Around Lough Gill on a bicycle back in 1904
Last week, we published the first half of an extract from the fabulous early 20th century bicycle travelogue ‘Rambles in Éirinn’ by William Bulfin. Here, in the second and concluding part, journalist and nationalist Bulfin records his journey around Lough Gill in more memorable and descriptive prose
UPWARD YOU bend your way across the little patches of light which the sun throws on the ground, as he peeps down through the branches of the oaks and pines, until you come to the level and wooded summit of the hill. You walk out on a rocky terrace and stand right over the lake, hundreds of feet over the pebbly strand which shines below you. This terrace gives you a splendid cross-view of Lough Gill. The western and south-western creeks and bays are all in sight.
You are far over the tree-tops of the islands. You can see the wide lawns of a park sloping downward to the river that flows on to Sligo and the farmsteads of the distant hills beyond which the Atlantic frets and swells. Here, indeed, you may rest and dream, or smoke and think of things. This is beauty undefiled, and you have it all to yourself. No tripper agency has yet discovered it; no railway company has yet fumigated it with coal smoke; no restaurant tout has yet daubed it with advertisements.
But you must not stay here for ever and ever, nor even for hours and hours. You have only just entered the charmed district of Lough Gill as yet, and there are many miles of it still to be seen.
When you have had a good long draught or the loveliness which flows in upon you here, you tear yourself away as best you can from this terrace and go back to your bicycle.
The road now leaves the waterside and goes off round the mountain to Drumahaire. When you leave the wood behind you the country falls into a jumble of hills and valleys and ravines and heathery mountain sides, and racing mountain streamlets which seam the rocks and start from under the ferns here and there, leaping wildly into the radiance of the day. I do not know how many years you could spend going over those roads without tiring of the beauty through which they take you. I have gone over them two or three times, and I want to go back there again. The hills are of many colours, dark green and bright green with grass or scrub, brown or gray with rocks, or purple with heather. Some of them are thickly wooded, others are bare and grim. You think you are going to get rid of them when you are climbing some steep reach of the smooth road; you fancy that when you have topped the incline in front of you there will be no more of them in your way.
But when you stand panting on the crest you will find another bewildering series of them still before you. Below you is a green valley, and above the fields laughs the gorse that crowns the slope. Beyond the yellow sheen of the blossoms is the dark shadow of another hillside and beyond that again the haze over another valley is purpled by the distance. And, over the valley, the hilltops, one behind the other – all dim and far away – are peeping at you over each other’s shoulders or frowning at you over each other’s heads.
Bagairth a geinn thar dhruim a cheile.
That is exactly how the mountains must have looked to the poet – nodding their heads one from behind the other. They were piled up, just as they are around Lough Gill. They were grimly humourous in their persistency to hem a mortal in and plant themselves in his road, turn which way he would. These are the Leitrim hills. They roll northward into Donegal, north-westward to Lough Erne and eastward to Cavan. Long ago they were called Ui Briuin, Breifni or Brefney. The territory was so called, says O’Mahony, from its being possessed by the race of Ui Briuin. And the learned translator of Keating goes on to say: “The Ui Briuin race derived their name from being descendants of Brian, King of Connacht, in the fourth century.” Brian’s posterity possessed the greater part of Connacht, and were called the Ui Briuin race. Of this race were the O’Conors, the O’Rourkes, the O’Reillys, MacDermctts, etc., etc.
And further he says: “The O’Rourkes and O’Reillys derived their descent from Aedh Finn or Hugh the Fair, King of Connacht, who died AD
611. O’Rourke’s country was called Brefney O’Rourke and O’Reilly’s country was called Brefney O’Reilly.” There must have been a hardy race bred on those rugged hills. The mere work of marching over them would make an athlete of a man or kill him. And when you come to push a bicycle around in Brefney you would want the muscle of four gallowglasses and the lungs of half a clan, and the patience of Job. It is a magnificent country. Its scenery is splendid in its many sided variety, but it is not as easy to cycle through it as the Phoenix Park.
“Use makes master,” however, and you get used to Leitrim cycling difficulties. You accustom yourself to suddenly parting with your wheel and falling down a mountain with safety. You may fall gracefully and you may not, but the main point is to fall as safely as you can. If you can manage to fall into a wood, it is not bad; if into a growth of ferns, it is nicer, so long as you have a good distance to roll ; it is grand to hear them rustling and breaking into sweet smelling shreds as you crash through them.
