Killarney

Very brilliant are the “Kerry diamonds,” and very pretty, but valueless save to the children who pick them up, and perhaps to that fairy world whose standards are not the sordid ones of mortals. To them these lovely crystals, whether clear or coloured, may be the true treasure.

Beautiful Innisfallen, with hill and glen, creek and harbour, and cliffs overhung by trees shading the many bays. The Gem of Killarney it is called. “Not heaven’s reflex, but a bit fallen out of heaven itself,” were Macaulay’s words, and they express the feeling called forth by its rich verdure, its wonders of foliage and of colour, the ineffable beauty which clothes it as a mantle. Yet so great are its contrasts that in this island of 24 acres are woods as gloomy as the ancient Druidical forests, thick with giant ash and enormous hollies.

As you approach the island you seem to draw near such a forest, so close are these great trees, extending into the water. On landing, you find they encircle a lawn of the deepest and most vivid green. Open glades through the trees give enchanting vistas—the lofty peaks of Toomies and Glena, the misty summits of the Purple Mountain, Ross Castle and its wooded shores, sunny islands and sparkling waters, sometimes so still as to reflect the woods and mountains as in a mirror. In the morning hour the mountains bordering on the Lower Lake are left in shadow, but as the day goes on the sun glides imperceptibly along the line of the great chain, and darts his rays on that side of the mountains which lies next to the lake. All their bold irregularities are then revealed—their protruding rocks, their deep glens, and the lake is illuminated amid its dark and wooded isles by the long gleams which pass athwart its waves.

At such hours it looks too fair a world for sin and sorrow, but yonder stands the Castle, with ruined battlements and many a grim sign of the stormy past, while fair Innisfallen itself contains a ruin where once holy men maintained a warfare equally deadly against the powers of evil, though fought with no mortal weapons.

Little remains of the Abbey of Innisfallen, founded in the sixth century by St. Finian. Even the walls are levelled save for the remains of an oratory, whose western gable contains a doorway with rich decorations. This monastery, however decayed, will always be famous, because the Annals of Innisfallen were written here.

The original work is in the Bodleian Library. It is on parchment and in medium quarto, and contains fifty-seven leaves. Extracts from the Old Testament and a history of the ancient world down to the arrival of St. Patrick in Ireland in 432 form the earlier part. From this period it deals exclusively with the affairs of Ireland, terminating with 1319. It seems to have been the production of two monks, one carrying it to 1216, the other continuing it to 1320. It is one of the earliest of Irish histories, and considered by savants as taking high rank among them.

In 1100 the Abbey was plundered by Mildwin O’Donoghue of a great treasure of gold, silver, and rich goods of the adjacent country, which had been deposited there as secure sanctuary. Many of the clergy were slain by the MacCarthys, “But,” writes the monk, “God soon punished this act of sacrilege and impiety by bringing many of its authors to an untimely end.”

Well, there is peace now in fair Innisfallen. The visitor bears away its impress with the memory of one of the fairest spots on earth.

Glena, the “glen of good fortune,” is one of the most eagerly sought out beauty spots of Killarney. Glena Bay is the first part of the Lower Lake if it is entered from the Long Range, but by whatever way you reach it the picture which meets the eye is unsurpassed.

The mountains of Glena and Toomies are densely wooded to their base, the trees hanging over their sides and coming down in rich luxuriance to the water’s edge. A very forest of the finest arbutus, with berry and blossom together in autumn, with oak, ash, pine, birch and alder, white thorn, yew, and holly, it must be seen to realize the colour effect or the matchless tintings of gorse and heather, a great mosaic quivering in the sunshine. The varieties of this immense scenery of forest are impossible to describe, the woods extending about six miles in length, and from half a mile to a mile and a half in breadth, while the inequalities of the ground produce wondrous effects of light and shadow.

Glena is all soft loveliness, but rugged rock and crag, and the stern grandeur of Torc Mountain on the other side, strike again that minor chord never far from Killarney’s brightest scenes.

Lough Leane has upwards of thirty isles, large and small, and as the boat is rowed past Glena shore you see them in all their varied form and colour, from Ross to tiny Mouse Island. It is a fair sight. There is a little bay at the foot of the Toomies where you can land to reach O’Sullivan’s Cascade, one of the greatest of the Killarney waterfalls, not only from its size, but from the peculiar formation of the bed down which it dashes. It really consists of three falls. “The uppermost, passing over a bridge of rocks, falls about 20 feet perpendicularly into a natural basin; then, bursting between two hanging rocks, the torrent hastens down a second precipice into a second receptacle, from which it rolls over into the lowest chamber of the fall. It is about 70 feet high. The roar of the descending water can be heard from afar, and is almost deafening when near. Beneath a projecting rock overhanging the lowest basin is a grotto, with a seat rudely cut in the rock. From this little grotto the view of the cascade is peculiarly beautiful. It appears a continued flight of three foamy stories. The recess is overshadowed by an arch of foliage so thick as to interrupt the admission of light.”

