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

THE NIGHT HE WAS BORN

We were talking together, an old man and myself, on the hill between Laguna and Glen. The conversation turned on ages – a favourite topic with old men2– and on the degeneracy that one noticed all over Ireland, especially among the young. “And what age would you take me for?” said he, throwing his staff from him and straightening himself up. “Well, I’m a bad hand at guessing,” said I, “but you’re eighty if you’re a day.” “I’m that,” said he, “and more. And would you believe it,” said he, “the night I was born my mother was making a cake!”

THE LUSMÓR

The lusmór, or “great herb” – foxglove,

That stars the green skirt of the meadow,

is known to the peasantry by a variety of other names, as for example, sian sléibhe, “sian of the hills” (it grows plentifully on the high, rough places); méarachán, “fairy-thimble”; rós gréine, “little rose of the sun”; and lus na mban-sidhe, “herb of the elf-women, or witch-doctors,” etc., etc. It is bell-shaped, and has a purplish-red colour. As Dr. Joyce observes, it is a most potent herb, for it is a great fairy plant; and those who seek the aid of the Daoine Maithe, or Good People, in the cure of diseases or in incantations of any kind, often make use of

Drowsy store,

Gathered from the bright lusmór,

to add to the power of their spells. It is a favourite flower in Highland, otherwise Gaelic Scotland; and the clan Farquhar, “hither Gaels,” have assumed it for their badge.

DERRY PEOPLE

Donegal is what I call “county-proud.” Speaking of Derry – the marching county – an old woman said to me the other day: “Och, there’s no gentility about the Derry people. They go at a thing like a day’s work!”

A CLOCK

I was going along the road this evening when I came on a clock (some would call it a black beetle), travelling in the direction of Narin. The poor thing seemed to have its mind set on getting there before dark – a matter of three miles, and half an hour to do it in! The sense of tears in me was touched for the clock, and I stooped down to watch it crawling laboriously along in the dust, over a very rough road, tired and travel-stained, as if it had already come a long way; climbing stones (miniature Errigals) twenty times as high as itself; circumventing others, falling into ruts headlong, and rising again none the worse for its awful experience; keeping on, on, on, “with a mind fixed and a heart unconquered.” I couldn’t help laughing at first, but after five minutes I felt a sort of strange kinship with the clock – it was a wayfarer like myself, “a poor earth-born companion and fellow-mortal” – and I stood watching it, hat in hand, until it disappeared out of view. The last I saw of it was on the top of a stone on rising ground, silhouetted against the sunset. Then it dropped over.. and I resumed my journey, thinking.

CARRICK GLEN

Here there is quiet; quiet to think, quiet to read, quiet to listen, quiet to do nothing but lie still in the grass and vegetate. The water falls (to me there is no music more beautiful); a wayfarer passes now and again along the road on his way into Carrick; the sea-savour is in my nostrils; the clouds sail northward, white and luminous, far up in the sky; their shadows checker the hills. If the Blue Bird is to be found this side of heaven, surely it must be here!

A SHUILER

I was talking to a stonebreaker on the road between Carrick and Glen when a shuiler passed, walking very fast. “A supple lad, that,” says the stonebreaker. “The top o’ the road’s no ditch-shough to him. Look at him – he’s lucky far down the hill already.” He dropped his hammer, and burst into a fit of laughing. “He’s as many feet as a cat!” says he.

TURKEYS IN THE TREES

One of the gruesomest sights I ever saw in my life – turkeys roosting among the branches of the trees at a house above Lochros. You would think they were birds with evil spirits in them, they kept so quiet in the half-darkness, and looked so solemn.

A PARTY OF TINKERS

A party of tinkers on the high road – man, wife, children, ass and cart. A poor, back-gone lot they are surely. The man trails behind carrying one of the children in a bag over his back. The woman pushes on in front, smiling broadly out of her fat, drunken face. “Oh, God love ye for a gentleman,” she whines in an up-country barróg which proclaims her a stranger to the place. “Give us the lucky hand, gentleman, and may the Golden Doors never be shut against ye. Spare a decent poor body a copper, and I’ll say seven ‘Hail Mary’s’ and seven ‘Glory be to the Father’s’ for ye every night for a week. Give us the lucky hand, gentleman.” I throw her a penny, not so much out of charity as to get rid of her, and the cavalcade moves on. Over the hill I hear her voice raised in splendid imprecation on the husband. Such coloured speech one only hears from peasants and strolling folk, who are in touch with the elemental things – the wonders and beauties and cruelties of life.

