THE GRAVE OF ST. PATRICK The shops of Belfast, with their embroidered linens (duty, forty-five per cent!), proved a magnet too great for Betty to resist, but I hied me away, next day, into County Down, on a pilgrimage to the grave which is said to hold the three great apostles of Erin—Saint Brigid and Saint Patrick and Saint Columba. It is in the churchyard of the village of Downpatrick that the grave lies, and the thirty mile run thither from Belfast is through a green and fertile country covered with broad fields of flax. There are raths and tumuli here and there, and a few ruins topping the neighbouring slopes, but it is not until one reaches Downpatrick that one comes upon a really impressive memorial of the old days. The cathedral is visible long before the train reaches the town, standing on the edge of a high bluff overlooking the valley of the Quoile, and it was to it I made my way from the station, up a very steep street, for Downpatrick, following the fashion of Irish towns, is built on the side of a hill—and also follows the fashion in having an Irish Street and an English Street and even a Scotch Street, the surviving names, I suppose, of the quarters where the people of those various nations once lived close together for mutual protection. The cathedral was locked, as Protestant churches "And yet," I said, "it was Saint Patrick who founded this very church, and you have him and Saint Brigid and Saint Columba buried in your churchyard." "Yes, and we're proud to have them," he retorted quickly, "for they weren't Romanists—they were just Christians, and good ones, too. The Protestants of Ireland can honour Patrick and Brigid just as much as the Catholics do. It wasn't till long after their day that the Irish church made submission to Rome." There is a modicum of truth in this, for, though it is probable that St. Patrick was regularly ordained a bishop and is even sometimes asserted to have been sent on his mission by Pope Celestine himself, the ties which bound Irish Catholics to Rome were for many centuries very slight indeed, and it was not until after the Norman conquest that the authority of Rome was fully acknowledged; and this independence has persisted, in a way, even to the present day; for while Irish Catholics, of course, acknowledge absolutely the supremacy of the Holy See in all spiritual affairs, they have always been quick to resent its interference in things temporal, and their tolerance toward other religions Here at the spot where that mission began it is fitting that I should say a word of it. Of Saint Patrick himself very little is certainly known, for he was a man of deeds and not of words, and left no record of his life; but there seems no valid reason to doubt the traditional account of him; that he was born at Kilpatrick, in Scotland, somewhere about 390; that his father was a Roman citizen and a Christian; that, when about sixteen years of age, he was captured by a band of raiding Irish, carried back to Ireland as a slave, sold to an Ulster chief named Milcho, and for six years tended his master's flocks on the slopes of Slemish, one of the Antrim hills. In the end he escaped and made his way back to his home in Britain; but once there his thoughts turned back to Erin, and in his dreams he heard the cries of the Pagan Irish imploring him to return, bearing the torch of Christianity. The voices grew too strong to be resisted, and in 432 he was back on the Irish coast again, having in the meantime been ordained a bishop of the Catholic Church; and he sailed along the coast until he came to Strangford Lough, where he turned in and landed. His purpose was to go back to Slemish and ransom himself from the master from whom he had escaped, but he paused at a large sabhall, or barn, and said his first Mass on Irish soil. It was to that spot he afterwards returned, when the hand of death was upon him, to THE GRAVE OF PATRICK, BRIGID AND COLUMBA THE GRAVE OF PATRICK, BRIGID AND COLUMBA THE OLD CROSS AT DOWNPATRICK At last, feeling his end near, he made his way back to the sanctuary at Saul, died there, and was brought for burial to this bluff overlooking the great rath below. Legend has it that Saint Brigid wove his winding-sheet. She herself, when she died, was buried before the high altar of her church at Kildare; and there are two stories of why her body was removed to St. Patrick's grave. One is that, in 878, her followers, fearing that her grave would be desecrated by the Danes, removed her body to Downpatrick and buried it in the grave with the great apostle, where the remains of St. Columba had been brought from Iona and placed nearly two centuries before for the same reason. The other story is that the bones of St. Brigid and St. Columba both were brought here in 1185 by John de Courcy, to whom Ulster had been granted by the English king,—and who had surprised and captured Downpatrick eight years previously,—in the hope of conciliating the people he had conquered. Either story may be true; but all that need concern us now is that there seems to be no question that the three great apostles of Ireland really do lie at rest within this grave. De Courcy enlarged the cathedral, which, before that, had been a poor affair, dedicated it to Saint Patrick, Hi tres in duno, tumulo tumulantur in uno Brigida, Patritius, atque Columba pius. The stone which marks the grave is in the yard just outside the church—a great, irregular monolith of Mourne granite, weatherworn and untouched by human hand, except for an incised Celtic cross and the word "Patric" in rude Celtic letters—one monument, at least, in Ireland which is