It is not unpleasant to slip off the road into a big, bunchy tuft of heather, or into a moss-grown dyke. But it is unsafe to go headlong into the Atlantic Ocean or dive into a mountain lake, or take a flight over a precipice into a heap of rocks three or four hundred feet below. After being some years in journalism a man’s hide is fairly hard and thick, but there are exigencies over which it will not rise superior. It has its limits of endurance. I rode twice across Leitrim, and, please God, some day or another I will ride across it again. It would be easier and safer work, of course, if your bicycle had a pair of wings, and if you had fourteen or fifteen lives; but even with an ordinary wheel and one life it is grand.
It may be asked, why and how you fall down a mountain? But no concise or definite reply can be given. Ask a great singer how or why he gets such glorious music out of his throat, and what can he tell you, only that it comes? He may be able to give you a few superficial details, but no words of his can reach the kernel of the wonder. It is a gift. And so with falling down mountains: it is a gift. Your wheel slips or slides, or runs away, or you make too sharp a curve, and all the rest is falling, falling, falling, and getting to the bottom. While you are mending yourself and your bicycle, you may wonder how you did it; but you can never tell exactly. You can feel it and dream about it afterwards, but never realise it – until it happens again.
Drumahaire was the capital of Brefney O’Rourke. The O’Rourkes had castles at Leitrim, Carrickallen and Castlecar, but Drumahaire was their chief stronghold. The ruins of their castle stand on the outskirts of the little town, beside a river, overlooking a valley.
Both the castle and valley are famed in song and story. Moore’s verses will occur to you as you stand in the ivyclad ruins. You remember the lines, of course:
The valley lay smiling before me
Where lately
I left her behind,
Yet I trembled and something hung o’er me That saddened the joy of my mind.
I looked for the lamp which she told me Should shine when her pilgrim returned,
Yet though darkness began to enfold me, No lamp from the battlement burned.
Well, here you have the valley that lay smiling before him. Here were also the battlements, now no more. They were battered to fragments in the wars of the 16th century, but some of the walls remain.
Here Dermod MacMurrough and Dervorgilla, the wife of Tiernan O’Rourke, used to meet. They finally bolted during the absence of O’Rourke, and hence the infamy that has lived on through the ages. When MacMurrough was obliged to fly the country from the vengeance of O’Rourke, he went to England and brought back the Normans. It was a terrible crime, a terrible wrong, a terrible atonement.
MacMurrough died, falling to pieces, in the pangs of a loathsome disease, and the evil he did lived after him. I am not concerned about his fate at all. But there is some fiction and wasted sympathy mixed up with this tale of Brefney which should be sorted out, so that history may have fair play. For we can do no good by taking our bitter historical pills coated over with the sugar of romance; better swallow them just as they are compounded for us by cold, stern facts. Thomas Moore was no mean historian, but his poetic fancy got the better of him in Drumahaire. For example, let us take the lines:
There was a time, falsest of women,
When Brefney’s good sword would have sought
That man through a million of foemen
Who dared but to doubt thee in thought.
Here is a splendid and passionate sorrow grandly expressed, but it existed more in the poetic soul of Thomas than in the fierce heart of Tiernan. For Tiernan O’Rourke was
no saint. He was just a predatory mountaineer who had a heart as black as the next man. According to the Four Masters, this Tiernan O’Rourke, who, by the way, was called the One-eyed, led his men in 1136 AD across the Shannon, on a certain kind of pilgrimage which was little to his credit.
“They raided and sacked Clonard and behaved in so shameless a manner as to strip O’Daly, then chief poet of Ireland. Among other outrages they sacrilegiously took from the vestry of this abbey a sword which had belonged to St. Finian, the founder.” The leader of this raid was the person who was supposed to be returning from some pious journey when he failed to see Dervorgilla’s light on the battlements. He was a nice pilgrim!
Dervorgilla was a “false one” when she fled, but there are historians who deny that she was “young.” She was about 40 years of age, and was old enough to have sense. She seems to have quickly tired of MacMurrough, or he of her. Anyhow she did not remain with him very long; two years would be the very outside of their criminal relationship after the elopement. She either left him or was left by him. Or was taken from him, after which she lived with her people, who were chieftains of Meath.