TEELIN, BUNGLASS, AND SLIEVE LEAGUE

It is a lovely summer’s day, warm and fragrant and sunny. We have just come from Mass at Carrick chapel, and are following the road that leads south by the harbour up to Teelin village. Numbers of people are on the road with us – mostly women and girls, for the men have remained behind to smoke and to talk over the week’s happenings in the different ends of the parish. The groups go in ages – the old women with the old women, the marriageable girls with the marriageable girls, the younger girls with the girls of their own age. There is a crowd of little boys, too – active as goats, dressed in corduroys or homespuns, and discussing in Irish what they will do with themselves in the afternoon. Some will go bathing in the harbour, others will go up to the warren by Loch O’Mulligan to hunt rabbits, others will remain in the village to watch the men and bigger boys play at skittles in a cleared space by the high road. I pick up with a quiet-eyed lad – the makings of a priest or a scholar, by his look – and in a short time I am friends with the crowd. If one could see me behind I must look like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, so many children have I following alongside me and at my heels. They come to know by my talk that I am interested in Irish – an enthusiast, in fact – and they all want to tell me at once about the Feis at Teelin, and about the great prizes that were offered, and how one out of their own school, a little fellow of eight years, won first prize for the best telling of a wonder-tale in the vernacular. The quiet-eyed lad asks me would I like to see Bunglass and the great view to be had of Slieve League from the cliff-head. I tell him that I am going there, and in an instant the crowd is running out in front of us, shouting and throwing their caps in the air – delighted, I suppose, at the prospect of a scramble for coppers on the grass when we get to the end of our journey. For boys are boys the world over, let the propagandists carp as they will! and when I was young myself I would wrestle a ghost under a bed for a halfpenny – so my grandmother used to tell me, and she was a very wise and observant woman. We have come to Teelin village – a clean, whitewashed little place on a hill, built “all to one side like Clogher” – and from there we strike up to the right by a sort of rocky, grass-covered loaning which leads to the cliffs. We pass numbers of houses on the way, each with a group of gaily-dressed peasants sunning themselves at the door. The ascent is gradual at first, but as we go on it gets steeper, and after a while’s climbing we begin to feel the sense of elevation and detachment. The air is delightfully warm, and the fragrance of sea and bracken and ling is in our hearts. In time we reach Carrigan Head, with its martello tower, seven hundred feet odd over the Atlantic. Southwards the blue waters of Donegal Bay spread themselves, with just the slightest ripple on their surface, glinting in the warm sunlight. In the distance the heights of Nephin Beag and Croagh Patrick in Mayo are faintly discernible, and westwards the illimitable ocean stretches to the void. From Carrigan Head we follow a rough mountain trail, and in a short time reach Loch O’Mulligan, a lonely freshwater tarn, lying under the shadow of Slieve League. Back of the loch a grassy hill rises. We climb this, the younger boys leading about fifty yards in front, jumping along the short grass and over the stones like goats. Arrived at a point called in Irish Amharc Mór, or “Great View,” a scene of extraordinary beauty bursts on us. We are standing on Scregeighter, the highest of the cliffs of Bunglass. A thousand and twenty-four feet below us, in a sheer drop, the blue waters of Bunglass advance and recede – blue as a sapphire, shading into emerald and white where they break on the spit of grass-covered rock rising like a sceilg-draoidheachta, or “horn of wizardy,” out of the narrow bay. Right opposite us is Slieve League, its carn a thousand feet higher than the point on which we stand. In the precipitous rock-face, half-way up, is a scarped streak called Nead an Iolair, or the Eagle’s Nest. The colouring is wonderfully rich and varied – black, grey, violet, brown, red, green – due, one would think, to the complex stratification and to the stains oozing from the soft ores, clays, and mosses impinging between the layers. We step back from the cliff-edge, and sit down on a flat slab of stone, the better to enjoy the view, and the boys spread themselves out in various attitudes over the short grass before and behind us. They are conversing among themselves in Irish, speaking very rapidly, and with an intonation that is as un-English as it can possibly be. The thickened l’s and thrilled r’s are especially noticeable. To hear these children speak Irish the way they do makes one feel that the language of Niall Naoi Giallach is not dead yet, and has, indeed, no signs of dying.

