The best way to get to Munster nowadays is undoubtedly by the new route from Fishguard to Rosslare, in which the Great Western Railway has reopened what was for ancient times the natural and easy way from England to Ireland. The Normans, as everyone knows, came across here, an advance party landing on the coast of Wexford; but the main force under Strongbow sailed straight up the river to Waterford. Many another invader before the Normans took the same route: and there is little doubt but that the peaceful invasion of Christianity had begun in this region, or that south-eastern Ireland was already baptized, before Patrick set out on his mission. Earlier again, the Milesians (according to modern theory) came from Britain, a race of warriors trained to fight on foot in the Roman fashion with sword and javelin, and drove before them the chariot-fighting people who then held the wide plain watered by the three great rivers which meet in Waterford harbour.

For a good sailor, undoubtedly the long passage to Cork, ending with a sail up the beautiful haven and the "pleasant waters of the river Lee", is to be preferred beyond all other routes. But the mass of mankind, and more specially of womankind, like the short sea and quick rail, and their choice is Fishguard to Rosslare. You enter the southern province of Ireland by a viaduct which leads from the flat lands of Wexford, through which you will have travelled for nearly an hour, on to the steep left bank of the river Suir facing Waterford city. The great bridge crosses the united Barrow and Nore; half a mile lower down is the junction with the Suir, and from the train you have a glorious view of the wide pool made at the confluence—a noble entrance into this province of lovely waters.

The run along the river is beautiful, too. Citizens of Waterford have built them prosperous villas and mansions facing you along the south bank, and a mile below the city on an island there is seen a castle of the Fitz-Geralds—rebuilt recently, but comprising in it the walls of an ancient place of strength which has never ceased to be a dwelling of this strong Norman-Irish clan. It was the household, too, from which issued a notable man in latter times, Edward Fitz-Gerald, the translator of Omar Khayyam. His portrait, by Laurence, hangs there, picturing him as a chubby, good-humoured boy.

The city itself may show to you only a line of lights, very picturesque along its great length of quay: but by daylight you can distinguish the low round castle which still keeps the name of Strongbow's tower. Fragments of the old walls remain, and there are buildings of much antiquarian interest—the restored cathedral, the ruined Franciscan abbey. But, on the whole, you are not likely to stop in Waterford, with Kerry and West Cork before you.

Yet let me tell a little of the things which the ordinary tourist visiting Munster passes by in his haste. The route from Rosslare to Killarney strikes across from the valley of the Suir into the valley of the Blackwater, rounding the Comeragh mountains: and I do not suppose it can be disputed that the Blackwater is the most beautiful of Irish rivers. I have seen it at Mallow, at Fermoy, at Lismore, and at Cappoquin, and everywhere it is the same yet different; a chain of long wide pools, but always with a swift flow to keep the water living and sparkling, and they are strung together with great sweeping rapids, deep enough for salmon to lie in, the anglers' joy: while on each shore are hill slopes receding, richly wooded, from the stream and the meadows beside the stream. The palm of beauty belongs of right to Lismore, where the Duke of Devonshire has his great castle overhanging a famous pool: and below it from the bridge one looks down the stream and the valley to a far-off blue vista between the hills. Yonder, where the river meets the sea at Youghal is one of the quaintest and most charming towns of Ireland. I saw it first by the light of a long procession of tall torches which lit up delightfully the old houses with their scrolled fronts of timber, and the pretty faces of girls and women looking out of the first-floor windows: but it was no little surprise to me in that march to find myself under an archway, over which rose a tall slated tower, fully equipped with loopholes, and from whose top (if I had only known it) arrangements had been made to bombard me and my friends that night. In daylight I saw, though with a hasty glance, the very beautiful fifteenth-century church still intact (for a miracle) and still used for worship: the still greater attraction of Sir Walter Raleigh's old house I never visited, but I hope you may. It has a mulberry tree said to be of his planting, and a chimney piece against which he almost certainly reclined his shoulders while in act to toast his travelled calves.

Travelling by this line of rail you will have on your right the Comeragh and the Knockmealdown mountains which divide the valley of the Blackwater from the valley of the Suir. But it may possibly be your pleasure, as it will certainly be your profit, to explore also the Suir valley, which divides the Comeraghs from the outlying mass of Slievenamon, and, farther west, curves northward from the base of the tall Galtee ranges.

