The South Isles of Aran (County Galway)

The superstitions attached to this tree are many, and to tell them would fill a volume.

Stumps of Pine and Fir are numerous in the Aran islands. The fir tree has been ever highly esteemed. It was amongst the materials employed in the building of Solomon's temple. Together with the pine it was held in such veneration in France, that St. Martin met with the strongest possible opposition when he proposed the destruction of the holy fir groves. The fir grew luxuriantly in Palestine; and the Prophet Hosea saith that the Lord will make Ephraim flourish "like a green fir tree."[25 - Hos. xiv. 9.] And another prophet, Ezechiel, informs us, in the fifth verse of the twenty-seventh chapter of his prophecy, that the navy of Tyre was constructed of this tree, whilst the masts were from the cedars (pines) of Libanus. It was the timber, too, used for the manufacture of musical instruments in Israel; for in the Second Book of Samuel (ch. vi. 5) it is written that "David and all the house of Israel played before the Lord on all manner of instruments made of fir wood, even on harps, and lutes, and timbrels, and cornets, and cymbals." And when Hiram, King of Tyre, sent timber to Solomon for the building of the temple, it was the cedar and the fir[26 - 1 Kings v. 10, 11.] he sent, for which he was allowed twenty thousand measures of wheat. It was, in Palestine, a tall tree, on the tops of which, we are informed somewhere in the Psalms, the storks built their nests.

HOLLY – IVY.

The Holly, or Holy, and the Ivy are indigenous in the soil of Aran. In idolatrous times holly was planted, according to Pliny, in the neighbourhood of dwelling-houses, to keep away spirits and all manner of enchantments. There can be no doubt that those who believe dreams to be other than the wanderings of the fancy can on any night have steady sensible dreams of a reliable nature if they bring home in their handkerchief (observing the strictest silence all the time) nine leaves of thornless holly and place the same under their pillow. Amongst the conversions of the trees of the forest from the pagan to the Christian faith, that of the ivy was the most remarkable; it no longer adorns the brow of a drunken Bacchus, but is now entwined in wreaths over the altar at the midnight Mass on Christmas night. Nevertheless, they that would look into futurity can still read in the ivy leaf of what is coming to pass in after-times. Place a leaf, on New Year's Eve, in a basin of water, and take it out on the eve of Twelfth Night; if it come out fresh, health is on the house; but if it come out spotted, sickness and death are sure to follow.

HAWTHORN – BLACKTHORN.

The Hawthorn and Blackthorn grow freely in the islands. Need it be told that the antipathy between these shrubs is so great that the one is never found to be growing naturally near the other? Of course, if planted together, they will struggle on for a time; but one or other generally sickens and dies; for there is a controversy between them as to which had the misfortune to supply the crown of thorns to Christ on the night of the Passion. The peasantry in England, Scotland, and France believe it was the hawthorn, and they look on it as an outrage to bring in flowering hawthorn in May to their houses, it being unlucky and accursed ever since that dreadful night preceding the Crucifixion. So also the blackthorn in Austria and the south of Europe is considered unlucky; as it is there insisted on that it supplied the thorns, wherefore it is doomed to blossom when no other tree of the forest dares, in the teeth of the poisonous Eurus, so to do. On which side the truth lies we shall not venture to speculate; but our astonishment is great when we learn that the walking-stick of Joseph of Arimathæa was of hawthorn, that in Glastonbury he stuck it accidentally in the ground, and that ever since it and its descendants bud, blossom, and fade on Christmas Day!

THE ROSE – SILENCE.

The Rose.– "I am the Rose of Sharon." In the East it is the pride of flowers for fragrance and elegance. It was used amongst the ancients in crowns and chaplets at festive meetings and religious sacrifices. A traveller in Persia describes two rose trees fully fourteen feet high, laden with thousands of flowers, and of a bloom and delicacy of scent that imbued the whole atmosphere with the most exquisite perfume. Originally it was white, and the white moss-rose was suspended over the door of the Temple of Silence; whence it is that secrets are said to be told "under the rose." At convivial banquets in Greece the guests not unfrequently wore chaplets of roses, and anything said by them whilst wearing the emblem of silence was not to be repeated. The white rose was the emblem of purity, and the term "Mystical Rose" is applied by the Catholic Church to the Virgin Mary. Under the cross there grew, amongst the wild flowers of Calvary, a multitude of white roses, some of which were reddened with the blood of Christ. From these comes the red rose, emblematic, not alone of purity, but of martyrdom.

