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MUNSTER

Described by Stephen Gwynn Pictured by Alexander Williams

BLACKIE AND SON LIMITED LONDON GLASGOW AND BOMBAY 1912

Beautiful Ireland

LEINSTER ULSTER MUNSTER CONNAUGHT

Beautiful England

OXFORD THE ENGLISH LAKES CANTERBURY SHAKESPEARE-LAND THE THAMES WINDSOR CASTLE CAMBRIDGE NORWICH AND THE BROADS THE HEART OF WESSEX THE PEAK DISTRICT THE CORNISH RIVIERA DICKENS-LAND WINCHESTER THE ISLE OF WIGHT CHESTER AND THE DEE YORK

Page

The Blackwater at Dromana 8

Blarney Castle 16

Ferrybank, Waterford 20

Shandon Steeple from the River Lee 26

Entrance to Cork Harbour 32

Kenmare Bay from Templenoe 38

Macgillicuddy's Reeks 42

The Gap of Dunloe, Killarney 46

Muckross Lake, Killarney 50

Brickeen Bridge, Lower Lake, Killarney 54

Holy Island, Lough Derg 58

The best way to get to Munster nowadays is undoubtedly by the new route from Fishguard to Rosslare, in which the Great Western Railway has reopened what was for ancient times the natural and easy way from England to Ireland. The Normans, as everyone knows, came across here, an advance party landing on the coast of Wexford; but the main force under Strongbow sailed straight up the river to Waterford. Many another invader before the Normans took the same route: and there is little doubt but that the peaceful invasion of Christianity had begun in this region, or that south-eastern Ireland was already baptized, before Patrick set out on his mission. Earlier again, the Milesians came from Britain, a race of warriors trained to fight on foot in the Roman fashion with sword and javelin, and drove before them the chariot-fighting people who then held the wide plain watered by the three great rivers which meet in Waterford harbour.

For a good sailor, undoubtedly the long passage to Cork, ending with a sail up the beautiful haven and the "pleasant waters of the river Lee", is to be preferred beyond all other routes. But the mass of mankind, and more specially of womankind, like the short sea and quick rail, and their choice is Fishguard to Rosslare. You enter the southern province of Ireland by a viaduct which leads from the flat lands of Wexford, through which you will have travelled for nearly an hour, on to the steep left bank of the river Suir facing Waterford city. The great bridge crosses the united Barrow and Nore; half a mile lower down is the junction with the Suir, and from the train you have a glorious view of the wide pool made at the confluence--a noble entrance into this province of lovely waters.

The city itself may show to you only a line of lights, very picturesque along its great length of quay: but by daylight you can distinguish the low round castle which still keeps the name of Strongbow's tower. Fragments of the old walls remain, and there are buildings of much antiquarian interest--the restored cathedral, the ruined Franciscan abbey. But, on the whole, you are not likely to stop in Waterford, with Kerry and West Cork before you.

Yet let me tell a little of the things which the ordinary tourist visiting Munster passes by in his haste. The route from Rosslare to Killarney strikes across from the valley of the Suir into the valley of the Blackwater, rounding the Comeragh mountains: and I do not suppose it can be disputed that the Blackwater is the most beautiful of Irish rivers. I have seen it at Mallow, at Fermoy, at Lismore, and at Cappoquin, and everywhere it is the same yet different; a chain of long wide pools, but always with a swift flow to keep the water living and sparkling, and they are strung together with great sweeping rapids, deep enough for salmon to lie in, the anglers' joy: while on each shore are hill slopes receding, richly wooded, from the stream and the meadows beside the stream. The palm of beauty belongs of right to Lismore, where the Duke of Devonshire has his great castle overhanging a famous pool: and below it from the bridge one looks down the stream and the valley to a far-off blue vista between the hills. Yonder, where the river meets the sea at Youghal is one of the quaintest and most charming towns of Ireland. I saw it first by the light of a long procession of tall torches which lit up delightfully the old houses with their scrolled fronts of timber, and the pretty faces of girls and women looking out of the first-floor windows: but it was no little surprise to me in that march to find myself under an archway, over which rose a tall slated tower, fully equipped with loopholes, and from whose top arrangements had been made to bombard me and my friends that night. In daylight I saw, though with a hasty glance, the very beautiful fifteenth-century church still intact and still used for worship: the still greater attraction of Sir Walter Raleigh's old house I never visited, but I hope you may. It has a mulberry tree said to be of his planting, and a chimney piece against which he almost certainly reclined his shoulders while in act to toast his travelled calves.

