWilliam, and through him got her own adherents posted in a string of castles—which purpose accomplished, so they say, she declared the union at an end. All the castles along the Mayo shore are associated with her name; but the place of her resting is in the little old church with vaulted roof (and still a trace of colour in the stonework) on Clare Island—most important of the long line which fringes that dangerous coast, from Inishboffin northwards. Aran belongs to a different grouping, its amazing formation links it to Burren, and it was, in truth, always owned by the O'Briens, lords of Thomond, the heart of which was Clare. But this string of petty island communities lies nearer the coast, is less separate from it—and yet, after all, very distinct. Land on Inishturk or Inishark, and the headman of the island will receive you with majestic courtesy—and he is still in some cases called the "king". But if you go there to collect rates for the county, I cannot promise you so kind a hospitality: there is unending though intermittent war, the islanders affirming (not unreasonably) that it is no business of theirs to pay for maintaining roads and bridges on the mainland.

Clare Island is somewhat unlike the rest, its people having always depended on agriculture rather than on fishing; and it is one of the best examples of the Congested Districts Board's beneficent work in purchasing the whole, reselling to the tenants, re-allotting farms, dividing off commonage, and providing materials and instruction for the islanders to put up decent dwellings for themselves. In earlier days rents were collected there at huge cost by the aid of posses of police; now instalments of purchase come in regularly and smoothly, and people who have begun to prosper a little by their holdings see no reason why they should not add to prosperity by taking their share of the sea's harvest. Herrings have come back to those waters, and it is no longer as it was when a spokesman of the people declared that "the shoals came and there was no one to catch them, and so the fish went away"—slighted, it would seem.

But Clare Island belongs to the outer fringe of the isles which lie across the entrance to Clew Bay, whose waters are sprinkled with little points and fields of sod-covered rock in a labyrinth past counting. Some affirm that the view from Westport over this blue water so bespeckled with green is the finest thing in all Ireland—and Croaghpatrick rising over against the little town is certainly a mountain worthy of all its associations.

Here takes place annually one of the most impressive ceremonies to be witnessed at home or abroad—the saying of mass at the summit to which St. Patrick, they say, pushed his western journey, and looking out over the Atlantic blessed all that he beheld. Ruder legend, with its touch of grotesque, tells that from this steep height he drove out into the deep all venomous things that had haunted unchristian Ireland, tumbling toads and snakes by his white wizardry into the ocean depths.

Be that as it may, there are no snakes in Ireland, and St. Patrick's name is great there still—fitly celebrated when the archbishop of the West and of the isles climbs that long steep path, and there in the face of heaven celebrates the mysteries which link times old and times new, before a multitude which extends far away from him down the hill slope—for there are always laggards whose attendance at that strange mass finds them kneeling half a mile away.

Westport town has, what is rare in western Ireland, the look of being cared for: trees planted in a Mall by the little river make a pleasant feature, due to the fact that Lord Sligo's demesne adjoins the town, and that the lords territorial have here always been resident and always capable and executive persons. Wooded slopes, planted with an eye to beauty as well as to shelter, tell the same story and enrich the landscape, which is best seen from a low hill above the parsonage. But Westport town and its neighbourhood have been so often and so well described by the sharp-pointed pen which "George A. Birmingham" handles that one need only recall those witty volumes. I cannot pretend to place the island where "J. J.", the resourceful and philosophic curate, went to discover Spanish gold; but nearly any of them all would do.

A little farther along the coast on the way towards Achill is Newport, on a salmon river of some repute, which flows from the most enchanting lake to which my fishing ever took me. I reached Lough Beltra by a long ride from the other direction, and found it away in the hills with Nephin high over the eastern end, and Croaghpatrick filling the south-western outlook. The fishing was nothing to brag of, and I ate most of the few small sea trout that I caught in the kitchen at the keeper's cottage—but how good they were, grilled fresh out of the water, with mealy potatoes and butter, and an egg or two, and a dash of whisky in the tumbler of fresh milk. I should have liked to stay a week or a month in that neat, wholesome, comfortable cottage—where the only serious trouble was that pike had somehow got into this mountainy water, where no such brutes should be.

Mallaranny farther along the coast is the place where most people go to see Clew Bay, for the railway has put a good hotel there; but the real attraction of this coast is the amazing island of Achill, to which the railway has now been carried; or rather, to the bridge across the narrow sound which divides Achill from the mainland, and under which such a tide sweeps as can be seen hardly anywhere else.