THE ROSARY – FERNS.

The tomb of the Virgin (the Rose that never fades) was found by the apostles to be filled with roses after the Assumption. Her altars ever after have been decorated with roses, and it was a high privilege in the Middle Ages to have a garden where no other flower was admitted. These gardens, called rosaries, may have suggested to St. Dominic the name given to that collection of prayers which he arranged, and which he called the Rosary.

The love of the nightingale for this flower is proverbial in the East. It is unnecessary, of course, for us to remind our readers that the white and red roses were the badges of the rival houses of York and Lancaster.

As for the elm and the beech, countless superstitions are attached to these trees, but as we fail to find that they existed in Aran, so we shall not prosecute further our inquiries on this head.

Ferns.– Not the least interesting amongst the botanical curiosities of Aran are the ferns, that carry their seed on their backs – a seed that has, it is said, the extraordinary property of making the person in whose shoes it is placed instantly invisible to all but himself. So Shakespeare has it, too, in his play of "1 Henry IV.," act ii. scene 1:

"We have the receipt of fern seed, we walk invisible."

FERNS – INVISIBILITY.

A painful illustration of this property occurred, it is told, when once upon a time a man was looking for a foal that had strayed from his stable. He happened to pass through a meadow just as the fern was ripened, some of the seeds of which were shaken into his shoes. After a wearisome and fruitless search during the night he returned all travel-soiled in the morning, and sat down in his house to join the family at breakfast. He was amazed to see that neither wife nor children welcomed him home, nor showed the slightest concern at the night he had spent, nor even inquired about the result of his search. At length, breaking silence, he said, "I haven't found the foal." All were startled, and they looked everywhere to see where he was hiding. Believing that his family were treating him with contempt, he repeated, in a towering passion, "I have not found the foal!" They all sprang to their feet, and his wife called him by name to give over that nonsense, and to come out from his hiding-place. The creaking of his shoes was distinctly heard, though the wearer thereof could not be seen. At length, in a voice of anger, he repeated, as he planted himself opposite his wife at the foot of the table, "I say, I have not found the foal!" Need we tell the terrors of the family? But just then he remembered that he had, on the previous night, crossed a meadow loaded with ferns, and that some of the seed might have got into his shoes, and that he was therefore invisible. Flinging them off, he at once became visible to everybody.

Fern seed has also the valuable property of doubling a man's power in the working field, several examples of which are given by writers on this interesting subject.

FAIRY FLAX – FAIRIES.

The Fairy Flax of Aran we have frequently spoken of in the preceding pages, and that flax may be spun from year's end to year's end, and little realized thereby, unless, indeed, "the good people," as the fairies are called,[27 - Numbers of books treat of the superstitious belief in fairies. The Irish fancy that they are the "fallen angels" mentioned in Jude 6, and that on the day of judgment they will be released from their hapless condition (2 Peter ii. 4). The belief in fairies is universal in Mahomedan countries. —Vide "Lalla-Rookh," "Paradise and the Peri."] take the spinner under their protection. Now, there was once a man in humble circumstances, who had an only daughter, the most beautiful creature that ever was seen. She spent much of her time spinning, but to no purpose. At length a hideous dwarf, lame and blind of an eye, came to her one day as she was spinning, and presented her with a distaff full of flax, upon which, he said, there was enough for her whole life, if she lived a hundred years, provided she did not spin it quite off. On she went spinning, but never spinning to the end, and her loom produced the choicest of stuffs, for which she received prices almost fabulous! Day by day her wealth increased, and after a time she felt assured that the produce of her labour had now secured so sure a market that it made little difference whether she spun the fairy flax right off or not; so, to try what would be the effect, in her curiosity she spun it to the end. In a moment the wheel stopped, and she had ever after to repent the curiosity that stripped her of immense wealth.

SATURDAY'S SPINNING – HEMP.

The spinning-wheel in Aran, the old crones say, should never spin on Saturday. Whence this keeping holy the Saturday I know not; but it does look as if they who kept the Saturday holy, were of Israelitish descent – were, perhaps, of the lost tribes carried into Nineveh at the time of the Captivity by Salamanassar, 730 b. c.![28 - 2 Kings xvii. 6.] Now, there were two old women indefatigable spinners, whose wheels never stood still, though they were by the wise men warned not to spin on Saturdays. At length one of them died, and on the Saturday night following she appeared to the other, who was as usual busy at the wheel, and showed her her burning hand, saying —

"See what in hell at last I've won,
Because on Saturdays I've spun."