Travelling by this line of rail you will have on your right the Comeragh and the Knockmealdown mountains which divide the valley of the Blackwater from the valley of the Suir. But it may possibly be your pleasure, as it will certainly be your profit, to explore also the Suir valley, which divides the Comeraghs from the outlying mass of Slievenamon, and, farther west, curves northward from the base of the tall Galtee ranges.

I came last into Munster by motor car, driving from Kilkenny to Clonmel over the southern shoulder of Slievenamon , and a finer journey could not be taken. We struck out through rich pasture and tillage, keeping this shadowy dome which rose from the plain as our objective, till the pass began to define itself. But it was when we had crossed or were crossing the pass that the real beauty began. Slievenamon was on our right, well wooded; facing us, as we ran south, were the Comeraghs, and a low foot ridge thrown out from them, between which and us ran the Suir. The valley is wider than that of the Blackwater, with less of what may be called fancy wooding; but it can fairly hold its own; and the quay at Clonmel by the shining, swirling river is as pretty as heart could desire.

From Clonmel to Lismore a road carries you over the top of Knockmealdown , and those of my companions who took that drive crowed over me for the rest of the journey; describing in glowing phrases all the glories I had missed, the wonderful panorama from the top, then the gradual descent down a long wild wooded glen into the tranquil and cultivated beauty of Lismore.

Yet if I had a motor car at Clonmel and only one day's excursion to make, it is not south I would go. I would go north into the heart of Tipperary, through the Golden Vale which lies overshadowed and half-circled by the Galtee range, until I came to the thing best worth seeing in all Ireland, Cashel of the Kings.

This rock is crowned with buildings that speak of war and peace, but of peace rather than war. There stands intact Cormac's Chapel, finest example of Irish building in the pre-Norman style; round-arched, solid, barrel-roofed, decorated with string-courses of dogtooth moulding. Beside it is the great cathedral built by the O'Brien lord of Thomond, cathedral and fortress in one; unroofed now, dismantled, and ruinous, yet hardly beyond reach of repair, since the choir was used as a cathedral till the latter part of the eighteenth century. Then an archbishop got an Act of Parliament authorizing him to unroof it and providing a regiment of soldiers to execute the work. Archbishop Price's reason for such an enterprise may not seem wholly conclusive; he liked--good easy man--to drive in comfortable state to his cathedral door, and no coach and horses could conveniently ascend the winding path up the Rock.

Beside the cathedral is the tall Round Tower, and on the north side of the Rock, many remains of choir schools and other monastic buildings. On the level plain and in the town are other monasteries ruined yet not wholly shorn of their splendour; and within a few miles, Holycross Abbey and Athassel speak of the wealth and culture which were destroyed in this rich land of the Golden Vale.

But the Rock itself, standing up there, crowned with such a group of buildings as no other of Ireland's high places can parallel, is the true object of pilgrimage; and the view from it over the Golden Vale, to the noble Galtee peaks and pinnacles due south of you, and the long waving line of Comeragh Mountains which runs continuously east from them along the valley of the Suir, is a prospect worth long journeying. Nor is that all. Slievenamon rises dome-shaped from the eastern plain, a gap between it and the outlying spurs of Comeragh showing where the Suir, headed off its southward course by Galteemore, finds a way eastward to the sea: and to the north beyond the plain is the far-off range of Slievebloom, dividing Leinster from the Shannon; and nearer towards Athlone and the Shannon are the low hills with the Devil's Bit nipped out of the top of them.

