Mearing Stones: Leaves from My Note-Book on Tramp in Donegal

THE FESTIVAL OF DEATH

I met an old man on the road, and his face as yellow as dyer’s rocket. “Walk easy past that little house beyond,” says he in a whisper, turning round and pointing with his staff into the valley. “There’s a young girl in it, and she celebrating the festival of death.”

IN GLEN-COLUMCILLE

Through blown rain and darkness I see the Atlantic tumble in white, ghost-like masses on the strand. Beevna is a shadow, the crosses shadows. Only one friendly light burns in the valley. The patter of rain and the dull boom of the surf ring ceaselessly in my ears. The hills brood: my thoughts brood with them. I stare into the sunset – a far-drawn, scarlet trail – with mute, wondering eyes. Remoteness grips me, and is become a reality in this ultimate mearing of a grey, ultimate land.

THE BRINK OF WATER

I have often heard it said that what passes for folk-lore is in reality book-lore, or what began as book-lore got into the oral tradition and handed down through the generations by word of mouth. A young Ardara man, a poet and dreamer in his way, told me that poetry most frequently came to him when he was near water; wandering, say, by the edge of Lochros, or looking down from Bracky Bridge at the stream as it forced its way through impeding boulders to the sea. I asked him had he ever read “The Colloquy of the Two Sages1”? He said that he had not. I told him that in that MS. occurred the passage: ar bá baile fallsigthe éicsi dogrés lasna filedu for brú uisci, i. e., “for the poets thought that the place where poetry was revealed always was upon the brink of water.” Nettled somewhat, he confessed that he got the idea from his father, a seanchaidhe, since dead, who knew something of Irish MSS., and who perhaps had read the “Colloquy,” or at all events, had heard of it. But apart from the fact of the thing having been given him by his father, he felt that it was true in his own experience – that poetry always came to him more readily when he was near water.

A DARK MORNING

A dark, wet morning, with the mist driving in swaths over the hills. I met an old man on the road. “There’s somebody a-hanging this morning,” says he. “It’s fearful dark!”

THE SWALLOW-MARK

There is a lot of the wanderer in me, and no wonder, I suppose; for I have the swallow-mark – a wise man once showed it to me on my hand – and that means that I must always be going journeys, whether in the flesh or in the spirit, or both. “The swallow-mark is on you,” says he. “You will go wandering with the airs of the world. You will cheat the Adversary himself, even that he drops his corroding-drop on you!” And as I am a wanderer, so the heart in me opens to its kind. I love a brown face, a clear eye, and an honest walk more than anything; if in a man, good; if in a woman, better. And why people look for the cover of a roof, and the sun shining, I never can make out. Sunshine and the open, the wind blowing, travelling betimes and resting betimes, with my back to the field and my knees to the sky, a copy of Raftery or Borrow in my pocket to dip into when the mood is on me – and I am supremely happy!

WOMEN BEETLING CLOTHES

I see three women by a river: they are so close to me that I can hear them talking and laughing. One of them is an oldish creature, the other two are young and dark. They are on their knees on the bank, beetling clothes. One of them gets up – a fine, white-skinned girl – and tucking her petticoats about her thighs, goes into the stream and swishes the clothes several times to and fro in the brown-clear water. Then she throws them out to her companions on the bank, and the beetling process is repeated – each garment being laid on a flat stone and pounded vigorously until clean. The women do not see me (I am standing on a bridge, with a rowan-bush partly between them and me), so I can watch them to my heart’s content.

THE SEA

The sea is one of those things you cannot argue with. You must accept it on its own terms, or leave it alone. And I like a man to be that way: calm at times, rough at times, kind at times, treacherous at times, but at heart unchanging: not to be argued with, but accepted. Is not the comparison apter than one thinks? Is not a man and his passions as divine and turbulent as anything under the sun?

A BALLAD-SINGER

A ballad-singer has come into Ardara. It is late afternoon. He stands in the middle of the Diamond – a sunburnt, dusty figure, a typical Ishmael and stroller of the roads. The women have come to their doors to hear him, and a benchful of police, for lack of something better to do, are laughing at him from the barrack front. The ballad he is singing is about Bonaparte and the Poor Old Woman. Then he changes his tune to “The Spanish Lady” – a Dublin street-song:

As I walked down thro’ Dublin cityAt the hour of twelve in the night,Who should I spy but a Spanish lady,Washing her feet by candlelight.First she washed them, and then she dried themOver a fire of amber coal:Never in all my life did I seeA maid so neat about the sole!