Hemp.– I don't remember seeing hemp growing in Aran to any great extent. Sowing the seed of hemp on All Hallows' Eve in some parts of the country, and on St. John's Night in others, is described in the following lines from Gay's "Pastorals": —

"At eve last midsummer no sleep I sought,
But to the field a bag of hemp seed brought:
I scattered round the seed on every side,
And three times in a trembling accent cried,
'This hemp seed with my virgin hand I sow,
Who shall my true love be the crop shall mow.'
I straight looked back, and, if my eyes speak truth,
With his keen scythe behind me came the youth.
'With my sharp heel I three times mark the ground,
And turn me thrice around, around, around!"

HAZEL – DIVINING-RODS.

The Hazel, one of Thor's trees, is generally used as a divining-rod to discover mines and lost treasures supposed to be hidden underground. The person who seeks for the treasure takes a hazel rod with an end in each hand, and then slowly walks over the ground, keeping the rod in a horizontal position before him; when passing over the spot it bends down like a bow in the middle, towards the place as if it were magnetized, as the needle turns to the pole. Beyond a doubt the hazel is known to miners, and to those who look for minerals underground, as the divining-rod.

FAREWELL INISHMORE.

And now, bringing our legends to a close, we shall bid farewell to these lonely and lovely isles, and in bidding them farewell we shall merely ask how it is that the travelling English public travel not into these islands, where frosts never wither, where snows never rest? And so farewell to Inishmore, the island-home of St. Enda – Inishmore – once

"Notissima famâ
Insula dives opum, Hiberniæ dum regna manebant
Nunc tantum sinus, et statio mala fida carinis."

APPENDIX A

"Adorned with honours on their native shore,
Silent they sleep and dream of wars no more."

    Pope's Iliad.

O'BRIENS LORDS OF ARAN.

We have spoken so much in the foregoing pages of the O'Briens, lords of Aran, that we feel inclined to say a word as to, who those O'Briens were, whence they came, and whither they went; and first, let us state that their pedigree is traced by Irish genealogists to a date earlier than the Christian era. The O'Briens, lords of Aran, were descended from Bryan Boroimhe, King of Thomond and monarch of all Ireland, who conquered and fell at the battle of Clontarf on April 23, 1014, when the Danish power, all over Ireland, was scattered to the four winds of heaven. In the third generation after the death of Bryan, his descendant Dermod sat on the throne of Thomond, and this Dermod had sons and daughters, and the eldest of the sons was called Turlough, who in 1118 became, on his father's death, King of Thomond, whilst his younger brother was Mahon, and his youngest brother was Teige; and the clan MacTeige for 470 years ruled those islands, we have no doubt, with a very equitable and a very paternal rule, and wholly unhampered with legislative bodies such as a Witenagemot, or with the parliamentary institutions of the Normans, where the members then, as now, had the liberty of speaking, sometimes very plainly, their minds – as, indeed, the Norman name of our legislative assembly imports: parler-les-mens, a place for "speaking their minds." That the Corporation of Galway recognized the power of the O'Briens, lords of the isles, is plainly told in the foregoing pages, where we remember that twelve tuns of wine were annually paid to the lord for sweeping the sea, as it were with a broom, clean of the Algerine pirates that then infested the high seas; and there can be little if any doubt that the O'Briens were ready, from time to time and at all times, to massacre the foe wherever they met him, and to convert his ships to their own use and behoof in manner and form as by their indenture of treaty was provided. It is not for us to criticize with critical pen the policy of the respected lord of the isles, who, in 1560, was swallowed up in the deep, near the Great Man's Bay, when he was returning from Thomond loaded with the booty which, at the point of the sword, he had won from the subjects of his cousin O'Brien of Thomond; for it does not appear that ties of blood preserved his Majesty of Thomond from the vengeance of his lordship the lord of the isles, or, mutatis mutandis, the lord of the isles from the vengeance of his Majesty. "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," was their maxim, and it may have been good law where the antagonists had each two eyes and two teeth; but the vengeance was dreadful when the punished party had only one eye and one tooth. He was then blinded and untoothed out and out; and frequently such dreadful vengeance did await the conquered. Let us not, however, be too hard on the conquerors when we remember that David sawed his prisoners in two, and drove harrows over them in a harrowed field.[29 - 2 Sam. xii. 31.] The O'Flaherties, an equally warlike race, dispossessed the lords of the isles, and in 1588, the very year of the Spanish Armada, Queen Elizabeth finally confiscated their territories, and now the name of O'Brien is forgotten in Aran. Not so on the mainland; the O'Briens are still in Thomond and elsewhere, as, it is to be hoped, they will be for centuries yet to come. The lords of the Isles of Aran are extinct. The last of the male line was John O'Brien of Moyvanine and Clounties, whose daughter Sarah was married to Stephen Roche, from whom is descended the present Thomas Redington Roche, of Ryehill, Esq., J.P., Co. Galway. Amongst the families of this house still existing in Thomond, are the noble house of Inchiquin and the O'Briens of Ballynalacken, both of whom trace up, in an unbroken succession, to Bryan Boroimhe, who, like Leonidas at Thermopylæ, fell fighting the foreign foe for the liberties of his country.