If I had to see Munster by motor car, my disposition would be to start from Waterford, follow the valley of the Suir up to Clonmel, then strike north to Cashel and see it. All the monuments can be seen in a few hours, and no ruin or building that I ever visited has so intelligent a custodian. From Cashel I would go to Holycross, that exquisite remnant of monastic splendour, rich in historic memories, and thence push out across Tipperary to the north-west, steering for the gap between Keeper Mountain and the Silver Mines. This would bring me out of the Golden Vale, which is in truth the valley of the Suir, and into the basin of a still greater and more famous river, at its most famous point. For from this gap the route would descend to the Shannon, at the narrow gorge below Lough Derg where all its vast volume of water is contracted to the ford and pass at Killaloe. Here, if you will, is beauty: long peaceful levels above the weir where lake passes imperceptibly into broad river; below it huge swirling rapids, interspersed with wide, smooth, yet swift running salmon pools, all down the twelve miles of river to the head of the tideway at Limerick. And here, too, are historic memories more glorious than can be matched elsewhere in Ireland. It was here at the outflow of the lake, where is an unsuspected ford, that Sarsfield crossed , on the raid when he stole out of Limerick along the Clare shore and so to this ford, on his way to lie in wait on the slopes of Keeper for William's expected battering train. On your road from Cashel you will have passed near Ballyneety, where he and his troopers surprised the sleeping convoy and blew the heavy guns into scattered shreds--a splendid foray, splendidly preluding Limerick's heroic and successful resistance to the great Dutchman.

"I have left them with the foreigners After being cut down, O Mahon! In hardship they followed me on every field, Not like as thy people."

It was Brian who in that council caused appeal to be made to the Clan Dalcais whether they would have peace or war, and "War", they answered, "and this was the voice of hundreds as the voice of one man".

The work that was begun at Kincora was finished sixty years later outside Dublin when the Danish menace was finally broken and dispelled on the shore by Clontarf: and in that fight the old lord of Kincora, Brian of the Tribute, High King by then of all Ireland, fell gloriously in the hour of a victory almost too dearly won.

You can see in Killaloe the little old church, built somewhere in the eighth or ninth century, with its high-pitched roof of stone slabs, under which Brian worshipped more than ten centuries ago. Beside it is the cathedral built by his descendants, and adorned with noble archways in the rich Romanesque style of native Irish architecture.

From Killaloe to Limerick the road is pleasant, along the ever-widening valley which is blocked by Keeper to the north, but trends opening and widening towards West Clare and the sea. Yet to understand the beauty and the charm of that characteristic piece of Irish landscape, you should be taken down the stream in the characteristic boat of those waters, the long pole-driven cot. Shooting the rapids in these craft is a wonderful sensation, and even on a chill day in February the tumult of lashing water sends warmth into the blood. So you can follow the stream till at last below Athlunkard bridge you reach the long Lax Weir, which keeps the memory of Scandinavian settlers in its name , and the memory of early Norman settlement in the odd little tower built in the middle of the weir to command the passage, as long ago as the days of King John.

In Limerick itself King John's Castle with its great rounded towers frowns over the Bridge of the Broken Treaty, where Sarsfield and his men covenanted with William for protection to the property and the religious freedom of Irish Catholics, and then took ship for France--first of the Wild Geese, founders of the Irish Brigade--leaving no guardians but honour and justice to enforce the sanction of the treaty, guardians that were of no avail. Much has been written of the siege of Derry and in praise of its heroic defenders: but too little is known of Limerick's resistance, when the French officer, whom James II had left in charge, declared that the walls could be battered down with roasted apples, and Sarsfield answered that defended they should and must be. You can see the mark of William's cannon balls on the old wall near the convent hospital east of the town: single marks on the dark limestone here and there, but at the angle of the wall, where the Black Battery stood, and where a breach was made, there is clear trace still of the desperate assault--from which William's best troops, after they had effected a lodgment, were finally driven back pell-mell.

