Through Sligo by bicycle – in 1904
Newspaper editor and nationalist William Bulfin’s early 20th century bicycle travelogue ‘Rambles in Éirinn’ contains a wonderful description of Sligo. With it long out of copyright, a Sligo Weekender reader suggested that we make Bulfin’s beautiful prose known to more people around the county. Appropriately, it was originally serialised in a newspaper. Here, we present the first half of his descriptive, opinionated and humorous journey through Sligo and around Lough Gill on his bicycle
IHAD DECIDED on a tour into northern Connacht, so with a mixture of “the white wind from the South and the brown wind from the West” on my shoulder I pulled out on one of the main roads leading through Ely O’Carroll and faced for the Shannon. Lough Gill was my destination and I shaped my course as follows – Athlone, Roscommon, Boyle, Sligo, Drumahaire.
Had I hearkened to the oracular guidance of a road book, edited by a West Briton, which had cost me a shilling, I would have gone to Sligo by train, for, according to the book, the road from Dublin to Sligo is “an uninteresting route and road indifferent.” But a month’s experience had taught me that the most I could expect from this book was an occasional piece of unconscious humour.
The “uninteresting route” alluded to above is really one of the most interesting in all Ireland. It crosses the magnificent plain of Meath, passing close to Tara. It takes you past scores of historic and beautiful places in fair Westmeath of the lakes. It leads you over the most picturesque of the Longford uplands; and whether you decide to cross the Shannon at Lanesborough or at Carrick, it shows you the hills of Annaly of the O’Ferralls, and gives you the choice of a look at beautiful Lough Ree, or a ramble through the delightful country between Newtownforbes and Drumsna.
When you cross the Shannon the Sligo road takes you over the Connacht plains and brings you within sight of royal Cruachain. It leads you into Boyle, and thence through the Pass of the Curlews, or you have an alternative road to Sligo round the northern spur of the Curlews by the rock of Doon, and the shore of Lough Key and to Sligo by Knocknarea.
“An uninteresting route?” Not if you are Irish and know some of the history of your land, and feel some pleasure in standing beside the graves of heroes and on ground made sacred by their heroism. Not if you delight to see the hay-making, and the turf cutting, and in observing the simple, beautiful life of rural Ireland. Not if you feel at home among the boys and girls at the cross-roads in the evening time, or if you know how to enjoy a drink of milk and a chat with the old people across the half door, or on a stool beside the hearth. Not if you love the woods and the mantling glory of waving corn ripening in the sun, and the white, winding roads made cool on the hottest day by the shade of flower-laden hedges.
But if you are one of those tired and tiresome souls desirous only of treading in the footsteps of the cheap trippers who follow one another like sheep, if you have no eye of your own for the beautiful, and if you think it your duty to go out of your way to put money into the pockets of vampire railways, then in the name of all the Philistines and seoinini take the train, or stay away out of the country altogether, or go to some peepshow and surfeit your narrow photographic soul on “views.”
The road over the Curlew Mountains from Boyle is a grand one. If you are an average roadster you can pedal up the greater part of the gradient. They tell a story in Boyle of a man who negotiated the mountains in night time without becoming aware of it. He said, when asked how he had found the roads, that they were all right, but that he thought he had met a sort of a long hill somewhere. He was either a champion rider or a humorist.
Anyhow the ordinary tourist will have to get off his machine for a few steep zigzags. The rest is nothing more formidable than a good tough climb. You can rest now and then and admire the spreading plains behind you to the eastward. You can see into Mayo and Galway to your right, and Boyle is just below you, the old abbey lifting its 12th century gables over the trees. To your left is beautiful Lough Key.
ALITTLE HIGHER up you come to the verge of the battlefield of the Curlews. They call it Deerpark or some such history-concealing name now. Ballaghboy is what the annalists call it. You can see the stone erected on the spot where Clifford, the English general, fell. You can see where the uncaged Eagle of the North prepared for his swoop, and the heart within you leaps as your eye follows adown the slope the line of his victorious onset. God’s rest and peace be with your soul, Red Hugh! You were a sensible, practical patriot, although there is no big tower one hundred and goodness knows how many feet high erected to your memory on Ireland’s ground. And although you had no blatant press to give you high-sounding names and sing your praises to the world, you believed that liberty was worth the best blood in your veins, and you did not waste breath on windy resolutions. And when you raised your hand, a bouchal, it was not the everlasting hat that you held out in it to the gaze of the nations, for it had that in it which was worthy of Ireland and of you. ’Twas something that gleamed and reddened and blazed and that flashed the light of wisdom and duty into the souls of manly men.