To give her her due, she seems to have reformed her ways. She built some churches and lived a retired life. It was she who built the beautiful 12th-century church of the nuns at Clonmacnoise. Thirty-four years after Tiernan O’Rourke had sacked Clonard, the abbey was once more looted in a manner that left even the vandalism of the Brefney men in the shade. The raider this time was O’Rourke’s rival, MacMurrough, and he was aided in his ruffianism by Earl Strongbow and the other reavers from over the water.
It is sad to think of, but so is nearly every year of those blood-stained centuries. The ready-handed chieftains raided each other and finished nearly everything that the Danes had left, and it seems we are now beginning to find out that the Danes left a good deal. The Church was the most powerful moral influence in the land, but there was little, if any, real union between it and the State. The State itself was inchoate. Clontarf had left it victorious but inorganic. There were saintly ecclesiastics and there were laymen of statesmanship and patriotism; but neither class had produced a man to fill the leadership left vacant by the death of Brian. The Church had neither the power to protect itself from the blows dealt it by children of its own, nor influence enough to quell the wild passions of the times. The State had neither cohesion nor strength; for the centuries that had gone by since the cursing of Tara had failed to evolve a nation self-centred and self-confident in the practice of well-defined political institutions. Brian of the Tribute would, in all human probability, have given law and order to the whole of Ireland had he survived his victory over the Norsemen. But the fates were unkind, and after the Dane came the Anglo-Norman – and came, alas, to stay. There was no acknowledged and effective leader of the Irish race, no central power, no recognised national government to band the clans together into one solid fighting force and hurl them with crushing strength upon the foe. The invader came upon us in our weakness and we fell a prey to him. And “through ages of bondage and slaughter” the Church as well as the State was destined to groan beneath the heel of the tyrant, and to look back with futile sorrow to that thrice accursed day when the foundations of centralised civil government were destroyed at Tara by the anger of an all-powerful and over-zealous ecclesiasticism.
AND THUS it fell out that we passed under the chastening hand of adversity to feel the greatness of our fall, to see the magnitude of our errors, and, in the dark and slow-dragging centuries of oppression and suffering, to steel and temper our souls, that we may be instinct with all godliness and kingliness when we break at last from the house of bondage and march onward once more towards the greatness of our destinies.
Drumahaire is an ideal place to spend a quiet time, far from the roaring crowds of the cities. The railway comes close to the town, but not close enough to be in evidence. It winds in from the Manorhamilton hills and then swings off again across the valleys, and is quickly lost to view. You are within easy reach of busy cities, and yet you seem to be as far away from them as if you were in the heart of a trackless continent. There is no noise, no hurry or worry. No one is interested in your movements. You can stroll along the mountain roads over the hills, and come and go as you wish. No fuss of fashion, no social emulation, no show. Perfect quiet, perfect ease, beautiful scenery, and a hotel – the Abbey Hotel – which is one of the best of its kind in Ireland, and one of the cheapest, although its accommodation is first class. It is called after the old Cistercian abbey which stands beyond the town on the river banks.
The ruined abbey shows many traces of its former magnificence. There are three sides of the cloister arches intact, and the beautiful window tracery of the main aisle, over where the high altar stood, is still flawless. It was a very old religious foundation, and the walls now standing were doubtless built to replace the original monastery.
If you have a week or a fortnight to spare you could make Drumahaire your headquarters, and take a new route each day for a cycling trip of twenty or thirty miles around. You can see new charms in the country on every journey; and if you begin to long for change of scene, pull out for the north, and a day’s spin will take you across the Erne into Donegal. About two miles from Drumahaire, going northward, you skirt a
mountain and drop down on the lake shore again. The road runs along the water edge, and over it the scrubgrown hills rise sheer and high into the blue. There are oaks and pines among the hazels, striking their roots as best they can into the clefts of the rocks, and underneath, around the gnarled trunks, the mosses and ferns are year by year making a soil. Here is an object lesson in the uses of afforestation which is of great value. It teaches that most of our waste mountain lands could be made productive, and that many a bare hillside in Ireland could be made beautiful by a wood. In Connaught, Ulster and parts of Munster, aye, even in sylvan Leinster, there is room for hundreds of thousands of acres of forest. Irish Ireland should set about planting them at once. It is work for nation builders.
