Travel
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The Delights of Ireland
WREN KCOKOILLy is necessary there is no country in ihe world where it is more pleasant to economise than Ireland. Where no one is rich it is no hardship to be poor, and the pleasures of life in Ireland were never on the gold standard. If one is seeking only rest and change, quietness and sunlight, after a Landon winter and slumps and depressions, one might well consider that coast south of Dublin which is bathed in sun from November to April. It has a climate very similar to that of Dinard, and a beauty you might find in Italy. 'There are occasional storms, but they pass quickly, and my memories of that coast after several winters spent there are steeped in sunlight. You wake to it morning after morning, flooding your room in one of the little white villas built after the Italian
style with green outside shutters. • -
It is a gardener's paradise. Killiney Hill, rising above the bay, shelters it from the north. The white villas are set amidst eucalyptus trees which grow in profusion. They keep the Italian illusion with their silver grey leaves and yellow bark against the darker pines.. They climb Killiney Hill with the houses which rise one above the other, terrace upon terrace, to catch the sue. The gardens sloping from those terraces have -flowers all the year round and are a mass of bloom in spring. It is an early spring, three weeks or so ahead of England. The bulbs are coming up already, in January, and the birds are singing.
The coast with its caves and rocks was and is a children's paradise. There is, north of Killiney, Dalkey, a fascinating place which has not changed at all smeem childhood'awinter spent there. It is not only the magic of childhood's memory that makes its fascination. It is a toy UM-A, full of the small, delicious, one-storied houses they have built about South Cour ty Dublin with, the added fascination of many sailors' marks and devices—models of ships above the low doors, and in the wind-swept gardens smelling of the sea. And, best of - all, the small harbours of Dalkey and Bullock, with the fisher- -metes boats against the wail and the fishermen's nets laid out to dry in the sun (it is always sunlight) and the fishermen smoking their pipes against the wall ready for a chat and for wonderful tales of the sea, and that memory is full of the smell of ,the boats and tar and seaweed left by the tide, and the strange fascinating smell of fishermen's clothes. And once, long before the Irish Sweep was dreamed of, two children saved up one and sixpence to hire a boat to take them to Dalkey
It was as foreign to small London children as anything to be found in France—in Brittany. Even the speech of the sailors was strange, until their quick children's ears grew accustomed to it There is that foreignness about Ireland which makes complete change. Galway, grey and blue under a summer sun, is a strange Spanish city and the grey west of Ireland towns have a look of France. And that cast coast was only the gateway of Ireland. It is that country that still offers the loveliest country life in the world. You may leave Laudon inafog, and a day later, wake up to the sun lighting the trees outside your window in a room in an Irish country house. There are always trees close to Irish houses and their trunks are green-tinged so that the winter sun striking them through the bare branches seems to edge them with a light that is half green and half gold and strangely beautiful. You may lie wondering why those trees could only be Irish trees and why the room coming out of the shadows of the winter morning could only be an Irish room. The shabbiness- perhaps—not that only. It is something snore elusive, never clearly defined. You follow it in the long cold corridors. of Irish country houses, in the dim beautiful rooms not made for the Shannon Scheme which shows too clearly our faded walls and chintzes, a general shabbiness, in the stable yard which holds so much of the atmosphere, grey and cold in the early morning, silent until your foot wakes it and a horse moves in Ms stalk. . .
Life is still extraordinarily easy in Ireland. On an income on which you would be poor in England you would be passing rich over here. One might add for those alarmed by the Public -Safety Hill that the country is perfectly peaceful and safe for the ordinary citizen and that English visitors are most welcome and popular. All sport is within the reach of the man or woman of moderate means. And there are country houses standing empty which are to be let for amazingly low rents, with fishing and shooting maybe thrown in and two or three packs of hounds within reach and good stables for 'your horses; and for those who are sick for country life, beanie 'paradise. The price of good horses at the moment is amazingly
low- And there are no fields M the world like Irish fields to ride over.
The hedges are black in the sunlight and the water which is never absent from an Irish landseape—it may be a lake or a pond or a regular canal running into distance—is grey and cold and beautiful under the sky, the reeds yellow at the edge. There are winter sunsets when the sky breaks beyond the black trees to red and yellow and pale green, and the lake water below it is dark and coldand mysterious. Youmay rise in the winter morning and push an old and leaky boat among the reeds and wait to hear the duck come in, in the pink dawn, the light of it on their wings. I know a lake in the west of Ireland which had something of a legend about the number of water birds that came to it. That lake has all the magic of chilishood's memory—a silver sea with small black islands floating on it and mysterious backwaters through which one could push a boat only with difficulty, because-the reeds had had their own way since the War began. Your taste may not be -for hunting and shooting-and you may have no desire to kill anything. And there is still Irish turf to ride over and the beauty of the lake in the dawn or in the green dusk and the enchantment of Irish gardens. In the soft climate of the south, tropical flowers grow out of doors and there is no harsh winter. If you have no mind for house- keeping (and the willingness of Irish servants is one of the things that makes life here pleasant and easy), there are some good hotels set in lovely places between the mountains and the sea ; although these hotels must be carefully chosen, for I do not pretend that we are a nation of hotel-keepers. You may forget the world's problems very pleasantly iasuchplaces, piling the sweetly smelling wood and turf fires high in the evening and reading-all the books you-have wanted to read for so long. There is rain but it is soft rain, and -the flooding sunshine between the showers is the more beautiful because of -the moistness of the air. zThere is a (peculiar loveliness about Irish summer sunlight, when it comes, turning the trees and the mountains and the water to gold. And last summer, letters received in a_sunless England told of such long„golden days and evenings in Achill and the far west of Ireland.
PAMETA HLNKSON,
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