Munster :: V

My last visit to Kerry was on a commission of enquiry into fisheries which took us driving round in motors to places off the usual track; and a railway strike came in, to complete our survey of West Munster. We had come up from Waterville, along the backbone of the peninsula, crossing Bealach Oisin, so that the coast road by Dingle Bay is known to me now only by far-off memory of a forty-miles drive in a long car—which the railway has for many years superseded. But I revived my memory of a bit of it, coming up in the morning from Caragh Lake to Killorglin, where we held our court, at the outfall of the Lowne which drains the lakes of Killarney. Opposite us across the bay was that other mountainous region of Corcaguiney, the Dingle Peninsula, which differs from Iveragh in this, that from the high point of the Reeks Iveragh slopes westward by a gradual declension of peaks and ridges; whereas Corcaguiney rises continuously westward and seaward till it reaches its climax in Brandon Hill rising majestically from the very limit of the land. So rises Mweelrea at the mouth of Killery, and I imagine that on a clear day from Brandon's top you would see Mweelrea, and from Mweelrea again might distinguish the peak of Errigal far north in Donegal. At all events I knew an old gentleman who told me that he had seen the whole length of Ireland in one field of vision, and he took either Mweelrea or Croagh Patrick as his midland centre and Errigal or Brandon (or the Reeks) as his two extremes.

This Dingle Peninsula is explored by very few, unexplored by me, alas! I could see from the road the dark outline of Cahirconree, a wonderful stone fort, built two thousand feet up on the side of the Sliabh Mish mountains: and away out to the west the Blasket Islands were in sight, hardly more accessible than the Skelligs, but inhabited by a race of Irish-speaking fisher folk, among whom a Norse student of the Celtic languages settled himself the other day and was overjoyed to find a stone inscription in Runic characters, containing the mind of some Scandinavian forebear of his own, set down in the Norse that was spoken a thousand years ago and had waited ten centuries for him to decipher it.

Under Brandon, on the extreme west of the peninsula, lies Smerwick Bay, where in Elizabeth's reign a small detachment of Spaniards landed and established themselves; their earthworks at Fort del Oro (so called because Frobisher was wrecked there with a cargo of pyrites which he took to be gold) can be traced easily. Kingsley in Westward Ho! has dealt, not overfaithfully, with the story of that enterprise which ended in the wholesale butchery of combatants who surrendered at discretion—suggesting, very unworthily, that the brutal deed was excused by its deterrent effect. We have never heard that it stopped the landing at Kinsale not many years later. There is ground to hope that Raleigh has been wrongfully charged with the actual perpetration of that black deed. But in truth the blackest chapter in all Irish history is precisely that which deals with the Desmond wars under Elizabeth, which ended in the complete devastation of this lovely province. Not far from Tralee they show you the spot where the last Earl of Desmond was captured and the rough mound a little way from it that marks his grave: and still when the moaning of wind and wave is heard over that countryside, they call it the Desmond's keene.

BRICKEEN BRIDGE, LOWER LAKE, KILLARNEY

To escape from all this record of civilized barbarity, the mind gladly turns back to far older and by far less barbarous days. Brandon keeps the name of the most picturesque figure in the long roll of Irish saints—St. Brendan, the Navigator, who was born a little west of Tralee, at Barra, close to the promontory of Fenit, in or about the year 484. He was baptized by a bishop named Erc, whose name still lingers in Termon Eirc, a townland three miles north of Ardfert: and a well near Ardfert which keeps St. Brendan's name is still a place of pilgrimage and votive offering, more specially on the saint's own day. Under Erc's guidance the lad was brought up, though he got some of his schooling at Killeady, the convent where St. Ita had established her religious house near Newcastle West in county Limerick. Later, Erc sent him to travel that he might "see the lives of some of the holy fathers in Erin"; and he went north to Connacht where the school of St. Jarlath at Tuam was already famous (as Archbishop Healy, who sits in St. Jarlath's chair to-day, tells with natural pride in his book on the Ancient Schools and Scholars of Ireland, which I am pillaging, not for the first time). He went farther north still in Connacht, and is said to have established a settlement of Kerrymen in the plains near Castlebar; but he returned to Kerry to get his priestly orders from the hands of his tutor Erc, now nearing death.