wholly dignified and worthy. One other thing of antiquarian interest there is near by, and that is an ancient cross, said to have stood originally on the fort of the King of Ulster, but removed by De Courcy and set up in front of his castle in the centre of the town, as a sign of his sovereignty, where it was knocked to pieces when the castle was. The fragments have been put together, and battered and worn as it is, the carvings can still be dimly seen—the crucifixion in the centre, with stiff representations of Bible scenes below. It is ruder than most, as may be seen from the photograph opposite page 522, for the circle which surrounds the cross is merely indicated and not cut through. There has been much controversy as to the origin of this circle, which is the distinctive feature of the Celtic cross; but I have never yet seen any theory which seemed anything more than a guess—and not a particularly good guess, either. Of the first church which was built here not a trace remains, and even of the structure of 1137 there is little left. For Downpatrick, with the priories and monasteries and hospitals and convents and other religious Just to the north of this bluff and almost in its shadow, close to the bank of a little stream, still stands the enormous rath built two thousand years ago by Celtchair, one of the heroes of the Red Branch of Ulster, and here he and the chiefs who came after him had their stronghold. So great was its fame that Ptolemy, in far off Egypt, heard of it, and it was gradually enlarged and strengthened until there were few in Ireland to equal it. The sea helped to guard it, for at high tide the water flowed up over the flats along the To get to it, one passes along the wall of the jail—one of the largest I had seen anywhere in Ireland, and which Murray proudly says cost $315,000—and scrambles down into the marsh, and there before one is the rath. My picture of it, the top one opposite the next page, was taken from close beside the jail, many hundreds of yards away, and gives no idea of its size, except for the thread-like path which you may perceive running up one end, which is two or three feet wide, and fully seventy feet long. The rath is an immense circular rampart of earth, nearly three quarters of a mile in circumference, fifty feet high, and so steep that I had great difficulty in getting up it, even by the path. Around it runs a fosse or ditch some forty feet wide and nine or ten feet deep. This, of course, was deeper in the old days, and would remain filled with water even when the tide was out. Inside the circular rampart, the ground drops some twenty feet into a large enclosure, near the centre of which a great mound, surrounded by a ditch ten feet deep, towers sixty feet into the air. The central mound corresponds to the keep or donjon tower of more modern forts, the last place of refuge and defence when the outer ramparts had been forced; and it was on this mound that the dwellings of the chiefs stood, rude enough, no doubt, though they were the palaces of kings. The tribal huts clustered in the enclosure about the foot of the mound; and so perfectly is the whole place preserved—though of course THE GREAT RATH AT DOWNPATRICK THE GREAT RATH AT DOWNPATRICK THE INNER AND OUTER CIRCLES THE CENTRAL MOUND I tore myself away, at last, for there was another place I wished to visit, and it was three miles distant—the Holy Wells of Struell. The caretaker at the cathedral had pointed out the route, so I climbed back past the prison, and went down through the town and up Irish Street beyond, and over Gallows Hill, where some unfortunate Irishmen were hanged during the rebellion of '98. The road beyond ran between high hedge-rows and under arching trees, whose shade was very grateful, for the day was the hottest I had experienced in Ireland; and then it crossed the white high-road and ran close under a long stretch of wall which surrounded an enormous and ornate building. I asked a passer-by what it was, and he answered that it was a madhouse, and big as it was, was none too big. Murray supplies the information that it cost half a million. There is a workhouse in the town which, from the look of it, must have cost $300,000—or say a million dollars for the three together, the jail, the workhouse and the asylum, every cent of it, of course, raised by taxation from the poorest people in the world! Sadly pondering this, I went on along the lane, and the heat made the way seem very long. But a girl I met assured Down the middle of a pretty valley, a small stream leaps from rock to rock, pausing here and there in little pools, and these pools are the "wells." Each of them is protected by a stone-walled, stone-roofed cell, built in the old days when the wells were in their glory, and now falling to decay. Just beyond the wells is a group of thatched cottages, and a girl of eight or nine, seeing my approach, hurried out from one of them and volunteered to act as guide, scenting, of course, the chance to earn a penny. And she took me first to what she said was the drinking-well, a little grass-grown pool in a fence-corner, and though she seemed to expect me to drink, I didn't, for the water looked stale and scummy. Then we climbed a wall, and walked over to a stone cubicle, which stood in the middle of a potato patch. This is the eye-well, and the cell over it is just large enough to permit a person to enter and kneel down above the water and bathe the affected parts. I took a picture of it which you will find opposite the next page. Then she led me to the largest well of all, the body well, or well of sins, where it is necessary