The Charm Of Ireland Part 25

But when I asked for such a card, the proprietor stared at me in amazement.

"There is no such gate hereabouts," he said.

"But there is," I protested; "right there at the end of the street. Do you mean to say you have never seen the Sheela-na-gig, nor read that line about Wilo Wisp and Jack the Printer?"

He rubbed his head dazedly.

"I have not," he admitted. "Look at that, now," he went on; "here have I been going past that gate for years, and you come all the way from America and see more in one minute than I have seen in me whole life!"

Then he asked me if I had been up on top the castle, which was just opposite his shop, and I replied that I had not.

"Nor have I," he said; "but I am told there is a grand view from up there."

"Why not go up with me now?" I suggested.

"I might," he agreed; and then he looked at the tall keep of the castle and shook his head. "'Tis not to-day I can be doing it; you see, I must stay with the shop."

So I left him there, and essayed the heights of the castle by myself.

Only for a little way, however, was I by myself, for some families connected with the garrison live there, and they are all prolific; so I soon found myself surrounded by a horde of ragged children, who begged for ha'pennies in the queer bated voice which seems to go with begging in Ireland. I distributed a few, but that was a mistake; for when they found I not only had some ha'pennies but was actually willing to part with them, they grew almost ferocious; I said "Oppenheimer!" in vain, and I was only saved at last by a husky woman who issued forth from one of the towers and swept down upon them, vi et armis, and drove them headlong out of sight. She was red-headed and curious, and she stopped for a bit of talk. (I pa.s.s over the part about America.)

"How do you like living in the old castle?" I asked her, finally.

"Sure, 'tis a grand place, sir."

"Do you ever see any ghosts?"

"Ghosts? Niver a one, sir."

"Nor hear any banshees?"

"Banshees is it? Sure, they niver come to this place, sir, 'tis that healthy, bein' so high."

And it must, indeed, be healthier than the narrow, gloomy, squalid streets below. I could look down into them from the top of the tower, to which I presently mounted, and see their swarming life--men and women idling about, a girl drawing water from the public pump, a boy skinning some eels at the corner, small children playing in the gutters. On the other side lay the river, empty save for a few small launches, and beyond it the roofs of the newer part of the town, and beyond the town the beautiful Westmeath hills.

Just at my feet was the bridge across the Shannon, connecting east and west Ireland. It is a modern one, but it stands on the site of the old one, built while Elizabeth was queen, and the scene of a desperate conflict when Ginkle stormed the town. Of the castle itself, only the keep is old. The drum-towers, which frown down upon the river, are of later date, though one would never suspect it to look at them; but when one gets to the top of them, one finds embrasures for artillery, and the approach is up a graded way along which the guns can be taken. The old drawbridge and portcullis which guarded the entrance to the keep are still in place, but there is little else of interest.

The ruins of the ancient abbey of Clonmacnoise lie close beside the Shannon, some ten miles below Athlone, and the road thither winds through a rolling country down to the broad river, which here flows lazily between flat banks. One would expect so n.o.ble a stretch of water to be crowded with commerce, but it was quite empty that morning, save for an occasional rude, flat-bottomed punt, loaded high with turf, which a man and a boy would be poling slowly upstream toward Athlone.

It was a desolate scene; and Clonmacnoise looked desolate, too, with its gaunt grey towers, and huddle of little buildings, and cluttered graveyard. It seemed incredible that this obscure corner of the world was once a centre of learning toward which scholars turned their faces from the far ends of Europe, to which Charlemagne sent gifts, and within whose walls princes and n.o.bles were reared in wisdom and piety. Yet such it was--the nearest to being a national university among all the abbeys, for it was not identified with any cla.s.s or province, but chose its abbots from all Ireland, and welcomed its students from all the world.

The abbey was founded by St. Kieran in 548. St. Kieran belonged to what is known as the Second Order of Irish Saints, founders of monasteries and of great co-operative communities, as distinguished from the First Order--St. Patrick and his immediate successors--who were bishops and missionaries and founders of churches, and the Third Order, who were hermits, dwelling in desert places, often in small stone cells, just as St. Molua did in his little cell near Killaloe. St. Kieran had already started an abbey on an island in Lough Ree, but grew dissatisfied with it, for some reason, and he and eight companions got on board a boat and floated down the river, rejecting this place and that as not suited to their purpose, and finally reaching this sloping meadow, where their leader bade them stop.

