AMONG THE CLOUDS IN IRELAND
From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893
Page 35
AMONG THE CLOUDS IN IRELAND
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Zeitgeist has not yet taken the bloom of simple trustfulness and veneration off the delightful mountain folk in the white flannel baunyeens and maddered petticoats—not, at all events, in regions outside the disenchanting track of the railways and the tourist cars. I wish I could have devoted this communication wholly to the description of an untravelled route between Cong and Leenane, which we happened upon last Monday, and for which the weary seeker after an unhackneyed Swiss valley would give volumes of Cook's coupons. Men who have dipped among the misty blue mountains of the Joyce country, and been repulsed from the door of Lord Leitrim's hotel in the Alpine valley under Maamturk, where a Swiss hotel-keeper would have found a gold mine, have never discovered that away on the north side of the Maam range, Lough Mask sends up a long silver arm into the heart of the mountains around Finnae, which, like an enchanted wand, turns all around it into romance. The lough, now laughing like a lady's mirror, now black as an Irish famine, zigzags through glens where never tourist trod; past patches of primeval forest that may have been waving when Queen Elizabeth's first red-coat was seen in the MacWilliam country; past softly sculptured hills in a blaze of purple and gold, with the blossoms of the bog-asphodel and the heather; past statelier hills, whose bases are draped in deep black, and their heads hooded with thunder clouds; past farmhouses, whose thatch is roped down with flagstones for fear of its being whirled across the mountains of a winter night; past marvellous little plots of tillage among the stern rocks, where the potato stalks, I am glad to say, are of a glowing, healthy green, and the oats beginning to receive their crown of modest gold—all swept by a breeze which, even with its all too frequent kiss … continue reading »
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