to undress and immerse the whole body. The stone building over the body well is divided into two parts by a solid wall, and one part is for men and THE EYE WELL AT STRUELL THE EYE WELL AT STRUELL THE WELL OF SINS AT STRUELL While I was manoeuvring for a photograph of the well of sins, a middle-aged woman came out of a near-by cottage to advise me where to stand. She had seen many pictures taken of the well, she said, and the place that made the best picture was on top of the wall around her garden, and I climbed up on it, and found that she was right. "'Tis a warm day," she went on, when I descended, "and your honour must be tired with the long walk. Will you not come in and sit a spell?" "Thank you," I said; "I'll be glad to—it is hot," and I followed her into a lovely old kitchen, with floor of flags, and whitewashed walls gleaming with pots and pans, and with a tall dresser in one corner glittering with a brave array of china. In here it was quite cool, so that after the first moment, the open grate of glowing coals, with the usual bubbling pot above it and the usual kettle on the hob, felt very pleasant. I expressed surprise that she was burning coal, and she said the landlords of the neighbourhood had shut up the peat-bogs, in order to make every one buy English coal; and it was very hard indeed on the poor people, who had always been used to getting their fuel for the labour of cutting it, besides shutting them off from earning a little money by selling the turf to the people in the town, who would rather have it than coal. But the landlords were always doing things like that, and it did no good to complain. She had two brothers in America, she said, and lived here at Struell and kept house for a third. She and her brother were both unmarried, and would probably always remain so. Then, of course, she wanted to know about my condition in life, and I described it as freely as she had described her own. And then she asked me if I wouldn't like a glass of milk, and when I said I would, she hastened to get it from the milk-house, through which a clear little stream trickled, and very sweet and cool it was. And then we got to talking about Ulster's attitude "God knows what will happen," said my hostess, very seriously. "I have been hearing a lot of wild talk, but paid no heed to it, for these Orangemen are always talkin' about this or that, and their talk means nothing. But I've come to think it may be more than just talk this time. I heard a few days since that all the Orangemen hereabouts have been getting together three evenings every week in a meadow over beyont, and an officer of the army comes there and drills them till it is too dark to see. And they say, too, that there is a gun ready for each of them, with plenty of powder and lead to put into it; and they've sleuthered a lot of poor boys into joinin' with them who have not the courage to say no. But I'm hoping it will pass by, and that no trouble will come of it. I am a Catholic myself, but we have never had any trouble with the Protestants. We get along very well together, and why shouldn't we? Some of my best friends are Protestants, and I know they wish us no harm. No, no, we are well-placed here, though them ones in the south do be calling us the black north." I told her something of the destitution and misery I had seen in the south and west; but she showed no great sympathy—rather a contempt, I fancied, for people who could be so easy-going and unambitious. She herself seemed of a very different breed; and the shining kitchen, as clean as a new pin, proved what a delight I walked about the steep streets of Downpatrick quite a while, after I reached the town, and found them unusually quaint. Like so many other towns in Ireland, this one is all too evidently on the down grade. The tall houses, which were once the residences of the well-to-do, have been turned into tenements, and while they are not so dirty and repulsive as those of Dublin and Limerick, they are still bad enough. Others of the houses are empty and falling into ruin. One curious thing about the place is that from any quarter of it the town-hall is visible, standing in the hollow at the bottom of the hill, for the five principal streets start from it—Irish Street and English Street and Scotch Street and two others whose names I have forgotten, but which were, perhaps, the neutral ground of trade. I made my way down to the station, at last, and as It is really only about thirty miles; but thirty miles is a great journey to the average Irishman. For the Irishman is no traveller; he is quite content to spend his life within the circle of one small horizon, and never so happy as when sitting at his own fireside. Indeed, he is apt to regard with suspicion those who have nothing better to do than wander about the world. Mayo tinkers have always had a bad name in Ireland, not because they do anything especially to deserve it, but merely because they make their living in an unnatural fashion by roaming from place to place. Surely there must be something wrong with a man who does that! That night, at Belfast, we went to a variety show. The Wild West film seems as popular here as in the rest of Ireland, for a particularly sensational one, where the heroine escaped from the Indians by going hand over hand along a rope above a deep ravine, into which the Indians were precipitated by the hero, who cut the rope when they started to cross by it, was received with great enthusiasm. There were also some scattered cheers when a conjuror, with carefully calculated effect, produced portraits of the King and Queen from somewhere |