There is one particular hill close to the eastern end of the lake that you ought to climb. It is a stiff piece of work, but the view from the top will repay you. Leave your bicycle on the side of the road which turns off to the right from the shore, and you will find a sort of path through the scrub which will give you your bearings. You cross a piece of sward where the rabbits’ tracks are plentiful, after you
have made your way through the hazels on the lower slope, and then you come to the sugar-loaf which tops the hill. This is almost perpendicular, but it is covered with hardy bushes by the branches of which you can pull yourself up step by step over the rocks. In a few minutes you are on the summit, locking down in unfeigned admiration on one of the most magnificent lake scenes in the world. The whole length of Lough Gill spreads out beneath your gaze, and you can see far over the hills and along the valleys which encircle it. The splendid perspective is closed by Knocknarea, with the royal cairn which overlooks the picture – a picture fit for kingly eyes. Grey Benbulben frames it to the right, while to the left the purple ridges and sleeping valleys alternate until the sky drops down upon them beyond the distant headwaters of the Shannon.
Right below you is the valley which, according to Moore, lay smiling before Tiernan O’Rourke. It is smiling now, and is certainly fair. It is one of the many valleys that run down to the shore of Lough Gill, all vying with each other in beauty. The big rugged peaks stand guardians over them, and along their green slopes the white-washed farmsteads are set amid the trees.
Tillage field, and meadow, grove, and haggard, and pasture, alternate along them until the distance blurs the view. When the mists roll upward from them in the morning and when the gold of the dawn flushes the crags and steals down the heather to the corn fields, it would be a callous nature that would not feel moved. No wonder the people love them so. I stood for a long time gazing on them from near the clouds, with one who could feel their beauty more thoroughly than I.
“It must be awful for any one born here to have to go away and never return!” was what we said as we turned to retrace our steps.
NEAR THE eastern extremity of the lake is a mountain called O’Rourke’s Table. You remember the old ballad of “O’Rourke’s Noble Feast.” Well, the top of the mountain yonder is the table on which the feast was set. It is indeed a table fit for such an occasion. It slopes gently from the valley on the far side, but facing the lake it is steep and inaccessible. The solid rock towers aloft on the crest like a huge fortress, and you must, therefore, take it by a flank movement. Unless you care to walk a mile or two round by the chapel, you must climb from near the rocks which front Lough Gill. There is a wood on one side of the mountain, and through this is the safest way. You scramble up through the larches, and then, forcing your way through a dense growth of beautiful ferns, your feet are on the table.
It was a lovely day when two of us stood there, and we shall never forget it. The table is about two miles long and half a mile in width. And such a royal tablecloth! Rich, fragrant, clustering heather! The top of the mountain is covered with peat, and the peat is covered with a growth of heather in which you stand waist high. Rank, sedgy grass and heaps of moss and huge tufts of mountain fern are along the edge near the wood, and right in the centre, where you can look down on the Atlantic and on hundreds of square miles of Ulster and Connacht, as well as Lough Gill, there is moss in which you sink to your knees, and dry clumps of heath in which you could dream your life away. The sedgy beds of broad grass are packed below with dry and withered leaves which yield to your weight as if they were feathers, and crumple as softly under your tread as if they were velvet pile from the old Genoese looms.
You are higher up than the grey peaks of the nearest ranges; you are on a level with the others. You are up in the blue air where only the eagle soars and the skylark sings. The rooks and daws and sea fowl are winging their flight below you over lake and valley and hill. Only the clouds lie here when they are lazy or too full of rain to travel. It is the flower of bogs – the canavaun of the mountain tops of Erin!
Not long ago I was reading one of those whimsical articles on the land question by Standish O’Grady – an article written in that vein of gentle. kindly raillery for which the gifted author is noted. He was replying to, or commenting on, some letter in which a correspondent said that “every man will have his own bit of land when we get compulsory purchase.” “Then,” said the chieftain, “I want to file my claim to the Rock of Dunamase.”
He wanted to own (although he is a kind Unionist) the rock on which Rory O’Moore’s fortress stood, the stronghold from which the Lion of Leix so often swept down in anger on the lordlings of the Pale. Well, there are more people than Standish O’Grady in Ireland who would like to have the feesimple of Dunamase. I am one of them myself. But I know there are too many prior claims put in, so I shall not file one. No one has, however, yet claimed the Table of O’Rourke, so I am first in the field. It is of little value as an estate. It is only heather and moss and peat and fern and rock, but I covet it all the same.