Finally he gives “I’m a Good Old Rebel,” a ballad of the type that became so popular in the Southern States of America after the Civil war:

I’m a good old rebel – that’s what I am,And for this fair land of freedom I don’t care a damn;I’m glad I fought agin it, I only wish we’d won,And I don’t want no one-horse pardon for anything I done.I followed old Marse Robert for four years nigh about,Got wounded in three places and starved at Point Look-Out:I cotched the rheumatism a-campin’ in the snow,But I killed a chance of Yankees, and I’d like to kill some moe.Two hundred thousand Yankees is stiff in Southern dust,We got two hundred thousand before they conquered us:They died of Southern fever and Southern steel and shot —I wish it was two millions instead of what we got!And now the war is over and I can’t fight them any more,But I ain’t a-goin’ to love them – that’s sartin shor’;And I don’t want no one-horse pardon for what I was and am,And I won’t be reconstructed, and I don’t care a damn!

He howls out the verses in disjointed, unmusical bursts. He acts with head and arms, and at places where he is worked up to a particular frenzy he takes a run and gives a buck-jump in the air, blissfully unconscious, I suppose, that he is imitating the manner in which the ballistea, or ancient dancing-songs, were sung by the Romans. At the end of each verse he breaks into a curious chanted refrain like: “Yum tilly-yum-yum-yum-yum-yum” – and then there are more sidlings and buck-jumps. Some of the women throw him money, which he acknowledges by lifting his hat grandiosely. Others of them pass remarks, quite the reverse of complimentary, about his voice and ragged appearance. “Isn’t it terrible he is!” says one woman. “Look at him with the seat out of his trousers, and he lepping like a good one. I could choke him, I could!” Another woman comes out of a shop with a crying child in her arms, and shouts at him: “Will you go away, then? You’re wakening the childer.” “Well, ma’am,” says he, stopping in the middle of a verse, “you may thank the Lord for His mercy that you have childer to waken!” The ducks quack, the dogs howl, the poor ballad-singer roars louder than ever. I listen for a while, amused and interested. Then I get tired of it, and pass on towards Bracky Bridge.

SUNLIGHT

Unless you have seen the sun you cannot know anything. Sunlight is better than wisdom, and the red of the fairy-thimble more than painted fans.

TURF-CUTTING

In the Lochros district, when the weather begins to take up, about the middle of May, the farmers repair to the moss on the north side of the Point, and start cutting the banks. The turf is then footed (sometimes by girls) along the causeway ditches, and when properly seasoned – say about the middle of July – is piled in stacks on high ground convenient to the moss, and covered on top with a lot of old mouldering “winter-stales,” to keep the rain off it. “Winter-stales” are sods that have been left over from the previous season’s cutting – the wet setting in and leaving the bog-roads in such a state that no slipe or wheeled car could get into them. Of course, most of the carrying in Donegal is done by creel or ass-cart; but in the Lochros district turf is scarce, and the farmers on the Point are obliged to keep horses to draw the turf in from the moss on the north side of the Owenea river, some miles off, and over roads that are none too good for wheeled traffic. In some cases I have noticed the “winter-stales” built up in little beehive-shaped heaps on dry ground, to be carted or creeled away as soon as the weather begins to mend. But it is only the more provident farmers who do this.

HIS OLD MOTHER

“My old mother’s ailing this twelvemonth back,” said a man to me to-day. “I’m afeard she’ll go wi’ the leaves.”

A DAY OF WIND AND LIGHT, BLOWN RAIN

A day of wind and light, blown rain, with the sun shining through it in spells. Aighe river below me, brown and clear, foaming through mossed stones to the sea. Trout rising from it now and again to the gnats that skim its surface. Glengesh mountain in the middle distance – a black, splendid bulk – dropping to the Nick of the Bealach on the left. Meadows in foreground bright with marigolds, with here and there by the mearings tufts of king-fern, wild iris and fairy-thimble.

LYING AND WALKING

To lie on one’s loin in the sun is all very well, but walking is better. It is over the hill the wonders are.

