Mearing Stones Part 2

RABBITS AND CATS

Donegal is over-run with rabbits; and sometimes on your journeys you will see a common house-cat--miles from anywhere--stalking them up the side of a mountain, creeping stealthily through the heather and pouncing on them with the savagery of a wild thing. The cats, a stonebreaker told me, come from the neighbouring farm-houses and cabins, "but they are devils for strolling," says he, and in addition to what food they get from their owners "they prog a bit on their own!"

THE GLAS GAIBHLINN

"That's a very green field," I said to a man to-day, pointing to a field, about two furrow-lengths away, on which the sun seemed to pour all its light at once. "Is there water near it?" "There's a stream,"

says he. "And the Glas Gaibhlinn sleeps there, anyway." "And what's that?" "It's a magic cow the old people'll tell you of," says he, "that could never be milked at one milking, or at seven milkings, for that,"

says he. "Any field that's greener than another field, or any bit of land that's richer than another bit, they say the Glas Gaibhlinn sleeps in it," says he. "It's a freet, but it's true!"

A HOUSE IN THE ROAD'S MOUTH

A house in the road's mouth--it is no roundabout to visit, but a short cut. Often I go up there of an evening, when my day's wandering is done, to meet the people and to hear the old Fenian stories told--or, maybe, a tune played on the fiddle, if Donal O'Gallagher, the dark man from Falcarragh, should happen to be present. It is as good as the sight of day to see the dancers, the boys and the girls out on the floor, the old people looking on from the shadow of the walls, and Donal himself, for all his blindness, shaking his head and beating time with his foot, as proud as a quilt of nine hundred threads!

THE QUEST

Where am I going? Looking for the dew-snail? No, but going till I find the verge of the sky.

MUCKISH

"When you see Muckish with a cap on," said a man to me one day, "you may lay your hand on your heart and say: 'We'll have a wet spell before long.'" This mountain, like Errigal, has a knack of drawing a hood of grey vapour round its head when the rest of the landscape is perfectly cloudless--like the peaks of the Kaatskills in _Rip Van Winkle_.

THE MAY-FIRE

The May-Fire is still kindled in some parts of Donegal. It is a survival of a pagan rite of our forefathers.

"And at it (the great national convention at Uisneach in Meath) they were wont to make a sacrifice to the arch-G.o.d, whom they adored, whose name was Bel. It was likewise their usage to light two fires to Bel in every district in Ireland at this season, and to drive a pair of each herd of cattle that the district contained between these two fires, as a preservative, to guard them against all the diseases of that year. It is from that fire thus made that the day on which the n.o.ble feast of the apostles Peter and James is held has been called Bealteine (in Scotch Beltane), _i.e._, Bel's fire."

[Ill.u.s.tration: MUCKISH, WITH A 'CAP' ON.]

The boys and girls of a whole countryside repair to these fires, which are usually lit upon a high, commanding hill, and they spend the night out telling stories, reciting poems, singing, and dancing to the accompaniment of pipes and fiddles. The May-Fire is not quite so generally observed as the John's-Fire, which is kindled on the night of the 23rd of June, St. John's Eve.

b.l.o.o.d.y FORELAND

b.l.o.o.d.y Foreland. An old woman comes out of the ditch to talk to me... . "It's a wild place, sir, G.o.d help us! none wilder. And myself, sir----sure I've nothing in the world but the bones of one cow!"

TWILIGHT AND SILENCE

Some places in Donegal seem to me to brood under a perpetual twilight and silence--Glen-Columcille, for instance, and the valley running into it. And mixed up with the twilight and silence is a profound melancholy that rises out of the landscape itself, or is read into it by the greyness of one's own experience. Those dark hills with the rack over them and the sun looking through on one little patch of tilled land, and the stone mearings about it, figure forth the sorrow that is the heritage of every Irishman; the darkness the sorrow, the suns.h.i.+ne the hope, iridescent and beautiful, but a thing of moments only and soon to fade away. I stand on the bridge here where the road forks, Slieve League to the left of me, a dim lowering bulk, and the road to Glen reaching away into the skyline beyond. The water of a hillstream murmurs continually at my feet. A duck splashes, and flaps dripping into the greyness overhead. Not a soul is in sight--only a blue feather of turf-smoke here and there to show that human hearts _do_ beat in this wilderness; that there are feet to follow the plough-tail and hands to tend the hearth. The sense of wonder over-masters me--the wonder that comes of silence and closeness to the elemental forces of nature. Then the mood changes, and I feel rising up in me the sorrow that is the dominating pa.s.sion of my life. Do many people go mad here? I have heard tell that they do, and no wonder, for one would need to be a saint or a philosopher to resist the awful austerity of the place.

THE POOR HERD

There is a poor herd at Maghery--a half-witted character--who lives all his days in the open, with nothing between him and the sky. He was herding his cows one evening in a quiet place by the caves when I happened on him. "What time o' day is it?" says he. "Just gone four,"

says I, looking at my watch. "What time is that?" says he, in a dull sort of way. "Is it near dark?"

A MOUNTAIN TRAMP

Bearing south by the Owenwee river from Maghery, we strike up through Maum gorge. Outside Maghery we come on two men--one of them a thin, wizened old fellow with no teeth; the other a youngish man, very raggedly dressed, with dark hair and features like an Italian. The old man tells us in Irish (which we don't follow very clearly) to keep up by the river-bed, and we can't possibly lose our direction. A quarter of a mile further on we meet another man. He bids us the time of day in pa.s.sably good English. I answer in Irish, telling him that we are on the road for Glen-Columcille, and asking him the easiest way over the hills. He repeats what the old man told us, viz., to keep to the river-bottom, and to cut up then by the fall at the head of Maum to Laguna, a cl.u.s.ter of poor houses in the mountain under Crockuna. "When you get there," he says, "you cannot lose your road." He comes a bit of the way with us, and then we leave him at a point where the track ends in the heather, and where a squad of navvies is engaged laying down a foundation of brushwood and stones to carry it further into the hills. It gives us a shock, in a way, to come on this squad of wild-looking men in so lonely and desolate a place.

