IRELAND FOR ENGLISH TRAVELLERS.* Murray—any Murray—is a work to be
consulted rather than read. We have put to this Murray imaginary ques- tions concerning routes and hostels, and everywhere it answered them clearly and fully. We have tested it wherever we had minute local knowledge, and Mr. Cooke's knowledge has inva.iably proved itself no less minute and much more accurate than ours. The maps appear excel- lent, and the brief pages in which a traveller is told what to take with him to Ireland and what to expect there, are full of common-sense and forethought. Therefore, since we do
• Murray's Handbook to Ireland. Fifth Edition, Revised and Enlarged by John Cooke. London : John Murray. not RPe our way to mend the book, we do most heartily com- mend Ind recommend it. But there are certain things about Irelan 1 which Mr. Cooke's studied compression has forced hue to omit; and these we shall endeavour to set out.
Ireland has been compared to an ugly picture set in a beautiful frame. The metapher is shaky, but the idea is sound ; you will not gain much, from the tourist's point of view, by going thirty miles inland. The sea-bordering fringe, however, is at almost every point full of beauty. For wildness and grandeur one must go to the North or West; the Channel coast is gentler in outline, but has some districts of the rarest beauty. Wicklow and the Dublin hills are well known ; no other great town has country near it possessing such a "wild civility." There are interesting places too, as well as picturesque scenery, near Dublin; at the little village of Swords a round tower stands, where it has stood a thousand years it may be. Beside it has been reared the square tower of an old abbey, and close by are the great ruins of the Norman Bishop's palace. In that palace, men say, Brian Born's body rested after his "last great battle" at Clontarf ; it was the first stage in the journey to Armagh, his place of sepulture. Yet Irish history is a confused welter of ill-ascertained records, the dry. bones of forgotten butcheries ; and the genius has not yet arisen who shall breathe into the dry-bones a principle of life. Learned men contend over the origin of round towers; but for Irish history and Irish antiquities even Irishmen, as a rule, care little. The most distinguished writer in Dublin, they say, once entertained a guest who wished to see a round tower. His host took him to Glasuevin, and they visited the one which was erected over O'Connell's bones ; they returned happy and equally unconscious of the error. Decidedly a holiday in Ireland can be better spent than in exploring ruins. Yet there is one district so beautiful in itself, and so fall of interest., that it should not remain un- visited. The Boyne water, where so much was decided, flows swift and deep; great willows trail into it, fine beech-woods rise steeply from its banks. No other place in Ireland so much recalls the rich beauty of English scenery ; but here, as everywhere, the landscape is invested with an opalescent atmosphere ; the blue of Irish skies has a quality of its own, carton gala rarum. Two or three miles from the Boyne are the ruins of Mellifont, once the Glastonbury of Ireland ; and two miles further on is the round tower and church of Monasterboice. In the churchyard stand three Irish crosses, tall and slender, the arms hooped together after the usual design. From top to bottom they are wrought with the most curious and intricate carving, symbolic figure- pieces enveloped in a twisted Celtic pattern ; and the crosses themselves with the figures on them, worn by wind and rain till their elaborate symmetry has lost its sharp out- lines, have the unconventional grace of a moss-grown tree- trunk. They are exquisite works of art made more than ex- quisite by Nature. But, if on a fine day one climbs the steep road that passes Monasterboice and crests the hill, there is a sight to see far commoner than the crosses yet far more beautiful. Northwards a great plain stretches ; beyond it rise the Carlingford hills, and, in majestic profile, the more distant Mourne mountains; obliquely to the right the sea bounds the landscape. All the play of sun and wind on such a picture, all the sweep of cloud-shadows, blue vistas of sea and purple mountains, that is the Ireland that Celtic bards sang of, and the Ireland we are in love with to-day.
For such delights as these the beaten track leads to Kerry. There is nothing else so perfect as Killarney, with its shores fretted into a lace-work of indentations, the rock of its in- numerable islands worn like pumice-stone, and out of every cleft, ferns, juniper, or arbutus springing or clinging. But its beauty has something exotic; something you will never see, and never miss, in the less tourist-ridden regions of Donegal and Antrim, where these notes may guide you. Say you get to Larne. Take your cycle or get on the long car, and whirl along the coast road northwards. On your right is the Moyle, and across it the Scotch hills show blueish gray, or, in clear weather, brown and purple. On your left are the hills and glens of Antrim; the wild country where St. Patrick was a prisoner; still so remote that people spin and sometimes weave their own wool there. Cushendall should be the first stage, one of the prettiest villages to be seen, and the inn is good ; next to it comes Cushendun, where and about which "Moira O'Neill" wrote the most beautiful songs ever written in Irish dialect.