One could spend a day in this place sunning oneself on the cliff-head, or loafing about on the grass, enjoying the panorama of mountain and sea and sky spread in such magnificence on all sides. But we have promised to be back in Carrick for lunch, and already the best part of the forenoon is gone. “Cad a-chlog é anois?” I ask one of the boys. He looks into the sky, calculates for a while, and answers: “Tá sé suas le h-aon anois. Féach an ghrían.” (It is upwards of one o’clock now. Look at the sun.) In a remote, open country like this the children are wonderfully astute, and well up in the science of natural things. Coming up the hill I had noticed a number of strange birds, and when I asked the crowd the names of them in Irish they told me without once having to stop to think. We are ready to go now, but before setting out we decide on having a scramble. My friend, R. M., takes a sixpence from his pocket, puts it edge down on the turf, and digs it in with his heel, covering it up so that no sign of it is visible. He then brings the boys back over the grass about a hundred yards, handicapping them according to age and size. One boy, the youngest, has boots on, and he is put in front. At a given signal – the dropping of a handkerchief – the race is started, and in the winking of an eye the crowd is mixed up on the grass, one boy’s head here, another’s heels there, over the spot where the sixpence is hidden. Five minutes and more does the scramble last, the boys pushing and shoving for all they are worth, and screaming at the top of their voices. Then the lad who reached the spot first crawls out from underneath the struggling mass, puffing and blowing, his hair dishevelled, the coat off him, and the sixpence in his hand!

We have got back to Carrick, an hour late for lunch, and with the appetites of giants. We met many people on the road as we returned, all remarkably well-dressed – young men in the blue serge favoured by sailors, and girls in white; a clerical student, home on holidays from Maynooth, discussing the clauses of Mr. Birrell’s latest Land Bill with a group of elderly folk; big hulking fellows with bronzed faces, in a uniform that I hadn’t seen before, but which a local man told me was that of the Congested Districts Board; and pinafored children. One young man we noticed sitting on a rock over the water with his boots off, washing his feet, and several boys sailing miniature boats made out of the leaves of flaggers.

THE SHOOTING STAR

I was out the other evening on the shore to the northward of Lochros, watching the men taking in the turf from the banks where it had been footed and dried. The wind was quiet, and there was a great stir of traffic on the road – men with creels, horses and carts, asses and children driving them. An old woman (a respectable beggar by her look) came by, and we started to talk. We were talking of various things – the beauty of the evening, the plentifulness of the turf harvest, the sorrows of the poor, and such like – when she stopped suddenly, and looked up into the sky. She gripped my arm. “Look, look,” she said, “a shooting star!” She blessed herself. There was a trail of silver light in the air – a luminous moment – then darkness. “That’s a soul going up out of purgatory,” she said.

SUNDAY ON THE ROAD BETWEEN CARRICK AND GLENGESH

Sunday on the road between Carrick and Glengesh. It is drawing near sunset. We pass a group of country boys playing skittles in the middle of the road – quite a crowd of them, big, dark fellows, of all ages between twenty and thirty-five. Some are lolling on the ditch behind, and one has a flute. Farther on we come on a string of boys and girls paired off in twos with their arms about each other’s waists, like a procession on Bride’s Sunday. The front pair are somewhat ill-matched. The man is old and awkward in his walk, yet cavalierly withal; the girl is young and pretty, with a charming white laundered dress and flowers in her hair. As our car passes they wave their hands to us as a sign that they are enjoying the fun quite as much as we are. We are rising gradually towards the Pass. Below us the road ribbons away through miles of bog to Slieve League. There is a delightful warmth and quietness in the air. The smoke of the cabin chimneys, as far as one can see, rises up in straight grey lines, “pillaring the skies of God.” The whole landscape is suffused with colour – browns and ambers and blues – melting into infinity.

A ROANY BUSH

“Do you see that bush over there?” said an old man to me one day on the road near Leckconnell – a poor village half-way between Ardara and Gull Island. “It’s what they call a roany bush. Well, it’s green now, but in a month’s time it’ll be as red as a fox’s diddy, and you wouldn’t know it for berries growing all over it.”