After passing Ballaghboy the road leads upward into the fastnesses of the Curlews, where for a while the world is shut off. The heath-clad summits of the peaks hem you in. For about a mile you ride in this solitude and then suddenly there is a turn and the world comes back again. Below you the valleys and woods are alternating in the near distance. In front of you is a green hillside dotted with farm houses. There, too, is Lough Arrough, and beyond it, away in the hazy distance, is the purple bulk of Slieveanierin and the gray masses of Knocknarea and Benbulben. Ten minutes will bring you to the town of Ballinafad. The road from here to Sligo is a grand one for the cyclist. It is smooth and level nearly all the way.
After a few miles of this pleasant road you come to an ancient-looking demesne. The timber is old and lofty, the wall along the roadside is mossgrown, the undergrowth beneath the oaks and pines is thick and tangled. This is the Folliat or Folliard estate. It is where the scene of “Willie
Reilly” is laid. Here lived the “great Squire Folliard” and his lovely
daughter – the heroine of one of the most popular of Anglo-Irish love tales, and the subject of a ballad that has been sung in many lands:
Oh! rise up, Willie Reilly, and come along with me!
The suggestion of the metre must have come to the balladist in the lilt of some old traditional air of Connacht. I have nearly always heard it sung in the Irish traditional style – the style which lived on even after the Irish language had fallen into disuse. I have heard it sung in two hemispheres – by the Winter firesides of Leinster and under the paraiso trees around the homes of the Pampas. I had followed it around the world, through the turf smoke and bone smoke – through the midges and mosquitoes and fire-flies. I was glad to find that I had run it to earth at last, so to speak.
There is a gloom over the Folliat demesne now. The shadow of a great sorrow is on it. A few years ago a daughter of the house went out on the lake in a boat to gather water lilies for her affianced lover, who was returning that evening to her after a long absence. She was drowned. They were to have been married in a day or two. The place has never been the same since then.
Collooney was meant by nature for great things. The river flowing by the town supplies it with immense water power. Under the rule of a free people, Collooney would be an important manufacturing centre. At present it is a mere village, struggling to keep the rooftrees standing. There are various mills beside the river, some of them, I fear, silenced forever. There is a woollen factory which is evidently trying conclusions with the shoddy from foreign mills. It is engaged in an uphill fight, but I hope it is winning. After passing the woollen factory, you cross the bridge, and, skirting a big hill, you drop down on the Sligo road, which takes you through one of the battlefields of ’98. The battle was fought close to the town. On the 5th of September, 1798, the advance guard of Humbert’s little army arrived at Collooney from Castlebar. Colonel Vereker, of the Limerick militia, was there from
Sligo with some infantry, cavalry and artillery. He was beaten back to Sligo, and he lost his artillery. Humbert then marched to Drumahaire and thence towards Manorhamilton, but suddenly wheeling he made for Longford to join the Granard men. Ballinamuck followed. Bartholomew Teeling and Matthew Tone (brother of Theobald Wolfe Tone) were among the Irish prisoners who surrendered with Humbert to Lord Cornwallis. They were executed a few days afterward in Dublin.
Close beside the road on a rocky hill they have erected a monument to Teeling. The statue, which is heroic in its expression, looks toward the “Races of Castlebar” and reminds one of that splendid day. One uplifted hand grasps a battle-flag. The face is a poem, grandly eloquent in its chiselling. You think you can catch the thought that was in the sculptor’s mind. You can feel that his aim was to represent his hero looking out in fiery appeal and reproach over the sleeping West!
SLIGO SHOULD by right be a great Irish seaport town, but if it had to live by its shipping interests it would starve in a week. Like Galway, it has had such a dose of British fostering and legislation that it seems to be afraid of ships, and the ships seem to be afraid of it. The city lives independently of its harbour, which it holds in reserve for brighter and greater days. There are, as far as one can judge, three Sligos – the Irish Sligo, the ascendancy Sligo and the Sligo which straddles between ascendancy and nationalism. The Gaelic League is strong in the city, and one of the hardest workers in the West, when I was there, was Father Hynes.