GLEN-COLUMCILLE TO CARRICK

Saturday. It is about half-past seven o’clock in the evening. The rain, which kept at it pitilessly all the afternoon, has cleared off, and we have left the little whitewashed inn at Glen-Columcille refreshed, and in high fettle, for the further six miles that has to be done before we reach Carrick, where we mean to spend the night. We had arrived at Glen two hours before in a weary enough condition physically after our tramp over the hills from Ardara, and we had almost resolved on the advice of the hostess of the inn – a slow, deliberate, slatternly sort of woman – to put up with her for the night; but it is wonderful what a rest and a meal and, incidentally, a slatternly hostess does, and so we finally decided to go on to Carrick. We follow the road up by the telegraph posts, and after a stiffish climb of half a mile or more, reach the plateau head. We are now about five hundred feet over sea level. Turning round to have a last look at the place, we see the chapel – a plain white cruciform building, with a queer detached belfry – the little grey, straggling village street (some of the houses with slate roofs, some with thatch), the crosses standing up like gallan-stones on every side of it, the deep valley-bottom green as an emerald, Ballard mountain silhouetted against the sunset, and the vast Atlantic tumbling through mist on the yellow strand beyond. The air smells deliciously of peat. In Donegal one notices the smell of peat everywhere; in fact, if I were asked to give an impression of the county in half a dozen words I should say: “Black hills, brown rivers, and peat.” The road is fairly level now, and we continue our course in a south-easterly direction. A wild waste of moorland stretches on every side of us, brightened here and there by little freshwater lakes, out of which we see the trout jumping in hundreds – Loch Unshagh, Loch Unna, Loch Divna, and another quite near the road, where we got, at the expense of wet feet and knees, some lovely specimens of the lilium aureum, or golden lily, which grows, I think, on every little shallow and flat and bywater in South Donegal. After an hour of pleasant walking the road begins to drop and the rain to fall again. Slieve League is on our right, but we can only see the lower slopes of it, for the cairn is completely covered with driving mist. The wind has risen, and the rain beats coolingly on our cheeks, and exasperatingly, at times, down our necks. We pass a shepherd on the road making for Malin Mór, a shawled figure with a lantern, and several groups of boys and asses with creels bringing turf into the stackers; and farther on a side-car zig-zagging up hill on its way to the Glen. There are two occupants, a priest – presumably the curate of Glen parish going over for Sunday’s Mass – and the driver. It is quite dark now, and the rain increases in intensity. Tramping in a mountainy country is a delightful sport – none better! But it is on such a night and at the end of such a journey as this that one begins to see that it has a bad as well as a good side to it. The rain is coming down in sheets, our clothes are soaked through, the darkness is intense, the roads are shockingly muddy, we are tired out walking, and still we have another stiff mile to go before we see the friendly lights of the inn at Carrick. Two of us – R. M. and myself – stop at a bridge to have a look at the ordnance sheet which has stood us in such good stead all through our journey. Torrential rain beating on a map – even a “cloth-mounted, water-proofed” one like ours – doesn’t improve it; but we have qualms about our direction. We think we should have arrived at Carrick ere this, and we just want to make sure that our direction is right, and that we haven’t taken a wrong turning in the darkness. After some trouble we manage to get a match lighted. The first misfires on the damp emery, the second blows out, the third is swallowed up in rain pouring like a spout through the branches overhead, the fourth.. “Carrick! Carrick! Carrick!” The frenzied cries of the advance guard tell us that the town is in view. We put up our map resignedly, shaking great blabs of water out of it, and push ahead. In five minutes we have passed the chapel, with its square tower looming up darkly in the fog, and in another two we are safe in the inn parlour, enjoying a supper of hot coffee, muffins, and poached eggs.

ORA ET LABORA

Noon of a summer’s day. I see a man in the fields – a wild, solitary figure – the only living thing in sight for miles. He is thinning turnips. Slowly a bell rings out from the chapel on the hill beyond. It is the Angelus. The man stands up, takes off his hat and bows his head in the ancient prayer of his faith… The bell ceases tolling, and he bends to labour again.

TWO THINGS THAT WON’T GO GREY

I met a woman up Glengesh going in the direction of the danger-post. She seemed an old woman by her look, but she more than beat me at the walking. When we got to the top of the hill I complimented her on her powers. “’Deed,” says she, with a deprecating little laugh, “and I’m getting old now. I’m fair enough yet at the walking, but I’m going grey – going fast. A year ago my hair was as black as that stack there” – pointing to a turf-stack out in the bog – “but now it’s on the turn. And I tell you there’s only two things in the world that won’t go grey some time – and that’s salt and iron.”