The forest about Toomies is still the haunt of the old red deer of Ireland, and a grand stag hunt is occasionally organized, the cries of the hounds, the shouting of the hunters, the firing of the signalling cannon, combining to awake the mountain echoes for many miles around. It is a cruel sport, though the stag is now, as a rule, saved from death. Yet its gallant attempts to save itself, its struggles to get free from the cordon of enemies around, its agonies of terror as, bounding for refuge to the heights, it is confronted by shouting men, and turned to confront the savage pack, are cruel enough. It leaps from rock to rock and chasm to chasm with sobbing breath and big tears, and plunges into the lake in desperation, to be met by the boats watching for it. Of late years it is set free, but it is not sentimentality to imagine that the grim experience it has passed through will render the life given to it a thing of terror, haunted by the bay of the hounds and the shouts of the hunters.

CHAPTER VI
THE KILLARNEY FOLK

The people who dwell on the shores of these lovely lakes are a handsome race, tall and finely formed, with clear-cut features and dark and most expressive eyes, often of the Irish grey or deep violet, with long black lashes. Pencilled eyebrows and abundance of dark-brown hair usually accompany these, and that clear complexion which the moist western breezes confer. They love music and dancing, the “boys and girls,” who, meeting on a roadside, only require a merry tune to “foot it away” and forget their cares.

But with all their lightheartedness their standard of duty is very high, and family ties are sacred. Seldom, if ever, is infidelity known among the married, and a certain honour is given to the head of the poorest household. Husband and wife each has a distinct place, which neither would dream of usurping, the husband having the chief, of course. In one case, however, and that a very important one to an Irishman, right of precedence is universally granted to the wife. This is when it happens that she is by birth of a superior tribe to her husband. “I am a MacCarthy; my husband is only a so-and-so,” she will say proudly.

There are many “shealings” around and on the sides of the mountains, where the “mountainy men,” as they are called, cultivate patches of land with a success due to their patient industry. They have hens, a few goats, and perhaps some lean mountain sheep, and all these are liable to visitations from the eagles when rearing their young. Often, too, they have one or two cows of the Kerry breed, which find sweet pickings among the rocks, and give more milk on the scant herbage than the sleek and well-favoured kine of richer counties. This breed is small, with long horns and wild, handsome heads.

Simple-hearted, generous and faithful are these men and women, with a dignified courtesy of manner which tells of the Eastern strain in their blood. Their courtesy and good manners are, indeed, very charming. For instance, you may have been out all day with a man, and when you reach his home he will step in first, and, turning, offer you his hand and bid you welcome, as though it were the first time he had met you that day. He welcomes you, and then you will be placed in the seat of honour, and refreshments brought you, the refusal of which would be an insult.

The love of classical learning among the peasantry was great. It continues still, though the classics are not cultivated in this practical age as in the days when they were taught by travelling scholars at the hedge schools. All the old writers on Killarney mention their wonder at meeting poorly-clad men and boys able to converse fluently in Latin, and studying the best Latin, and even Greek, authors. The power of reading Homer in the original was greatly coveted, and often attained. The magic of their surroundings may have had much to do with kindling the peasant’s imagination to passionate interest in a dead language.

The first distinct mention of the sea-coast adjoining Killarney occurs in the works of Ptolemy, who wrote in the second century. He speaks of the river of Kenmare under the title of Iernus, while again it is called Fluctus Desmonda, or the River of Desmond. At this Iernus of Ptolemy is placed by ancient authors the landing of several Milesian colonists, and though Irish history before the Christian era is chiefly traditional, there seems some foundation for this.

If we believe the bards and seers, the Milesian immigration was the fifth which came to colonize Hibernia out of the overflowing tribes of Asia. Of the fourth, the Tuatha de Danans, they tell a curious tale. These colonizers are depicted as accomplished sooth-sayers and necromancers who came out of Greece. They could quell storms, cure diseases, work in metals, foretell future events, and, by their supernatural powers as well as by virtue of the Lia Fail, or Stone of Destiny, they subdued the Firbolgs, who had preceded them, and exercised sovereignty, till they in turn were displaced by the Gaelic or fifth immigration.

Sometimes these called themselves Gael, from an ancestor; sometimes Milesians, from Milesius, projector of the immigration; sometimes Scota, from his wife. They came from Spain, and all their magical arts did not save the Tuatha from defeat. “In vain they surrounded themselves and their coveted island with magic-made tempest and terrors; in vain they reduced it in size so as to be almost invisible from sea. Amergin, one of the sons of Milesius, was a Druid skilled in all the arts of the East, and, led by him, his brothers countermined the magicians and beat them with their own weapons.”