Sligo is very picturesquely situated. Knocknarea guards it on one side and Benbulbin on the other. The hills which face the city to the northward are very beautiful, and beyond and above their fresh verdure are the rocky heights that beat off the keen and angry winds from the Atlantic. You ride down into the streets from a hill which overtops the steeples, and it is only when you come into the suburbs that you can see the bay. Clear and calm it looks from the Ballysodare road, but, alas! not a smoke cloud on the whole of it, not a sail in view, not a masthead over the roofs along the water front. The harbour is not, of course, entirely deserted. A steamer or a sailing ship comes in now and then. The same thing happens in Galway.
But I am not comparing the two cities, because there is no comparison between them. Galway drags on an existence. Sligo is very much alive. Galway went to the bad when its ocean trade was killed. Sligo is able to maintain itself by doing business with the district in which it is situated. Behind Galway there was no populous and fertile land near enough to be a support to business. Behind Sligo are the valleys which support a relatively thriving rural population.
You can spend a very pleasant day in and around Sligo, visiting places of historical interest or picturesque beauty. It was once a war-scourged district, and the scars are still there. The hills around have echoed to
a hundred battle cries, some of which were raised for Ireland. At Ballysodare you will find waterfalls that are beautiful even to people who have seen photographs of Niagara and read of cascades in several fashionable countries. There is a ruined castle of the O’Connors, too, which has a history. It was shot to pieces in the days when Connacht was making its last fight for freedom, and it was never rebuilt. It was one of the outposts of Sligo and saw many a bloody fray in its time.
The sea runs in to Ballysodare and makes a bay around which you have to cycle to Knocknarea. Soon after coming to the slope of the hill you meet one of the queerest, wildest and most beautiful of glens. They call it after the mountain.
It is a wondrously romantic freak of nature, planted there in a cleft of the rock and walled off from the world, as if the Great Mother meant to lock it up and hide it away for her own use. It is thickly wooded, narrow and deep. The trees meet over the path in places, and the ferns touch you as you pass. The spirits of Knocknarea must love it. One can fancy how they made it their own centuries ago. A mystic poet might dream his life away in it, holding communion with the hero-dead of Connacht. It would also be a grand place for a botanist, or “a man on his keeping,” or an amateur distiller.
WHEN YOU succeed in driving yourself out of the glen you ought to climb the mountain, on the top of which there is a cairn. There are people who will tell you that Queen Meave was buried there and not at Cruachain. I think they are in error. Perhaps it is one of the earlier kings of pagan Ireland that sleeps on Knocknarea.
Be that as it may, however, the cairn is a resting-place fit for a monarch. It looks down on wide Tir Fiachra, where dwelt “the music-loving hosts of fierce engagements.” Away to northward and eastward and southward are mountain and valley and river and lake and woodland. To the westward rolls the thundering ocean. The mountain has no partner in its glory. It stands proudly over the rocky coast in solitary grandeur. The mourners who erected the burial mound on its stately summit could not have chosen a more royal throne for their kingly dead. They could see the sun-god smiling on it in the morning time before any other peak was crimsoned by his touch, and they caught the last flash of his golden spear upon it as he sank to sleep in the west. The fleecy shreds of vapour which float around it in the Summer time adorn it like some silken scarf of gauze blown against the curls of a woman. The angry clouds of Autumn and Winter cap it. The lightning darts its fiery tongues upon it. The thunder bellows over it. And if the people of Tir Fiachra regarded all these things as being symbolic of the sunny or playful or tempestuous moods of their great one, it would only have been quite natural, for they were men and women of epic minds. Their lives were epic. Their fate was epic. Their history is epic.
And about Knocknarea itself there is an epic suggestiveness which you cannot miss if you climb the mountain. You cannot keep your hold upon the present while you are up there. You may smoke twentieth century tobacco and look down on twentieth century towns and railways and roads, but your thoughts are far away.
You can fancy the dead leader from the cairn on the summit gazing prophetically northward across Lough Gill and Brefney and Lough Erne into Ulster, or eastward toward Cruachain and Tara. You wonder is the prophesying all over. Did it all end, was it all fulfilled, in the long ago? Or has a portion of it still to weave itself into form, now that so many bright gleams of the old temperament are kindling in the dreamers of our time?
A bearded stranger found me standing on a bridge in Sligo one morning and proposed to take me up Lough Gill in a boat. I asked him some questions in geography, and found his mind was virgin soil in this respect. All he could tell me was that the water underneath the bridge led to the lake, and that he was a boatman of vast experience and of the strictest honesty.