RUNDAL

I see a green island. It is hardly an island now, for the tide is out, and one might walk across to it by the neck of yellow-grey sand that connects it with the mainland. It is held in rundal by a score of tenants living in the mountains in-by. Little patches of oats, potatoes, turnips, and “cow’s grass” diversify its otherwise barren surface. There are no mearings, but each man’s patch is marked by a cairn of loose stones, thrown aside in the process of reclamation. The stones, I see, are used also as seaweed beds. They are spitted in the sand about, like a cheval de frise, and in the course of time the seaweed carried in by successive tides gathers on them, and is used by the tenants for manure.

PÚCA-PILES

“What are these?” I asked an old woman in the fields this morning, pointing to a cluster of what we in the north-east corner call paddock-stools, and sometimes fairy-stools. “Well,” said she, “they’re not mushrooms, anyway. They’re what you call Púca-piles. They say the Púca lays them!”

THE ROSSES

Bog and sky: a boulder-strewn waste, with salt lochs and freshwater lochs innumerable, and a trail running up to a huddle of white clouds.

A COUNTRY FUNERAL

Death, as they say, has taken somebody away under his oxter! I was coming into Ardara this morning from the Lochros side, and as I came up to the chapel on the hill I heard the bell tolling. That, I knew, was for a burying: it was only about ten o’clock, and the Angelus does not ring until midday. Farther on I met the funeral procession. It was just coming out of the village. The coffin, a plain deal one covered with rugs, was carried over the well of a side-car, and the relatives and country people walked behind. The road was thick with them – old men in their Sunday homespuns and wide-awakes, their brogues very dusty, as if they had come a long way; younger men with bronzed faces, and ash-plants in their hands; old women in the white frilled caps and coloured shawls peculiar to western Ireland; young married women, girls and children. Most of them walked, but several rode in ass-carts, and three men, I noticed, were on horseback. The tramping of so many feet, the rattle of the wheels and the talk made a great stir on the road, and the movement and colour suggested anything but a funeral. Still one could see that underneath all was a deep and beautiful feeling of sorrow, so different to the black-coated, slow-footed, solemn-faced thing of the towns. As the coffin approached I stood into the side of the road, saluted, and turned back with it the tri céimeanna na trocaire (three steps of mercy) as far as the chapel yard.

YOUTH AND AGE

An old man came dawdling out of a gap by the road, and he stopped to have a word with me. We were talking for some time when he said: “You’re a young man, by the looks of you?” I laughed and nodded. “Och,” says he, “but it’s a poor thing to be old, and all your colt-tricks over,” says he, “and you with nothing to do but to be watching the courses of the wind!”

SUMMER DUSK

Summer dusk. A fiddle is playing in a house by the sea. “Maggie Pickens” is the tune. The fun and devilment of it sets my heart dancing. Then the mood changes. It is “The Fanaid Grove” now, full of melancholy and yearning, full of the spirit of the landscape – the soft lapping tide, the dove-grey sands, the blue rhythmic line of hill and sky beyond. The player repeats it… I feel as if I could listen to that tune forever.

A NOTE

Darkness, freshness, fragrance. Donegal fascinates one like a beautiful girl.

THE PEASANT IN LITERATURE

It has been said before that there is “too much peasant” in contemporary Irish literature, especially in the plays. The phenomenon is easily explained. Ireland is an agricultural country, a country of small farms, and therefore a nation of peasants; so that a literature which pretends to reflect the life of Ireland must deal in the main with peasants and the thoughts that peasants think. And peasants’ thoughts are not such dead and commonplace things that I, who have learnt practically all I know from them, can afford to ignore them now. The king himself is served by the field. Where there is contact with the unseen in this book, with the mysteries which we feel rather than understand, it is because of some strange thought dropped in strange words from a peasant’s mouth and caught by me here, as in a snare of leaves, for everyone to ponder. Impressions, with something of the roughness of peasant speech in them and something of the beauty, phases of a moment breathless and fluttering, the mystery of the sea, the thresh of rain, the sun on a bird’s wing, a wayfarer passing – those are the things I sought to capture in this book.