Among the mountains of South Kerry the peasants point out a stone where Queen Scota, daughter of Pharaoh of Egypt, and wife of Milesius of Spain, is believed to lie buried. She was killed in battle three days after landing with her sons on this coast. Upon the flat of the stone is an Ogham inscription, which reads, “Leacht Scoihin” (“The grave mound of Scota”). Ogham experts think this inscription a forgery, but the old tradition makes it at least probable that within sound of the thunder of the Atlantic, far from her own people, lies the daughter of the Pharaohs.

From an antiquarian point of view Kerry is one of the most interesting places in the British Isles, and very rich in relics of the past. An archæological society has been formed, which is endeavouring to rescue the relics and monuments from neglect and decay. Killarney has been found a singularly promising field to explore, though much has perished.

The Celtic nature is curiously complex, and those who do not themselves possess it find it hard to understand. It has one quality in which no other race has ever equalled it, and that is a marvellous power of absorbing alien nationalities to itself, so that, while conquered, it yet conquers. It is a matter of current knowledge that the English became more Irish than the Irish themselves. They intermarried with the families of native chiefs, gave their children to be nursed by Irish foster-mothers, spoke the Irish tongue, espoused the Irish interests. Had this power of amalgamation been encouraged, and not sternly repressed by the English Government, there was a period when it might have changed completely the destiny of Ireland; but it was not to be.

There is an interesting poem by an Irishman, “The Geraldines,” from which I quote one verse:

CHAPTER VII
THE FAIRIES—AND FAREWELL!

The Raths, or “fairy forts,” of Killarney have hitherto seldom been explored. They are circular grassy mounds enclosing a field, generally small. Underneath are found stone chambers, their beehive roofs and walls made of unmortared stone. It is supposed that here the ancient Celts fortified themselves and their cattle, retreating in winter into the stone chambers. Be this as it may, for centuries the Irish have believed them to be tenanted by a fairy race, whose palaces are here, and who guard hidden treasure.

These are the Sidhe, or people of the hill, the noblest among these mysterious folk. Some say they are the spirits of the Tuatha de Danan, that strange race which occupied Ireland till the Milesians came, when, conquered by a greater magic than their own, they disappeared. Strange to say, no mortal descendant of these people has ever been traced in any Irish family.

“Hanafin was a farmer owning a large herd of cows, which were driven up every morning to be milked in front of his house. For several days the tub into which the milk was poured was mysteriously overturned and the milk spilled. Hanafin’s wife was naturally excessively indignant, but, in spite of every precaution, the milk continued to be upset. One morning, however, as Hanafin was walking past a fairy fort, he heard a child crying inside it, and a woman’s voice saying: ‘Be quiet awhile! Hanafin’s cows are going home; we’ll soon have milk in plenty.’ Hanafin went home and personally supervised the milking, and on the usual overturning stopped his wife from scolding, telling her this time it was no fault of the girls, who had been pushed by one of the cows against the tub. ‘Leave it to me,’ he said; ‘I’ll try and manage the business.’

“The following morning, on hearing the child cry again in the fort, Hanafin, ‘like the brave man he was,’ went inside. He saw no one, but he said, ‘A child is crying for milk. A cow of mine will calve to-morrow. I’ll let no one milk that cow; you can do what you like with her milk.’

“The tub was never overturned again, and for two years Hanafin prospered in every way, taking good care of the cow, and never letting her be milked.

“Unfortunately, however, Hanafin, being soft-hearted, went security for some of his neighbours who had got into trouble, with the result that their creditors came down on him, and the bailiffs arrived one day to drive off his cattle. Hanafin repaired to the fort, and said: ‘I’m going to lose all my cattle, but I’ll try and keep the cow I gave you, and feed her still, so that the child may have the milk.’

“Three bailiffs came and went down to the pasture across the field, but when they drove the cows up as far as the fairy fort ‘each bailiff was caught and thrown hither and over by people he couldn’t see. One moment he was at one side of the ditch, the next at the other. They were so roughly handled and bruised that they were hardly alive, and they not seeing who or what was doing it! The cattle, raising their tails, bawled and ran off to the pasture.’

“The following morning ten policemen and bailiffs went to take Hanafin’s cattle, with exactly the same results, so that the men ‘barely left the place alive.’ Never again did police or bailiff meddle with Hanafin’s cattle, and the creditors never collected their money.”