Achill is virtually all one mountain which has its highest points, Slievemore and Croghaun, on the outer seaward rim and they drop almost sheer into the sea. Slieve League itself in Donegal cannot vie with the wonder of those cliffs; and the little bays of Kim and Keel on the southward, with their curve of pure sand, have a kind of daintiness of beauty most bewitching in that grim landscape. From Dugort on the north shore there is boating to be had, which in fine weather may bring you into seal-haunted caves, under cliffs where the wild goats scramble in herds; and you may see readily enough strange creatures of the deep, sunfish, huge basking sharks, with every seabird that frequents these islands. Once it was my luck to effect a landing on a flat island rock some ten miles out, called the Bills of Achill, where I suppose not once in three years man sets his foot. It was the breeding season and the birds hardly moved to let us pass: puffins sat in the quaintest droves, three or four hundred together, staring at us with parrot eyes barely out of arm's reach. I looked over a ledge of rock and saw below me a guillemot on her eggs, so near that I could touch her—and as she fluttered off, realized why these birds have an egg so big at one end that it cannot roll except round in a circle—for they are laid by two and three on a bare shelf of rock where the bird has hardly room to cover them. Only the great black-backed gulls forsook the island and their nests, soaring high into the air in hundreds where we landed, and leaving their big, ugly eggs and their big, ungainly young ones sprawling all over the turf. They are great robbers of other people's nests, worse than hawks on a grouse moor: but they provide securely for their own young, building only here and in one or two other places equally inaccessible.

But for all that it may offer of wildness, of grandeur, and of interest, Achill has no charm for me. Poverty is a show there: in the village of Keel can still be seen beehive-shaped wigwams rather than houses; and it always seems as if the elements there had been too strong for man and left him huddled and cowering on the earth. Famine, or at least continuous underfeeding through generations, has helped that work. Yet the Achill folk set out hardily year by year in companies, men in their troops, girls in theirs, to field labour in different parts of Great Britain. It is thus that the population of some thousands supports itself on that barren promontory—pitifully enough, heaven knows. No doubt the sea is at their doors rich in fish; but the sea that runs off Achill Head is a very different antagonist from what men wrestle with in the English Channel.

Yet Achill has been just big enough to encourage its people with a barren hope of finding a living on the land. It is the real islanders who reap the harvest: and now a strange new source of prosperity has come to one of these communities. Just north of Achill Head, outside the long peninsula of Belmullet which encloses Blacksod Bay, lie the two islands of Inishkee, and on the south island some few years ago a Norwegian company established a whaling station of the new type.

The Gulf Stream sweeps along here within a few miles of the coast, and whales, it seems, spend their lives strolling peaceably along its course, following always one direction. They stroll less peaceably nowadays, for from these islands steamers push out and harry them with new-fangled harpoons fired from a gun and headed with a bomb as well as the barb. The result is that whereas old-time whalers could only kill the "right" whale which is fat and leisurely, and stays long on the surface, your modern captain makes prey of everything, manoeuvring his steamer so as to get on to the whale's line, and fire the harpoon into him when he rises porpoise fashion for one swift tumble. In this way they kill—not without difficulty and danger—the lean, swift monsters, eighty or ninety feet in length, rorquals, and the rest, which can drag even the steamers about after them; and, having killed, they couple up the whale beside the steamer, as you may see a barge beside a tug-boat on the Thames, and run back to their station where the huge fish is dragged on shore, cut up, separated into its constituents of blubber, bone, and entrails—but every particle of it converted into some kind of use; what is not oil is desiccated and makes feeding cake, and what is not feeding cake makes manure. All this boiling down has two effects—one a prodigious stench which, some say, makes houses uninhabitable on the mainland six miles off; the second, a vast deal of employment for the islanders—of one island only. Work on the whaling station is jealously guarded for southern Inishkee; woe betide the man even of the northern island who should try to get a share of it. As for the folk of the mainland, Inishkee employs them (at a very modest wage) to attend to its potato patches and oat fields in the summer, while the privileged folk are at a special wage on the whaler's work. So far as I can learn, protection has never been more rigorously employed than by this energetic community.