We are now well into the gorge, and a wild place it is! Half-way up we come on a house--if one could call it such--with a reek of blue smoke threading out of a hole in the thatch. No other sign of life is visible. The walls of the gorge close in darkly on every side except the north. On that side is the sea, white on Maghery strand, and stretching away, a dull copper-green colour, into the sailless horizon beyond. Hearing the voices, a young man comes out from between two boulders serving as a sort of gateway to the house. His face is tanned with sun and exposure, and he is in his bare feet. We greet him in Irish and he answers--a little surprised, no doubt, at hearing the language from strangers. Then another man comes forward--a brother, if his looks don't belie him. He is in his bare feet also, and hatless, with a great glibbe of black hair falling over his eyes. "You have the Irish?" he says. "It's newance to hear it from townsfolk." We talk for a while, enquiring further as to our direction over the hill, and then we push on. Near the head of the gorge we sit down to have a rest, sitting on a rock over the stream, and bathing our hands and faces in the brown, flooded water. All the rivers of Donegal are brownish in colour, and the Owenwee (_recte Abhainnbhuidhe_, "yellow river") is no exception. The water stains everything it touches, and I have no doubt but that the dark colour of the people's skin is due, partly, to their was.h.i.+ng themselves in it. Coming through one's boots, even, it will stain the soles of the feet.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ON THE ROAD TO DOON WELL.]

We resume our journey, and after some rough and steep climbing reach the plateau head. Loch Nalughraman, a deep pool of mountain water, lies to the east of us, s.h.i.+mmering in the grey morning light. All around is bogland, of a dull red colour, and soaking with rain. We make through this, jumping from tuft to tuft, and from hummock to hummock, as best we can, going over the shoe-mouth occasionally in slush. In an hour or so we come on a bridle-path of white limestones, set on their flat in the spongy turf. We follow this for a while, and in time reach the poor village of Laguna. Entering into one of the houses I greet the bean-a'-tighe in Irish. She rises quickly from her seat by the hearth where she has been spinning--a crowd of very young children clinging to her skirts. She is a dark woman, with mellow b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and fine eyes and teeth. She is barefooted, as usual, and wears the coloured head-dress of her kind, curtseying to me modestly as I approach. She answers me in Irish--the only language she knows--and bids me come in. "_Beir isteach_," she says. A young man of five-and-twenty or thereabouts is weaving in the room beyond. (I recognised the heavy click-clack, click-clack, click-clack of the loom as I entered.) Hearing my enquiry he rises up from his seat, drops his setting-stick, and offers to guide us as far as the southern edge of the hill. "You will see the Glen road below you," he says, coming out in his bare feet into the open, and speaking volubly, like one used to good speech. "Look at it beyond," he says, "winding from the Carrick side. Keep south, and you will strike it after two miles of a descent." The woman brings a bowl of goat's milk to my sister. She drinks it readily, for she is thirsty after her climb. Then, thanking the poor people for their hospitality, we say, "_Slan agaibh_," and press forward on our journey to Glen-Columcille.

We reach the high-road in about half-an-hour, near a school-house, s.h.i.+ning white in the sun, and busy with the hum of children singing over their lessons. Things look more familiar now. We pa.s.s many houses, with fleeces of dyed wool--green and blue and madder--drying on bushes outside the doors, and men busy stacking turf and thatching. Here and there on the road flocks of geese lie sunning themselves, head-under-wing. As we draw near they get up and face us with protruding necks, hissing viciously. Dogs bark at us occasionally, but not often. (I had heard ill accounts of the Donegal dogs from travellers, but on the whole, my experience of them has not been quite so bad as I had been led to expect.) Slieve League rises on our left, a dark, shadowy bulk of mountain, shutting off the view to the south. All around is moorland, with a stream in spate foaming through a depression in it, and little patches of tilled land here and there, and the inevitable brown-thatched cabin and the peat-reek over it. After some miles' travelling we come on a little folk-shop by the road--a shop where one might buy anything from a clay-pipe or a lemon to Napoleon's Book of Fate. The window looks tempting, so we go in. The shopkeeper is a quiet-mannered little man, not very old, I would think, but with greyish hair, and eyes that look as if they were bound round with red tape--burnt out of his head with snuff and peat-smoke. We ask him has he any b.u.t.termilk to sell. He hasn't any, unfortunately--he is just run out of it--so we content ourselves with Derry biscuits, made up in penny cartons, and half a dozen hen-eggs to suck on the way. Some people may s.h.i.+ver at the idea of it, but raw eggs are as sustaining a thing as one could take on a journey! We pay our score, and get under way again. At a bridge where the road forks we sit down and eat our simple repast. A bridge has always a peculiar fascination for me--especially in an open country like this where one's horizon is not limited by trees and hedges--and I could spend hours dawdling over it, watching the play of sun and shadow on the water as it foams away under the arches. Here there is a delightful sense of s.p.a.ce and quietness. The heather-ale is in our hearts, the water sings and the wind blows, and one ceases to trouble about time and the mult.i.tude of petty vexations that worry the townsman out of happiness. Did I say one ceases to trouble about time? Even here it comes, starting one like a guilty thing. We reach Meenacross Post-office at four-thirty, and an hour later see the Atlantic tumbling through rain on the age-worn strand of Glen-Columcille.