"Let us remain here," he said, "for many souls will ascend to heaven from this spot."

So the abbey was started, and, though Kieran himself died in the following year, it grew rapidly in importance. Let me try to picture the place as it was then. The students lived in small huts crowded about the precincts; the cla.s.ses were held in the open air; only for purposes of wors.h.i.+p were permanent buildings built. Here, as at Glendalough, there was not one large church, but seven small ones; and the students seem to have attended divine service in the groups in which they studied. It was a self-supporting community, tilling its own lands, spinning its own wool, weaving its own cloth, and building its own churches; and its life, while not austere, was of the simplest.

The students, at times, numbered as many as three thousand. The teaching was free, but from every student a certain amount of service was required in the interest of the community. The princ.i.p.al study, of course, was that of religion, but from the very first the heathen cla.s.sics and the Irish language, arithmetic, rhetoric, astronomy and natural science were taught side by side with theology.

The life at Clonmacnoise was typical of that at all the other monastic schools with which Ireland was then so thickly dotted; and it is the more interesting because the whole continent of Europe, at that time, was groping through the very darkest period of the Middle Ages. Culture there was at its lowest ebb--knowledge of Greek, for instance, had so nearly vanished that any one who knew Greek was a.s.sumed at once to have come from Ireland, where it was taught in all the schools. Those schools sent forth swarms of missionaries, "the most fearless spiritual knights the world has known," to spread the light over Europe; they established centres at Cambrai, at Rheims, at Soissons, at Laon, at Liege; they founded the great monastery at Ratisbon; they built others at Wurzburg, at Nuremberg, at Constanz, at Vienna--and then came the Vikings, and put an end to Irish learning. For the Vikings were Pagans, and the shrines of the churches, the treasuries of the monasteries and schools, were the first objects of onslaught.

For two centuries, the Danes made of Ireland "spoil-land and sword-land and conquered land, ravaged her chieftaincies and her privileged churches and her sanctuaries, and rent her shrines and her reliquaries and her books, and demolished her beautiful ornamented temples--in a word, though there were an hundred sharp and ready tongues in each head, and an hundred loud, unceasing voices from each tongue, they could never enumerate all the Gael suffered, both men and women, laity and clergy, n.o.ble and ign.o.ble, from these wrathful, valiant, purely-pagan people."

The Danes aimed to destroy all learning, which they hated and distrusted, and they very nearly succeeded.

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

[Ill.u.s.tration: ST. KIERAN'S CATHAIR, CLONMACNOISE]

I have already told how, under Brian Boru, the Irish drew together, and finally managed to defeat the Danes at Clontarf; and for a century and a half after that, ancient Erin seemed rising from her ashes. The books destroyed by the Danes were re-written, churches and monasteries rebuilt, schools re-opened--and then came Strongbow at the head of his Normans, and that dream was ended. There was civilisation in Ireland after that, but it was a civilisation dominated by England; there was education, but not for the native Irish; there were great monasteries, but they were built by French or Norman monks--by Franciscans or Cistercians or Augustinians; and finally even these were swept away with the coming of the Established Church.

I shall not attempt to describe the ruins of the seven churches of Clonmacnoise, except to say that, though they are all small, they are crowded with interesting detail; and there are two round towers, somewhat squat and rude, as a witness to the danger of Danish raiders; but the glory of the place is the magnificent sculptured cross, erected a thousand years ago over the grave of Flann, High King of Erin, and still standing as a witness to Irish craftsmans.h.i.+p. It is ten feet high, cut from a single block of stone, and elaborately carved from top to bottom, and its date is fixed by an Irish inscription which can still be deciphered: "A prayer for Colman who made this cross on the King Flann." It was Flann who built the largest of the stone churches, near which the cross stands, about 909, and at that time Colman was Abbot of Clonmacnoise. Flann died five years later, and Colman honoured his memory with this magnificent tribute.