I asked him some questions in local history, and was informed that the history of Sligo is in books. So he had been told. None of the said history was in his possession, nor had he ever seen it, but he could positively assure me that his personal honesty was above suspicion, and that his boat was comfortable and safe, as the Mayor himself could testify. He offered to take me to Drumahaire and back for six shillings. I said that I preferred to ride. This he solemnly told me was impossible I knew better, for I had ridden it some weeks previously. But I did not tell this to the champion boatman of Sligo. I merely bade him good morning and said that I would mention him to my friends. He then offered to take me to Drumahaire and back for five shillings I shook my head. “For four, then,” he called after me. I made no sign. “For three,” he said, desperately. He drew a blank every time. Then he followed me and offered to tell me the best road. I knew it. Then in despair he turned away and left me to my fate. I do not know if there are any other Lough Gill boatmen in Sligo. If there, are, they do not seem to be overworked, for you seldom see a boat upon the lake. And yet it must be a delightful journey by water from the city to Drumahaire. The river which connects Lough Gill with the sea is short, but it is very beautiful. It flows between wooded hills and past smooth green lawns, and when it opens on the lake it is a new and abiding delight.
OPPOSITE Drumahaire, which is some distance away from the water, another river disembogues. You ascend this stream for about a mile until you meet a sort of jetty. Here you disembark, for you are within a few minutes’ walk of the Abbey Hotel. Such is one way to Drumahaire. The way of the cyclist is either along the northern or southern shore, around the lake. If you start by the northerly road you return to Sligo by the route which touches the southern shore of the lake. If you start by the southern road you return by the northern. A day will take you round Lough
Gill comfortably. It is a run of about twenty miles – Irish miles, of course. As you leave Sligo behind you and strike southward in the direction of Boyle the country looks bleak. It looks bleaker still as you wheel to the left at a cross-roads outside the city. The land is poor and the bare rock asserts itself over the clinging heather on the hills near the road. But have a little patience. Presently you come to a turn and creep down a steep incline, and then Lough Gill in all its loveliness and freshness and grandeur bursts upon your view. The change is so rapid and complete that for the first few moments you are bewildered.
But for goodness sake let us not hasten to compare it with anything or any place else. Let us take it on its own merits. The practice of comparing one beauty spot on this earth with another is hackneyed and, in the abstract, somewhat sickening. “The Switzerland of Ireland” is a cry to be abhorred. So is “How like Geneva!” So is “How suggestive of the English lake country!” And another parrot cry is “Oh! dear! How like the Riviera!” You cheapen Irish scenery when you rush into such comparisons. There is none of it that you can flatter by calling it German or Italian or French or English names. This land of ours revels in beauty. She is a favoured child of nature; and
I pity anyone born of her who would not prefer her loveliness to that of any other land, for it is second to none.
The change of scenery from the rather wild and barren country through which you passed after leaving the Boyle road opens full upon your view just when you have descended into the lake valley sufficiently to bring you on a level with the tops of the trees that cover the hills around the shore. Above the trees grow the heather and fern, and the weather-stained rocks crown the summits. Below you is the western end of the lake studded with islands, and each island is like a big hillock of verdure, so thickly do the trees grow together. In the Autumn, when the different tints come on the foliage, each islet looks like a big nosegay set in the water, and the heather above the timber belt on the hills is covered with purple bloom.
The surface of the lake is smooth enough to reflect everything – the blue sky and the fleecy clouds and the verdant glory of the trees and ferns and meadows and the royal trappings of the heath, and the browns and greys of the beetling crags. All these tints mingle in the depths, gilded by the glad sunshine that fondly caresses them all. A rivulet murmurs and laughs softly to you as it tumbles down from the rocks under the cool shade of the briars and ferns. There are bird songs in the trees, and a rabbit scuttles swiftly across the road, and you hear the tap, tap, tap of the thrush coming from the forest gloom beyond as he cracks a snail upon a stone and prepares his breakfast. You are alone with nature, and you enjoy it. But do not stop just yet.
RIDE DOWN the road to the water and look for a few moments up at the hills and along the lake between the islands. Then follow the road again upward through the woods until you come to a place where a broad pathway leads into the brush under the hazels. Leave your bicycle here – no one will meddle with it, even if they pass the way – and take the path which winds steeply up between the tree trunks at right angles to the road. The hart tongues, and the tall fronds of the wood ferns, and the wild violets and bluebells, brush your insteps ; the hazel branches rustle against your head and shoulders, and the dried twigs snap under your feet.
“You have only just entered the charmed district of Lough Gill as yet, and there are many miles of it still to be seen.” So says Bulfin, pictured right, when his trip continues and concludes – next week