1 I She has written of the glens in Blackwood, bat one story she has still to write. Some way up Glen Dan, on the skirts of a 1 wood by the road, there is a sheltered hollow, where the I Catholics used to meet for worship, for they were too poor to build a chapel. But they wanted a "good stone "for the altar, and so a boy went over to Iona in his boat, and by night stole a "good stone" from there. A compassionate English visitor has since built them a chapel; but the "good atone" is still in its place (Mr. Cooke mentions it), a curious weatherworn piece of sacred sculpture. The hopes and fears of that peasant embarking on his adventurous voyage to brave the uncanny creatures who peopled land and sea, and whom he might be bitterly offending, should make a noble subject.
The coast road leads from Cushendun to Ballycastle and the Giants' Causeway ; it is well worth while to turn aside and explore Fair Head with its basalt cliffs, which rise like battlements and buttresses from the sea; by the Gray Man's Path the yellow poppy grows in the upper clefts, but basalt is treacherous for climbing. Quitting Antrim you go to Derry, and Donegal is before you. You can go to the west and gather maidenhair on the cliffs of Slieve League, 2,000 ft. of cliff facing the Atlantic,—a strange home for that dainty greenery. Or you can go north to Lough Swilly and quit the region of railways. Golf has put a great stir of coming and going into that quiet country. There are three good links on the shores of Lough Swilly, Bancrana, Macammish (near Rathmullen), and Portsalon, with hotels at each. Portsalon is the best. This place lies on Fanad, the western headland of the lough. There is a pretty story about the hotel there, which a gentleman of the neighbour- hood built some years ago. Excursions from Derry used to mean heavy trade for the nearest publichouse; and the publican violently opposed the grant of a spirit-license to the hotel. Nevertheless the Grand Jury granted it. At an indignation meeting the injured man was heard declaiming,— " Let the bloody Protestant alone, boys ! Wait till he gets to hell—he'll find no Orange majority there ! "
There is more golf at Rosapenna, the narrow neck of sand between Mulroy and Sheep Haven. The hotel here was built by the late Lord Leitrim, and by his dogged perseverance a steamer plies from Milford to Glasgow and Derry, sighting as it goes up or down Mulroy, loveliest of all these bays, the narrow belt of larches which screen the spot where his pre- decessor was brutally murdered. Now a market is opened for that remote district, and men bless the name that was once, and not undeservedly, so bitterly detested. All the county expected to see the steamer cracked like an egg-shell; for Mulroy is a perfect stoneyard, and has tides that run like a mill-race in its narrows,—where at the lucky moment a man may have such white-trout fishing as he never dreamed of with the fly in salt water. But time and tide must serve. Fishing in Donegal is to be had nearly everywhere: salmon- fishing, if you pay for it ; trout-fishing, very often for a civil asking. For salmon it is best to take out the necessary license (costing 21) in the district where one means to fish ; this is one of the few things which Mr. Cooke omits to note. After the spring fishing in March and April, September is the best month; salmon-weirs close in August, and the white- trout and peel are up by then in droves, and take freer than in summer. Moreover, in Ireland, June and September are the fine months, July and August generally wet. Ramelton, situated where the Lennan flows into Lough Swilly, is a good and typical fishing centre. Lough Fern, about three miles off, is free to every one ; and except for the stretch im- mediately above the tideway, there is (or used to be) no difficulty about leave for the Lennan. Rods are charged a guinea a day on the preserved "pool," and though one gentle- man killed eleven fish weighing 130 lbs. there in a single day this spring, this is an excessive charge. But when there is water in plenty the upper waters and Lough Fern are as good as the "pool" Brown trout in Donegal run from herring to mackerel size generally, and three dozen is a good basket any- where. When the rivers are dead low, an angler who has or can procure a portable boat may have an amusing time on the little "loughs" or bog-holes, which are everywhere, running from a quarter of a mile to a hundred yards wide. Some of them are poached with the "otter," a deadly engine. But the present writer experimented on one which was protected by a belt of reeds and shaking bog. It had then not been fished for ten years, and very likely has not
seen a fly thrown since. The trout rose not very freely, but were much heavier than in the ordinary fishing-grounds, and in any of these loughs—eight or ten can be seen from Moyle Hill above Lough Fern—something big might be got. In Lough Colamb, near Milford, there are magnificent trout, and a tradition that no one ever got above two in the day. There is a record to establish. One word to fishermen or any one going to Ireland. Get introductions, if possible. Everywhere people are hospitable, for the Irish love to see strangers, and everywhere they will understand that tourists do not carry dress-clothes. And, after all, though Ireland is a pleasant country to look on, the pleasantest thing in Ireland is the Irish people.
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