Its maker's name is lost, but there can be no doubt he was a great artist. On one side he has represented scenes from the founding of Clonmacnoise, and on the other scenes from the Pa.s.sion of the Saviour.

The crucifixion, as usual, is depicted at the intersection, while h.e.l.l and heaven are shown on the arms themselves, crowded with the d.a.m.ned or the blessed, as the case may be. There is another cross in the graveyard scarcely less interesting, though no one knows on whose grave it stands, and there is the shaft of a third. And all about them are crowded the lichened tombstones marking the graves of the fortunate ones who won sepulture in St. Kieran's cathair, and who, on the last day, will be borne straight to heaven with him.

For this enclosure was once the very holiest in Ireland. It was here that Kieran was laid, and then his prophecy was remembered that many souls would ascend to heaven from this spot; and the belief gradually grew that no one interred "in the graveyard of n.o.ble Kieran" would ever be adjudged to d.a.m.nation. In consequence, so many people wanted to be buried there that there wasn't room for all of them, and in the end, even powerful kings and princes were forced to contend with great gifts for a place of sepulture. Here Flann was laid; and hither was borne the body of Rory O'Conor, the last who claimed the kings.h.i.+p of all Ireland, after his death at Cong. The great abbey at Cong served well enough as the retreat for his declining years, but it was only at Clonmacnoise, in the sacred cathair of Kieran, that he would be buried. And, as I closed the chapter on the Shannon with some verses of one of Ireland's truest poets, I cannot do better than close this one with his lovely rendering of the lament which Enock O'Gillan wrote many centuries ago for

THE DEAD AT CLONMACNOISE

In a quiet-watered land, a land of roses, Stands St. Kieran's city fair, And the warriors of Erin in their famous generations Slumber there.

There beneath the dewy hillside sleep the n.o.blest Of the clan of Conn, Each below his stone with name in branching Ogham And the sacred knot thereon.

There they laid to rest the seven kings of Tara, There the sons of Cairbre sleep-- Battle-banners of the Gael that in Kieran's plain of crosses Now their final hosting keep.

And in Clonmacnoise they laid the men of Teffia, And right many a lord of Bregh; Deep the sod above Clan Creide and Clan Conaill, Kind in hall and fierce in fray.

Many and many a son of Conn the Hundred-fighter In the red earth lies at rest; Many a blue eye of Clan Colman the turf covers, Many a swan-white breast.

CHAPTER XVIII

GALWAY OF THE TRIBES

IT was in the dusk of early evening that our train started westward from Athlone, and we soon found ourselves traversing again the dreary bogs which we had crossed on our way from Athenry. I have seldom seen a more beautiful sunset than the one that evening, and we watched the changing sky and the flaming west for long hours; and then, just as darkness came, the great reaches of Galway Bay opened before us, and we were at our journey's end--Galway of the Tribes, the beautiful old town which is the gateway to Connemara.

There is a good hotel connected with the railway, and we had dinner there, and then went forth to see the town. We were struck at once by its picturesqueness, its foreign air. The narrow curving streets do not somehow look like Irish streets, nor do the houses look like Irish houses; rather might one fancy oneself in some old town of France or Belgium. We were fascinated by it, and wandered about for a long time, along dim lanes, into dark courts, looking at the shawled women and listening to the soft talk of the strolling girls.

n.o.body knows certainly how Galway got its name. Some say it was because a woman named Galva was drowned in the river; others maintain that the name was derived from the Gallaeci of Spain, who used to trade here; and still others think that it came from the Gaels, who eventually occupied it in the course of their conquest of Ireland. Whatever the origin of the name, the town was but a poor place, a mere trading village of little importance, until the English came. Richard de Burgo was granted the county of Connaught by the English king in 1226, and six years later he entered Galway, rebuilt and enlarged the castle which had been put up by the Connaught men, threw a wall around the town, and so established another of those centres of Norman power, which were soon to overshadow the whole of Ireland. It was a very English colony, at first, with a deep-seated contempt for the wild Irish. Over the west gate, which looked toward Connemara, was the inscription,