O'BRIENS LORDS INCHIQUIN.

The title of Inchiquin dates from the year 1543, but no title was required to ennoble those who were of the blood of kings, and were "nobler than the royalty that first ennobled them." The untitled aristocracy in England are often superior to the titled aristocracy, who cannot trace back farther than the Wars of the Roses. Now, the last King of Thomond resigned his royalty to Henry VIII., who in return, by patent a. d. 1543, bestowed upon Murrough O'Brien, and upon the heirs male of his body, the title of Baron of Inchiquin. This Murrough had two sons, the elder Dermot, and the younger Donough, and Dermot on his father's death became Baron of Inchiquin; and so the title descended from father to son until the year 1855, when James, the twelfth baron, who was also seventh Earl of Inchiquin (creation a. d. 1654) and third Marquis of Thomond (a. d. 1800), died without issue male, when the earldom and marquisate expired. Thereupon the father of the present baron, who was also a baronet, and brother to William Smith O'Brien, celebrated as Member of Parliament and leader of the Irish people, knowing his descent from Donough, second son of the first baron, instructed his counsel to bring his case before the Committee of Privileges of the House of Lords, to whose satisfaction he proved that he was heir male of the body of the first baron, and thereupon he was confirmed in said barony, and became thirteenth baron.

MARSHAL MACMAHON.

Let us now go back to Dermod, the third generation from Bryan Boroimhe, which Dermod died, as we said, in 1118, leaving three sons, the eldest Turlough, King of Thomond, the younger Mahon, and the youngest Teige, lord of the isles; from Mahon is sprung Marshal MacMahon, whose acts and deeds are known of by all men.

O'BRIENS OF BALLYNALACKEN.

This Turlough, King of Thomond, was ancestor of Teige O'Brien, who married Annabella, daughter of Ulick McWilliam Burke, of Clanrickarde, known as "Ulick of the Wine," and by her had, with other sons, Turlough Don, King of Thomond in 1498, and Donal. Turlough Don was ancestor of the family of Inchiquin, of which we have spoken, and from Donal sprang Turlough O'Brien, who was married to a grandniece of Sir Toby Butler, better known as the jovial Sir Toby, the great luminary of the Connaught Circuit, Solicitor-General for Ireland under James II., and the celebrated lawyer who drafted that treaty which will be remembered by all generations as the broken Treaty of Limerick. Turlough was the grandfather of John O'Brien, of Ballynalacken, who died in 1855, and of James O'Brien, Esq., Q.C., who was Member of Parliament for the city of Limerick from 1854 to 1858, when he was raised to a judgeship in the Queen's Bench. It is too near our own time to speak of that learned lawyer further than to say that "he judged not according to appearance, but judged just judgment;" that in him the prisoner at the bar found a merciful judge, and at the same time one who held the scales so that crime could not escape with impunity. Let us hope that when he went to a higher court he reaped the rewards promised to a just judge; and let us hope that those who come after him of his name and race may, when their turn comes, follow in his footsteps, and thus show that the wisdom of the wise still dwells in the brehons of the Celtic race.

The Ballynalacken O'Briens are now represented amongst the landed gentry by James O'Brien, J.P., D.L., and they are also represented at the Bar by his brother, my learned friend, Peter, late Sergeant O'Brien, now Solicitor-General for Ireland.

APPENDIX B

STATISTICS OF ISLANDS OF ARAN.

[30] Vide return made in 1801 by Most Rev. Edward Dillon, D.D., Roman Catholic Archbishop of Tuam (Lord Castlereagh's Correspondence, vol. iv. p. 126). I can find no subsequent return.