I came last into Munster by motor car, driving from Kilkenny to Clonmel over the southern shoulder of Slievenamon (Sliabh na m-Ban, the Witches' Mountains), and a finer journey could not be taken. We struck out through rich pasture and tillage, keeping this shadowy dome which rose from the plain as our objective, till the pass began to define itself. But it was when we had crossed or were crossing the pass that the real beauty began. Slievenamon was on our right, well wooded; facing us, as we ran south, were the Comeraghs, and a low foot ridge thrown out from them, between which and us ran the Suir. The valley is wider than that of the Blackwater, with less of what may be called fancy wooding; but it can fairly hold its own; and the quay at Clonmel by the shining, swirling river is as pretty as heart could desire.

From Clonmel to Lismore a road carries you over the top of Knockmealdown (that is, Maeldune's Hill), and those of my companions who took that drive crowed over me for the rest of the journey; describing in glowing phrases all the glories I had missed, the wonderful panorama from the top, then the gradual descent down a long wild wooded glen into the tranquil and cultivated beauty of Lismore.

Yet if I had a motor car at Clonmel and only one day's excursion to make, it is not south I would go. I would go north into the heart of Tipperary, through the Golden Vale which lies overshadowed and half-circled by the Galtee range, until I came to the thing best worth seeing in all Ireland, Cashel of the Kings.

Nothing is, I repeat, better worth seeing, nothing less often seen by the tourist; for it lies off the track. The Rock of Cashel is a lone steep hillock, sharply scarped, and rising out of the plain which stretches from Slievenamon to Slieve Phelim, and comprises in fact the rich land drained by the Suir. Such a spot was inevitably seized on for a stronghold, and from its earliest days Milesian rule centred here. To Cashel it was that St. Patrick came to convert the king of Munster, for Cashel was to the southern half of Ireland what Tara was to the northern. It was the heart of Munster, whence principalities radiated out. Thomond, North Munster, ran west from it into Clare, across the Shannon; Ormond, Oir Mumhan, East Munster, lay away from it towards Kilkenny and Eastern Tipperary; Desmond, Deas Mumhan, the great kingdom of South Munster, comprising Cork and Kerry, came to its walls, for theoretically the High Kingship of southern Ireland alternated between Thomond and Desmond. And away south-east, through the gap between Slievenamon and the Comeragh Mountains, you can see into Waterford, which in Irish was called the Deisi, falling into Desmond as a separate lordship.

This rock is crowned with buildings that speak of war and peace, but of peace rather than war. There stands intact Cormac's Chapel, finest example of Irish building in the pre-Norman style; round-arched, solid, barrel-roofed, decorated with string-courses of dogtooth moulding. Beside it is the great cathedral built by the O'Brien lord of Thomond, cathedral and fortress in one; unroofed now, dismantled, and ruinous, yet hardly beyond reach of repair, since the choir was used as a cathedral till the latter part of the eighteenth century. Then an archbishop got an Act of Parliament authorizing him to unroof it and providing a regiment of soldiers to execute the work. Archbishop Price's reason for such an enterprise may not seem wholly conclusive; he liked—good easy man—to drive in comfortable state to his cathedral door, and no coach and horses could conveniently ascend the winding path up the Rock.

Beside the cathedral is the tall Round Tower, and on the north side of the Rock, many remains of choir schools and other monastic buildings. On the level plain and in the town are other monasteries ruined yet not wholly shorn of their splendour; and within a few miles, Holycross Abbey and Athassel speak of the wealth and culture which were destroyed in this rich land of the Golden Vale.

But the Rock itself, standing up there, crowned with such a group of buildings as no other of Ireland's high places can parallel, is the true object of pilgrimage; and the view from it over the Golden Vale, to the noble Galtee peaks and pinnacles due south of you, and the long waving line of Comeragh Mountains which runs continuously east from them along the valley of the Suir, is a prospect worth long journeying. Nor is that all. Slievenamon rises dome-shaped from the eastern plain, a gap between it and the outlying spurs of Comeragh showing where the Suir, headed off its southward course by Galteemore, finds a way eastward to the sea: and to the north beyond the plain is the far-off range of Slievebloom, dividing Leinster from the Shannon; and nearer towards Athlone and the Shannon are the low hills with the Devil's Bit nipped out of the top of them.