AUGUST EVENING

August evening, moonrise. A drift of ponies on the road. I heard the neighing of them half an hour ago as I came down the glen, and now I can see them, a red, ragged cavalcade, and a cloud of dust about their heels. There are some fourteen ponies in the drift, and three young fellows with long whips are driving them. They give me the time of day as I pass. One of them turns back and shouts after me: “Would you happen to have a match on you, gaffer?” He is a stout-built lad, with a red face, and a mat of black hair falling over his eyes. I feel in my pocket for a box, and give him share of what I have. He thanks me, and I pass on. The air is damp and fragrant, and wisps of fog lie along the ditches and in the hollow places under the hills. The newly-risen moon touches them with wonder and colour.

NEAR INVER

A yellow day in harvest. A young girl with a piece of drawn-thread work in her lap, sunning herself in the under wisp of her father’s thatch. I come on her suddenly round a bend in the road. She is taken by surprise (almost as completely as I am).. draws her legs in, settles her clothing, half smiles, then hangs her head, blushing with all the pudor of abashed femininity. I pass on.

ALL SUBTLE, SECRET THINGS

All subtle, secret things – the smell of bees, twilight on water, a woman’s presence, the humming of a lime-tree in full leaf, a bracken stalk cut through to show the “eagle” in it – all speak to me as to an intimate. I know and feel them all.

A MADMAN

I passed an old fellow to-day between Ardara and Narin, doubled up in the ditch with his chin on his knees, and staring at me out of two red eyes that burned in his head like candles.

“Who’s that old fellow?” I asked of a stonebreaker, a perch further down the road.

“Oh, never heed him,” says he – “he’s mad. This is the sixth. There’s a full moon the-night, and he ever goes off at the full o’ the moon. Was he coughing at you? God, you’d think he was giving his last ‘keeks,’ to hear him sometimes!”

LAGUNA

Under Crockuna; a thousand feet up. Interminable red bog. A cluster of hovels on the tableland; one set this way, another that, huddling together for company sake, it seems, in this abomination of desolation. A drift of young children play about on a green cleared space between the holdings. (In Donegal one sees young children everywhere.) They run off like wild-cats at our approach, screaming loudly and chattering in Irish as they run. A rick of turf, thatched with winter-stales; a goat tethered; a flock of geese; tufts of dyed wool – red and green and indigo – spread on stones to dry; the clack of a loom from the house nearest us; a dog working sheep beyond.

NEAR LETTERKENNY

A sheepdog with a flock of geese (a most unusual charge, I’m sure) halted by a bridge on their way to market. The owner squats smoking under the parapet – a darkavis’d man, with the slouch hat, slow eye, and wide, mobile mouth of Donegal. I greet him, and pass on.

SHAN MAC ANANTY

Up Glengesh. The hills of the Pass close in darkly on either side of me. The brown road rises between them in devious loops and twists to the sky beyond. There is the smell of bog-myrtle and ling in the air, and the sound of running water. The silence is awful. I am going along quiet and easy-like, with hardly a thought in my head, when near a sodded shelter, almost hidden from view in a cluster of fuchsia bushes, I come on a little lad of about three years of age. He can’t be older, I fancy, he is so small. He runs out in front of me, scared somewhat at my approach, as quaint a figure as ever I looked at. I shout at him and he stops, pulling the hat which he wears – and it is big enough to be his father’s – over his face, and laughing shyly at me out of one corner of it. His hands are wet, I notice, a blae-red colour, and sticking with grass – as if he had been “feeling” for minnows in the stream which runs alongside the road. He has a pair of homespun jumpers on, very thick, and dyed a crude indigo colour, a shirt and vest, and his legs are bare and wet up to the knees. I ask him in English “where he comes from,” “who is his father,” “who is his mother,” “where he lives?” He doesn’t answer, only pulls the hat deeper over his head, and laughs into it. I put the question to him then in Irish… The words were hardly out of my mouth when he gave a leap in the air. I felt as if something had struck me in the face – something soft and smothering, like a bag of feathers – and I was momentarily blinded. When I looked again who should I see but Shan Mac Ananty, my leaprachán friend from Scrabo in Down, running out in front of me, in a whirl of dust, it seemed – a white, blinding cloud – giving buck-jumps in the air, and dancing and capering about in the most outlandish fashion possible.

“So it’s you, Shan?” I said, when I had recovered my breath. I wasn’t a bit afraid, only winded.

“Ay,” says he. “I didn’t know you at first. The English is strange to me.” Then with a quaint grimace: “What are you doing up here?”

“And what are you doing up here yourself, Shan?” says I. “I thought Scrabo was your playground.”