From Limerick the West Clare Railway will carry you through Ennis, passing near Bunratty Castle, Quin Abbey, and many another place of fame, to the coast where Lahinch offers one of the most popular golf links in Ireland. It is a wild wind-swept coast, a wild surf beats on the strand that divides Lahinch from Liscannor, and north of it are the great cliffs of Moher. Lisdoonvarna is near by, a spa much frequented by Irishmen, more specially by the Irish clergy. But the favourite place of all who visit this part of Munster is Kilkee, a little watering-place set above steep cliffs on which the Atlantic swings in with all its weight. There is no other place known to me in western Ireland where you can find decent seaside quarters in a spot that meets the full force and splendour of the sea. And from the Clare coast near by--even out of the window of a railway carriage--I saw one of the greatest prospects that eye could look on. To the south, some thirty or forty miles distant, the Dingle peninsula stretched outward, with the huge mass of Brandon rising out of the blue: but away north-west I could see very clear the three island heights of Aran, and east of them the whole group of Connemara mountains, beyond which again, away up into Mayo, the shapes of Mweelrea and Croagh Patrick were dim yet recognizable in outline.

The day was of astonishing clearness, yet, as so often happens in western Ireland, its clearness had nothing hard: the Atlantic blue was deep and sombre, the mountain shapes, exquisite in line, were vested in colour that had a magic and a mystery all their own. Sunlight across that brine-laden air, across those pungent expanses of bog, is never crudely definite in its revelation; there is a hint of romance and glamour in the pearly shimmer of its brightness.

Clare has noble traditions: and no one should visit it without a pilgrimage to the castle of Carrigaholt on the Shannon estuary near Kilrush; for this was the ancestral home of that branch of the O'Briens who made the ancient name illustrious on every stricken field in Europe. They got their title, the Viscounts Clare, from Charles II, but after the Williamite wars they were attainted; and from Sarsfield's death onward it was always a Lord Clare who commanded the Irish Brigade--that wonderful fighting force whose chief recruiting ground was here in south-western Ireland. Two Lords Clare got their death at the head of their men, one at Massaglia in 1693 when Prince Eugene was beaten: the second at Ramillies, where in the general disaster the Irish Brigade not only saved its own colours, but carried two British standards back to Bruges. The third and last earl, who had refused restitution to all the estates and titles if only he would forswear his religion, led the immortal charge at Fontenoy, when Ireland's banished men snatched in a desperate feat of arms fierce requital for the penal laws that had left them a choice between exile and slavery. Among all the writers who ever handled that period of history, whatever their prepossessions, none ever wrote the name of "Clare's brigade", save with honour and admiration; and no nationalist poet has told their praise so eloquently as the Unionist, Miss Emily Lawless, in two sister poems. One of the two depicts the eve of Fontenoy in the exiles' camp, and the wild stirring in men's hearts. "The wind is wild to-night, and it seems to blow from Clare"--blows with a memory in it and a vision of all that has been left, blows with a promise of things long hoped for, since "Clare's brigade may claim its own" wherever the fight rages.

"Send us, ye western breezes, our full, our rightful share, For faith and home and country and the ruined hearths of Clare."

And the second tells how, on the morrow of the battle, strange craft with strange bodiless sailors were seen on the Western coast, making swift way like homing birds to Corcabascinn, this westernmost barony of Clare.

"Men of Corcabascinn, men of Clare's brigade, Hearken, stony hills of Clare, hear the charge we made, See us come together, singing from the fight, Back to Corcabascinn in the morning light."

Yet in truth it may be that only the native born will find any special charm in this stormy Corcabascinn or its wild winds and waters; for of prettiness and favour it has none, owning grandeur rather than beauty. The counties of Munster which appeal to every human being who has eyes in his head to see with are Cork and Kerry--but Kerry above all.