"It was probably at this time," says Archbishop Healy, "that St. Brendan built his oratory on the summit of Brandon hill", and there was fired with the project of setting sail across the Atlantic in search of a Promised Land—Tir-nan-Og, the Country of the Young. For there on Brandon top, a man can see—even without the vision of faith—"over half the south of Ireland, mountain and valley, lake and stream, plain and town, stretching far away to the east and south. But the eye ever turns seaward to the grand panorama presented by the ultimate ocean." Brendan from his watch tower

"Saw it in all its varying moods—but above all, at even, when the setting sun went to his caverns below the sea, and the line of light along the glowing west seemed a road to the Fortunate Islands where the sorrows of earth never enter, and peace and beauty for ever dwell. It was a dim tradition of man's lost paradise, floating down the stream of time, for with curious unanimity the poets and sages both of Greece and Rome spoke of these Islands of the Blessed as located somewhere in the Western Ocean. The same idea from the earliest times has taken strong hold of the Celtic imagination, and reveals itself in many strange tales, which were extremely popular, especially with the peasantry on the western coast. To this day the existence of Hi Brasail, an enchanted land of joy and beauty, is very confidently believed by our western fishermen. It is seen from Aran once every seven years, as Brendan saw it in olden times, like a fairy city on the far horizon's verge."

According to the records, Brendan was not first on this quest. Barinthus, a neighbouring monk, had fared seaward in search of a truant brother and had found him in the island called "Delicious", from which they sailed yet farther west and found other wonders. But at all events, however moved, Brendan bade his monks to fast with him forty days, then choosing fourteen of them, he built a great curragh, with ribs and frame of willow, hide-covered, and so with forty days of provisions they set out upon the trackless sea, steering for the "summer solstice".

Seven years that voyage lasted: they reached island after island in the Atlantic main, "following God's guidance, fed by his Providence, and protected by his power". At length, it is said, they reached the continent of America and found the place where they landed "to be indeed a delicious country abounding in everything to gratify the palate and please the eye"; and they were about to push across the swift, silvery current that had borne them to the verge of this land, when an angel rose before their path and bid them turn homeward, instead of resting to enjoy. And so back to Ireland came Brendan the Navigator, the travelled Ulysses among Irish saints.

What lies behind all this, who knows exactly? but certainly those dwellers on the outermost verge of Europe always had vague yet glorious rumours of a land beyond the sea—a land in truth whose flotsam and jetsam, strange nuts and weeds, the ocean current casts from time to time on their shores. And heaven knows, that this Western people, since Columbus brought promise into fulfilment and imagining into sure knowledge, have found in the west there a haven, a refuge from the miseries into which they were born. America has been a strange and often a sinister realization of the Fortunate Islands—yet conceive of Ireland's history for the past century without America to lean on, to look to for help. Its streets have not been paved with gold, no easily-won sustenance has been there: yet to the fisher folk and farmers it has offered the fulfilment of desire, the enlargement of aspiration; and the course that St. Brendan first charted, though it is more frequented now than could be wished, though it leads often enough to unhappy wreckage, has yet been to Ireland a blessed road.

HOLY ISLAND, LOUGH DERG

No man who visits this Atlantic seaboard of Ireland but must feel something of what Archbishop Healy's eloquence hints at—the sense of an open gateway beyond the sun-track through which imagination is beckoned towards its own goal. There is a soothing and restful influence from those vast spaces of the west. And even landward it follows you. We crossed the neck of the Dingle Peninsula to the pretty and prosperous town of Tralee, and all eastern Kerry merging into Limerick stretched away to right of us, a wide rolling expanse of land well divided into fields for tillage. Our course lay still on north-east to Listowel, crossing the tract of land which divides Tralee Bay from the Shannon's broad estuary; all about us, the country was spacious, yet well inhabited, set thick with trim little farmhouses: there was much traffic on the roads, of horse and man—and of asses: I saw there what is not common, two donkeys driven abreast in a little cart, stepping very smart down a long hill. There was plenty of room for the people, yet the people were there—on the land, living by the land, with the large air of the Atlantic blowing in across them. Next day, since the trains were not running, we had to proceed by motor to Limerick, and we simply ran north to the Shannon shore at Tarbert and followed the river to Limerick for a matter of forty miles, stretch by stretch, a broad sea lane for vessels, but alas! no vessels there: hardly a sail on the waters; though battleships can lie at Foynes, thirty miles in from Loop Head.