From the point of the Mullet to Erris Head, and across Broadhaven to Benwee Head and Portacloy, runs the wildest country and the most inaccessible in these islands. I have reached it only from the sea, and never anywhere in Ireland have I seen people so far removed from civilization as rowed out in their curraghs to meet us. Yet—so odd a place is Ireland—it is ten chances to one but in the loneliest of these creeks and mountains you would find folk who knew the great cities of America, and who if they landed in Boston or New York would find friends and kindred in plenty to greet them and help them to a living. Life is not so difficult here as it was formerly: for nowadays the trade in lobster fishing becomes very profitable on this unexploited coast, with its profusion of kelp-covered rocks and islands, and they have learnt in late years to take their toll of the salmon droves that pass this headland, making for Galway or the Shannon. What they have to sell, what they win at risk of life in the tremendous sea that runs among their rocks, they can sell now at a fair price. There is talk, too, of carrying a railway along the Mullet, in the hope of making Blacksod a haven for transatlantic commerce, and when that happens, the country will be gradually changed, as I have seen in my lifetime similar regions changed in Donegal; but till that day, whoever wants to see Ireland as Ireland has been any time for three or thirteen centuries (altered only by the introduction of three things, tea, paraffin oil, and American flour) can see it only in the northern parts of the Barony of Erris. It is no place to go for comfort; but "for to admire and for to see" it is well worth while.

The train will take you to Ballina, a considerable town, with a famous fishing on the River Moy, which can be had on easy terms—and nowadays even so far as Killala, on a bay which is for ever associated with a romantic episode in Irish history. Here Humbert landed in 1798—a month too late, for the great Wexford rising had been crushed out by July, and when he came in August all the forces in the country could be mobilized to meet his tiny army of republican French (Humbert was no Bonapartist) and their backing of half-armed and untrained Connaughtmen. Yet against all odds, the republican, with Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity in his heart as well as on his lips, pushed from Ballina to Castlebar, the capital town of Mayo, and there inflicted upon General Lake such a defeat as finally branded a name already deeply disgraced by the most brutal cruelties. It was a wonderful feat but wholly useless, for Humbert after forcing his way actually into Leinster was surrounded and forced to surrender without making terms for his Irish backers—upon whom Lake was free to avenge his own repulse in massacre. One of the strangest documents in history is the narrative of the Protestant Bishop of Killala, Dr. Stock, who was captured and most kindly treated during the raid.

All the shores of Killala Bay are prosperous and planted; you reach the beginning of wild country at Ballycastle, where I have pleasant memories of a little inn kept by the postmistress. Beyond that, the road is unknown to me; but another way into the heart of Erris leads out from Ballina through Crossmolina on Lough Conn. So far as this all is level land; and about this wide lake, famous for fishing (though its repute has sadly fallen away), are plenty of places to stay in. Nephin rises from its west shore, a magnificent mountain; and the whole place is well worth seeing, and the best way to see it is to fish a day on the lake, trolling or casting as you will—with the chance, especially if you troll, of big pike or salmon.

Beyond Crossmolina one runs into the wilds, with no stopping place for many miles till you reach Bangor Erris on the lower waters of the Owenmore River, which flows into Blacksod Bay. Here is a hotel, not so famous as it used to be in old days—but you will be all the better for that. The host of those days provided entertainment for the mind, but the bodies of his guests suffered some discomfort. "I left my boots outside my door last night and they were never touched," said one indignant protester. "And if you left a watch and a purse of gold with it, it's the same way they would be," the host answered triumphantly.

I stayed a fortnight there once, with an Englishman who had never seen Ireland before; and everything happened to us that happens in Lever's novels and that we all declare happens no longer. Our own water was poached to extinction; but we made friends with the most skilful angler I have seen (Dan Keary is his name, at your service), who escorted us to fish on a little stream high in the mountain, where in a raging flood we caught more big sea trout than either of us would have cared to carry and came home triumphant—to be confronted a couple of days later with the indignant owner of that water who wanted to know what we had been doing there. The upshot was that we had had the best day's fishing of many years, and made close alliance with the gentleman whose preserves we had innocently invaded. And I have no doubt that Dan spoke the exact truth when he said that he had been fishing that water all his life as often as the fancy took him.

Nowadays much of the land (if it can be called land) about these parts has been bought by the tenants, who lease out the shooting and fishing and pay their instalments of purchase with the proceeds—an admirable condition under which both shooting and fishing are likely to improve. But except for fishing and shooting I cannot recommend anyone to go to Bangor Erris, which is the most desolate spot that I have ever trodden. Distant views of Achill's high peaks made the one element of beauty in that depressing landscape—where, nevertheless, I would gladly go back, to try my luck once again on that wildly rushing stream that comes down, a torrent from Corrsliabh.