“You’re right, son,” says he. “The old fort is my playground, but the smoke – the smoke from the mill chimneys – chases me away at times, and I come up here for an airing. And, anyway, you mustn’t forget that I’m king of the fairies of Leath-Chuinn,” says he.

“And so you are,” says I. “I clean forgot that. And do you be in Donegal often?” I asked.

“Once in a spell,” says he. “I travel the townlands in turn from Uisneach to Malin,” says he, “and it takes me a year and a day to do the round. I saw you at Scrabo in June last,” says he, “but you didn’t see me.”

“When was that, Shan?” says I, thinking.

“On the night of the twenty-third,” says he. “There wasn’t a fire lighting as far as I could see; and I could see from Divis to the Horns of Boirche, and from that over to Vannin.”

A shadow darkened his queer little face. “Ah,” says he, “they’re changed times. I was an old man when Setanta got his hero-name,3 and look at me now,” says he, “clean past my time. No one knows me, barring yourself there. No one can talk to me; and at Scrabo it’s worse than here. They’re all planters there,” says he, “all strange, dour folk, long in the jaw and seldom-spoken, and with no heart in the old customs. Never a John’s-Fire lighted, never a dance danced, never a blessing said, never a..”

He stopped, and I turned to answer.. but Shan was gone! Nothing in sight for miles – nothing living – only a magpie walking the road, and a toit of blue smoke from a cabin away down in the glen.

A POOR CABIN

A poor cabin, built of loose whin rubble; no mortar or limewash; thatch brown and rotting. Dung oozing out of door in pig-crew to north, and lying in wet heaps about causey stones. A brier, heavy with June roses, growing over south gable-end; rare pink bloom, filling the air with fragrance.

THE FLAX-STONE

Outside nearly every house in Donegal – at least in the north-western parts of it – is the Cloch Lín, or “Flax-Stone.” This is a huge wheel of granite, half a ton or more in weight, revolving on the end of a wooden shaft which itself turns horizontally on an iron spike secured firmly in the ground. The purpose it serves is to “break” the flax after it has been retted and dried. On the long arm of the shaft tackling is fixed for the horse supplying the motive power – much in the same way as it is in a pug-mill or puddling machine used in the old days by brick-makers. The flax is strewn in swaths under the wheel, which passes over it repeatedly, disintegrating the fibre. The scutch-mill, of course, is a more expeditious way of doing the work, but Donegal folk are conservative and stick to the old method – which must be as old, indeed, as the culture of flax itself is in the country.

AFTER SUNSET

I was coming through Ardara wood the other evening just after sunset. There was a delightful smell of wet larch and bracken in the air. The road was dark – indeed, no more than a shadow in the darkness; but a streak of silver light glimmered through from the west side over the mountains and lay on the edge of the wood, and thousands of stars trembled in the branches, touching them with strangeness and beauty. As I approached the village I met an old woman – I knew she was old by her voice – who said to me: “Isn’t it a fine evening, that?” “It is,” said I. “And look,” said she, “at all the stars hung up in the trees!” Farther on I came on a number of women and girls, all laughing and talking through other in the half-darkness. I was out of the wood now and almost into the village, and there was light enough to see that they were carrying water – some with one pail, others with two – from the spring well I passed on my way up. This, I believe, is a custom in Ardara.4 The grown girls of the village go out every evening after dark-fall, if the weather happens to be good. They meet at the well, spend half an hour or so chatting and talking together, and then saunter home again in groups through the darkness, carrying their pails, just as I saw them on this particular evening. When I got to the village the windows were nearly all lit up. The white and white-grey houses looked strange and unearthly in the darkness. The doors were open, and one could see a dark figure here and there out taking the air. Over the roofs the stars shone and the constellations swung in their courses – the Dog’s Tail, the Dragon, the Plough, the Rule, and the Tailor’s Three Leaps; and although there was no moon one could see the smoke from the chimneys wavering up into the sky in thin green lines. The fragrance of peat hung heavily on the senses. There wasn’t a sound – only a confused murmur of voices, like the wind among aspen-trees, and the faint singing of a fiddle from a house away at the far end of the street. Even the dogs were quiet. I passed through the Diamond, down the long main street next the shore, and like Red Hanrahan of the stories, into “that Celtic twilight, in which heaven and earth so mingle that each seems to have taken upon itself some shadow of the other’s beauty.”