The unhappy inconveniences of sea travel prevent most folk from visiting County Cork under the best conditions. Access should be by boat: and surely the entrance into that wonderful Cove where the great liners halt to take off mails is noblest of all gateways into Ireland. All the encircling ring of hills is rich with vegetation, but above all on the east by Queenstown is the choicest and most varied wooding. Anything will grow there and nearly everything has been made to grow. The little town itself is picturesque, climbing the steep slope and dominated by Pugin's great cathedral, which stands on the disembarkation quay, making a centre for the last impressions and emotions of those--alas! how many thousands yearly--who leave Ireland.

It is not now as I saw it in the early 'eighties, when hopeless, broken, half-famished peasants were pouring out in a ghastly torrent, mere wreckage on the flood: emigration was then eighty thousand a year, to-day it is less than half that number. Those who go to-day, go reasonably equipped, go for the most part to friends in cities, of which they have heard so much, where they have so many kindred and acquaintances, that the journey seems hardly into exile--hardly to a strange land. Yet, even to-day, every train that brings the emigrants leaves behind it, through the West and South and Midlands, its wake of bitter weeping; at station after station it has gone out amid tearing away of locked hands, last embraces severed, faces of old men twitching, faces of women convulsed with sobs, and sped on its journey to the accompaniment of that dreadful heartrending "keene", the Irish wail, which is heard nowadays more often at the ship's side, or on the railway platform, than at the grave. "Och, the poor soft Irish," I heard a woman say this year, leaving some platform in Cork; on her way, evidently, to a home in the States, where she had lived, no doubt for many years, with the hard-faced, swaggering Yankee, who accompanied her, and who looked with ill-concealed contempt on the tears and emotions of the "poor soft Irish"; but she at least still kept the homely tongue and kind heart.

From Queenstown up to Cork is one of the loveliest waterways in the world, little towns on either bank under the steep wooded shores, and here and there some old castle. Cork itself may have no very great architectural beauties, but the whole lie of the city, spread between its hills, divided by the various streams of that delightful river, makes a beauty of its own: you see it best from the high ground over against the famous steeple where hang "the bells of Shandon that sound so grand on the pleasant waters of the river Lee".

"Pleasant" is the word for Cork, the county, and its soft-voiced, quick-speaking people, with the odd little turn upwards at the end of their sentence. It was called "the Athens of Ireland", though I would say rather, the Naples: in any case, Cork has always sent out far more than its share of brains. In the days of "Father Prout", who wrote the "Bells of Shandon" and other immortal ditties, Cork had a regular coterie of wits--among the best known being a Dowden, father or grandfather of the illustrious man of letters who is to-day one of the chief lights in Trinity College. The late Provost, Dr. Salmon, a still greater luminary, came also from the southern county--as did half a dozen more of the Fellows whose names are familiar enough to all in Ireland; though some, perhaps, enriched legend and chronicle rather than history, and survive as remembered oddities--after all, not the least loveable of survivals.

The south coast of Cork, from Youghal to the Kenmare River, is the pick of Ireland for yachtsmen. Endless is the succession, from Cork itself with all its lesser creeks and havens, Carrigalo, Carrigaline, and Ringabella, on past Kinsale harbour, Courtmacsherry and Clonakilty bays, Roscarbery, Glandore, and west to Baltimore and Roaring Water, off which lies Cape Clear. Then past Mizen Head, on the west shore, are greater bays, harbours not for yachts, but for navies--Dunmanus, Bantry, and the Kenmare River, whose northern shore belongs to Kerry, but which has a frontier certainly in paradise.

Baltimore is one of the great fishing stations of Ireland, and to it the population of Cape Clear comes for most necessaries of life. Along that coast many craft are familiar, but an odd name hangs about one set: the fishermen from near Dungarvan are always known as "the Turks". In 1631 Algerine pirates made a descent on the town of Baltimore, sacked it and carried a hundred of its folk into slavery: and it was a fisherman from Dungarvan who piloted the corsairs.

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