There is much to pause over on that route: Glin, where the hereditary Knights of Glin, an offshoot of the Desmond Geraldines, have maintained themselves, for a matter of seven centuries, even through the "pacifications" of Elizabeth's reign: Askeaton, many miles farther on, a chief seat of the main Desmond line, and in Ireland—so rich in ruins, so poor in buildings that have escaped destruction—there are few finer ruins than the Desmond Castle here, and the Franciscan Abbey. Still nearer Limerick, at Carrigagunnel, you see the landmark of another power, for this castle was built by the O'Briens of Thomond and it stood over against Bunratty on the Clare bank, another great fortress.—Yet a mere catalogue is without interest, and here is no space to trace the interlocking fortunes and conflicts of Norman noble, Irish chief, and Cromwellian soldier.

Let me concentrate on one spot, one group of memories. Above the little town of Foynes is a small house on a hill, now beautifully surrounded by plantations of shrubs and flowers; it was the home of a lady known to the Irish people at home and abroad, for her work in improving the lot of steerage passengers on emigrant ships, and also for her writings in prose and verse; yet known better as the true child of a notable father, William Smith O'Brien, Protestant, landlord, aristocrat, rebel, and felon by the law. She was one who felt and loved the beauty of Ireland—not only what one may call the scenic beauty of such places as Killarney, but the essential spacious beauty of those fertile valleys, those wide skies.

"Men come and go by this great river," she wrote, "and the revelation of its beauty is not made to them fully, often not at all; but let one live by it and it is the most beautiful place in the whole world.... But to-night it was no hidden beauty. I went down by the river in the evening. It was full, the tide just past the turn, and sweeping down the great mass of water at an extraordinary pace, and yet, though the whole river was swinging along at many miles an hour, the surface was a marvellous mirror. The glowing masses of furze on the island, a quarter-mile away, were so near and distinct in the wave, one could almost stretch out a hand to gather them. Every cloud and every shade of light and colour in the sky was again in the river, but far more intense. At my feet and twenty yards down and across the channel was a dense black cloud reflected, its crenellated edge cut sharp against the reflection of silver, blue, grey, and intense white light stretching far away westward. I stood, as the old books used to say, 'entranced', and still the river swept down, and still the furze and the wonderful green and the dark cloud-bar were, as it were, under my hand, and the glorious 'gates of the Shannon', as the Elizabethans called this Foynes, were opened to heaven's light beyond my touch."

From the road just beyond Foynes towards Limerick, you shall see a round hill topped by a ruin and the tokens of a graveyard. There in the high windy burial-place of her choice she lies, this lover of Ireland and of the Shannon, Charlotte Grace O'Brien. And for the last word in this little book, I, her near kinsman, whose main ties are with other provinces, shall set down another passage of her writings, which is curiously revealing of Munster. For behind Knockpatrick you may see a few miles farther off another low hill which is topped by a well-marked mound, and on the mound a great mass of shattered masonry stands, "like a black clenched fist thrust against the western heavens". That is Shanid, the original stronghold of the southern Geraldines: "Shanid aboo", was their war-cry.

To this place Charlotte O'Brien, who loved flowers hardly less even than other live things, came to look for a reported rare plant—"The Virgin Mary's Thistle", "so-called because the leaves are all blotched and marbled with white stains, and legend made it a sacred plant bearing for ever stains of the Blessed Virgin's milk".

"Sure enough," she wrote, "I found a mass of it growing together only on the southern exposure under the great wall. Now this plant is said to exist only as an introduced species in the British Isles. To account for it, therefore, on this utterly lonely and desolate hilltop, we must look back through the centuries and see the sacred plant in the monastery garden at Askeaton—the first Geraldine home in Desmond. We must think how the seed may—in fact, must—have been carried up to this watch tower, perhaps by some long-haired daughter of the Geraldines, sent for safety to the mountain fortress. We must imagine how its frail growth (only annual) took hold on the sheltered side; we must see generation after generation of men swept away, the monastery torn down and desecrated, the name of Desmond almost forgotten, the great Geraldine race broken and destroyed: we must see the almost impregnable castle blown to pieces and left as a trampling ground for summer-heated cattle; more wonderful than all, we must realize that time has so gone, that no record is left us of that great downfall and destruction—nothing—nothing but a few pieces of nine-foot-thick wall, a few earth mounds, and the sacred plant. Irishmen! What national history lies in one seed of that plant!"

True enough! And true it is that to feel the real beauty of Ireland, her mountains and valleys, her fields and waters, you must see them in the light of the past as well as the present, informed by knowledge and by love.

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
At the Villafield Press, Glasgow, Scotland

Transcriber's Notes
Minor punctuation errors were silently corrected. Illustrations were moved to paragraph breaks. Click on the illustrations to see larger images.
Page 24: Changed Roscarberry to Roscarbery.

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