AN INSLEEP

We were talking together the other evening – an old woman and myself – on a path which leads through the fields from Glengesh mountain to Ardara wood. We had got as far as the stream which crosses the path near the wood when she stopped suddenly. She looked west, and scratched her eyebrow. “I’ve an insleep,” says she. “I hadn’t one this long time!”

WATER AND SLÁN-LUS

What is more beautiful than water falling, or a spray of slán-lus with its flowers?

BY LOCHROS MÓR

The heat increases. The osmunda droops on the wall. The tide is at full ebb. A waste of sea-wrack and sand stretches out to Dawros, a day’s journey beyond. I see two figures, a boy and a girl, searching for bait – the boy digging and the girl gathering into a creel. The deep, purring note of a sandpiper comes to me over the bar. It is like the sound that air makes bubbling through water. I listen to it in infinite space and quietness.

RIVAL FIDDLERS

I was talking with a fiddler the other evening in a house where there was a dance, up by Portnoo. I happened to mention the name of another fiddler I had heard playing a night or two before in Ardara. “Him, is it?” put in my friend. “Why, he’s no fiddler at all. He’s only an old stroller. He doesn’t know the differs between ‘Kyrie Eleison’ and ‘The Devil’s Dreams’!” He became very indignant. I interrupted once or twice, trying to turn the conversation, but all to no purpose; he still went on. Finally, to quiet him, I asked him could he play “The Sally Gardens.” He stopped to think for a while, fondling the strings of his instrument lovingly with his rough hands; then he said that he didn’t know the tune by that name, but that if I’d lilt or whistle the first few bars of it, it might come to him. I whistled them. “Oh,” says he, “that’s ‘The Maids of Mourne Shore.’ That’s the name we give it in these parts.” He played the tune for me quite beautifully. Then there was a call from the man of the house for “The Fairy Reel,” and the dancers took the floor again. The fiddlers in Donegal are “all sorts,” as they say – farmers, blacksmiths, fisher boys, who play for the love of the thing, and strollers (usually blind men) who wander about from house to house and from fair to fair playing for money. When they are playing I notice they catch the bow in a curious way with their thumbs between the horsehair and the stick. At a dance it is no uncommon thing to see a “bench” of seven or eight of them. They join in the applause at the end of each item, rasping their bows together on the strings and stamping vigorously with their feet.

NATURE

A poor woman praying by a cross; a mountain shadowed in still water; a tern crying; the road ribboning away into the darkness that looks like hills beyond. Can we live every day with these aspiring things, and not love beauty? Can we look out on our broad view – as someone has said of the friars of the monastery of San Pietro in Perugia – and not note the play of sun and shadow? Nature is the “Time-vesture of God.” If we but touch it, we are made holier.

SUNDAY UNDER SLIEVE LEAGUE

It is Sunday. The dawn has broken clear after a night’s rain. The sunlight glitters in the soft morning air. The fragrance of peat, marjoram, and wild-mint hangs like a benediction over the countryside. A lark is singing; the swallows are out in hundreds. The road turns and twists – past a cabin, over a bridge – between fringes of wet grass. It dips suddenly, then rises sheer against a wisp of cloud into the dark bulk of Slieve League behind. I see the mountainy people wending in from all parts to Mass. I am standing on high ground, and can see the hiving roads – the men with their black coats and wide-awakes, and the women with their bright-coloured kerchiefs and shawls. Some of them have trudged in for miles on bare feet. They carry their brogues, neatly greased and cleaned, over their shoulders. As they come near the chapel they stop by the roadside or go into a field and put them on. The young girls – grey-eyed, limber slips from the hills – are fixing themselves before they go in of the chapel door. They stand in their ribboned heads and shawls pluming themselves, and telling each other how they look. The boys are watching them. I hear the fresh, nonchalant laugh and the kindly greeting in Irish – “Maidin bhreagh, a Phaid,” and the “Goidé mar tá tú, a Chait?” The men – early-comers – sit in groups on the chapel wall, discussing affairs – the weather, the crops, the new potato spray, the prospects of a war with Germany, the marrying and the giving in marriage, the letters from friends in America, the death and month’s mind of friends. The bell has ceased ringing. The men drop from their perch on the wall, and the last of them has gone in. The road is quiet again, and only the sonorous chant of the priest comes through the open windows – “Introibo ad altare Dei,” and the shriller response of the clerk, “Ad Deum, qui laetificat juventutem meam.”