These are the familiar fairies who stole children out of their cradles, young matrons from their husbands, and girls from their lovers; who bewitched cows and blighted potatoes, but who “did you many a good turn too.” The peasant will not lightly lose faith in them, nor will the fairies lightly forsake the land of beauty, of sunshine, and of shadow. Quickly as events march and ideas change in this wonderful age, hurrying we know not where, and though here and there someone may be found to dare—or say he will—enter a fairy fort or cut down a fairy thorn, I think that with the boldest of these unbelievers it is a case of the man who denied the power of the priest to turn him into a rat, but who, saying “It’s as well to make sure,” took the precaution of shutting up the cat at night. “Taking it all round,” writes Lady Gordon, “it would be a drab world if there were no fairies in it, no supernatural region in which nothing is too preposterous to occur.... Earth-bound humanity, seeking to escape from earth cares, still dreams in one form or other of a land of strange happenings.”

How much remains still to be said about Killarney, its varied interests, its shifting, matchless scenery! The lover of beauty and romance, the historian, the archæologist, the antiquary—it is a field for each. It has begun to dawn on the mind of many explorers what great questions hinge on Celtic antiquities, what light they may shed upon the ancient history of Europe, while students of the Irish language say it will yet prove the key to ancient ones which are puzzling philologists. Killarney is rich in Ogham inscriptions, in curious old remains and relics (utilized hitherto by mason and builder). Such as are not hopelessly lost are gradually being unearthed by the ardent seekers of to-day.

Whatever changes may be in the future, Killarney must ever remain a land of enchantment. Perhaps a few recent words of Alfred Austin may fitly close this attempt to sketch the principal features of this fair land.

“The tender grace of wood and water is set in a framework of hills, now stern, now ineffably gentle, now dimpling with smiles, now frowning and rugged with impending storm, now muffled and mysterious with mist, only to meet you again with brilliant sunshine. Here the trout leaps, there the eagle soars, and there beyond the wild deer dash through the arbutus covert, through which they have come to the margin of the lake to drink, and, scared by your footstep or your oar, are away back to bracken or heather-covered moorland. But the first, the final, the deepest and most enduring impression of Killarney is that of beauty unspeakably tender, which puts on at times a garb of grandeur and a look of awe, only to heighten by contrast its soft loveliness. How the missel thrushes sing, as well they may! How the streams and runnels leap and laugh! For the sound of journeying water is never out of your ears, the feeling of the moist, the fresh, the vernal is never out of your heart.”

No, never! True words are these with which reluctantly to say farewell to beautiful Killarney.

INDEX

A B C D E F G H I K L M O P R S T V

Aghadoe, 12
Antiquities of Kerry, 53
Arbutus, The, 26
Austin, Alfred, 61

Black Valley, 20

Chess in Ancient Ireland, 19
Clancarty, Earl of, 36
Classical learning amongst older generation, 51
Coleman’s Eye, 28

Devil’s Punch Bowl, 36
Devil’s Stream, 37
Dunloe Castle, 14
Dunloe, Gap of, 17

Eagle Island, 27

Fairies, The, 56
Foliage of mountain-sides, 24

“Geraldines, The,” 54
Glena, 46
Golf Links, 12
Guides, The, 39

“Hanafin and His Cows,” 57

Innisfallen, Abbey of, 44
Innisfallen, Annals of, 44
Innisfallen Island, 43
Islands, The, 23

Kate Kearney’s cottage, 16
Killarney folk, 49

Lakes and mountains, 23
Last Irish snake, 20
“Light of Love,” 29
Logan Stone, 21
Long Range, The, 28
“Lord Brandon’s Cottage,” 22
Lough Leane, 47
Ludlow, Parliamentary General, 39

Macaulay, Lord, his words on Innisfallen, 43
MacCarthy’s Island, 27
MacGillicuddy’s Reeks, 18
Mineral treasures, 37, 41
Moore, Thomas, the poet, 16
Muckross Abbey, 33
Muskerry, Lord, the Royalist, 39

O’Donoghue and his white charger, 6, 40
O’Donoghues of Ross, The, 40
Ogham inscriptions, 15, 53
Origin of the lakes, legendary, 9
Osmundi Regalia, 28
O’Sullivan’s Cascade, 47

Precious Stones of Kerry, 42, 43
Ptolemy’s map of Ireland, 51
Purple Mountain, 18

Raths, or fairy forts, 56
Ross Castle, 38

Scota, Queen, daughter of Pharaoh, 53
Settlements of Ireland, early, 52
Sidhe, the, or People of the Hill, 56
Stag-hunting, 48
Stillman, the famous war correspondent, 7

Toomies Mountain, 18, 46
Torc Cascade, 36
Trichomanes speciosum, or Brutle Fern, 29

Voice of Nature, The, 7

BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD