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

“Donegal is a terrible place for stones.” “Heth, is it, sir – boulders as big as a house. And skipping-stones? Man dear, I could give you a field full, myself!”

THE STRAND-BIRD

I could sit for hours listening to the “bubbling” of the strand-bird; but that’s because I am melancholy. If I weren’t melancholy I’d hardly like it, I think. The tide’s at ebb and the bollans and rock-pools are full of water. Beyond is space – the yellow of the sand and the grey of the sky – and the pipe-note “bubbling” between. A strange, yearning sound, like nothing one hears in towns; bringing one into touch with the Infinite, and deep with the melancholy that is Ireland’s.. and mine.

SPACE

In towns the furthest we see is the other side of the street; but here there is no limit to one’s prospect – Perseus is as visible as Boötes – and one’s thought grows as space increases.

RABBITS AND CATS

Donegal is over-run with rabbits; and sometimes on your journeys you will see a common house-cat – miles from anywhere – stalking them up the side of a mountain, creeping stealthily through the heather and pouncing on them with the savagery of a wild thing. The cats, a stonebreaker told me, come from the neighbouring farm-houses and cabins, “but they are devils for strolling,” says he, and in addition to what food they get from their owners “they prog a bit on their own!”

THE GLAS GAIBHLINN

“That’s a very green field,” I said to a man to-day, pointing to a field, about two furrow-lengths away, on which the sun seemed to pour all its light at once. “Is there water near it?” “There’s a stream,” says he. “And the Glas Gaibhlinn sleeps there, anyway.” “And what’s that?” “It’s a magic cow the old people’ll tell you of,” says he, “that could never be milked at one milking, or at seven milkings, for that,” says he. “Any field that’s greener than another field, or any bit of land that’s richer than another bit, they say the Glas Gaibhlinn sleeps in it,” says he. “It’s a freet, but it’s true!”

A HOUSE IN THE ROAD’S MOUTH

A house in the road’s mouth – it is no roundabout to visit, but a short cut. Often I go up there of an evening, when my day’s wandering is done, to meet the people and to hear the old Fenian stories told – or, maybe, a tune played on the fiddle, if Donal O’Gallagher, the dark man from Falcarragh, should happen to be present. It is as good as the sight of day to see the dancers, the boys and the girls out on the floor, the old people looking on from the shadow of the walls, and Donal himself, for all his blindness, shaking his head and beating time with his foot, as proud as a quilt of nine hundred threads!

THE QUEST

Where am I going? Looking for the dew-snail? No, but going till I find the verge of the sky.

MUCKISH

“When you see Muckish with a cap on,” said a man to me one day, “you may lay your hand on your heart and say: ‘We’ll have a wet spell before long.’” This mountain, like Errigal, has a knack of drawing a hood of grey vapour round its head when the rest of the landscape is perfectly cloudless – like the peaks of the Kaatskills in Rip Van Winkle.

THE MAY-FIRE

The May-Fire is still kindled in some parts of Donegal. It is a survival of a pagan rite of our forefathers.

“And at it (the great national convention at Uisneach in Meath) they were wont to make a sacrifice to the arch-god, whom they adored, whose name was Bél. It was likewise their usage to light two fires to Bél in every district in Ireland at this season, and to drive a pair of each herd of cattle that the district contained between these two fires, as a preservative, to guard them against all the diseases of that year. It is from that fire thus made that the day on which the noble feast of the apostles Peter and James is held has been called Bealteine (in Scotch Beltane), i. e., Bél’s fire.”

The boys and girls of a whole countryside repair to these fires, which are usually lit upon a high, commanding hill, and they spend the night out telling stories, reciting poems, singing, and dancing to the accompaniment of pipes and fiddles. The May-Fire is not quite so generally observed as the John’s-Fire, which is kindled on the night of the 23rd of June, St. John’s Eve.

BLOODY FORELAND

Bloody Foreland. An old woman comes out of the ditch to talk to me… “It’s a wild place, sir, God help us! none wilder. And myself, sir – sure I’ve nothing in the world but the bones of one cow!”

TWILIGHT AND SILENCE

Some places in Donegal seem to me to brood under a perpetual twilight and silence – Glen-Columcille, for instance, and the valley running into it. And mixed up with the twilight and silence is a profound melancholy that rises out of the landscape itself, or is read into it by the greyness of one’s own experience. Those dark hills with the rack over them and the sun looking through on one little patch of tilled land, and the stone mearings about it, figure forth the sorrow that is the heritage of every Irishman; the darkness the sorrow, the sunshine the hope, iridescent and beautiful, but a thing of moments only and soon to fade away. I stand on the bridge here where the road forks, Slieve League to the left of me, a dim lowering bulk, and the road to Glen reaching away into the skyline beyond. The water of a hillstream murmurs continually at my feet. A duck splashes, and flaps dripping into the greyness overhead. Not a soul is in sight – only a blue feather of turf-smoke here and there to show that human hearts do beat in this wilderness; that there are feet to follow the plough-tail and hands to tend the hearth. The sense of wonder over-masters me – the wonder that comes of silence and closeness to the elemental forces of nature. Then the mood changes, and I feel rising up in me the sorrow that is the dominating passion of my life. Do many people go mad here? I have heard tell that they do, and no wonder, for one would need to be a saint or a philosopher to resist the awful austerity of the place.

THE POOR HERD

There is a poor herd at Maghery – a half-witted character – who lives all his days in the open, with nothing between him and the sky. He was herding his cows one evening in a quiet place by the caves when I happened on him. “What time o’ day is it?” says he. “Just gone four,” says I, looking at my watch. “What time is that?” says he, in a dull sort of way. “Is it near dark?”

A MOUNTAIN TRAMP

Bearing south by the Owenwee river from Maghery, we strike up through Maum gorge. Outside Maghery we come on two men – one of them a thin, wizened old fellow with no teeth; the other a youngish man, very raggedly dressed, with dark hair and features like an Italian. The old man tells us in Irish (which we don’t follow very clearly) to keep up by the river-bed, and we can’t possibly lose our direction. A quarter of a mile further on we meet another man. He bids us the time of day in passably good English. I answer in Irish, telling him that we are on the road for Glen-Columcille, and asking him the easiest way over the hills. He repeats what the old man told us, viz., to keep to the river-bottom, and to cut up then by the fall at the head of Maum to Laguna, a cluster of poor houses in the mountain under Crockuna. “When you get there,” he says, “you cannot lose your road.” He comes a bit of the way with us, and then we leave him at a point where the track ends in the heather, and where a squad of navvies is engaged laying down a foundation of brushwood and stones to carry it further into the hills. It gives us a shock, in a way, to come on this squad of wild-looking men in so lonely and desolate a place.