Letters From the West of Ireland - Maam to Cong

Letters from West Ireland, XI, (From our Special Correspondent)

The Times London, September 15, 1884

Cong, Mayo, Sept. 8

Connemara scenery can never have been in greater beauty than on the night when I drove back from Kylemore to Leenane. The full moon dimmed the twinkle of the stars…each summit stood clear as at noonday; and the black shadows of the opposite mountains fell across the silvery locks. So that it was little of a surprise…when I looked out next morning on a thick, gray drizzle. Such sharp transitions in the weather are the rule rather than the exception here. The rain came down heavier and more heavily; and towards afternoon it was tumbling in torrents… I ordered round the car that was to take me to Cong.

The heavy wet of Connaught, even when you have it in excess, is unlike any I have met with elsewhere… Driving towards Lough Corrib, the whole country was surging, foaming, and murmuring with the course of the river Maam through the bogs, always sweeping in a brown torrent round the corners and often flooding the intervening _____. It was fed from the hills by a thousand little tributaries, falling from shelf to shelf in cascades… The very ditches by the roadside had become lively brooks, running along under a green fringe of ferns and flowerless foxgloves.

After a short, sharp climb from Leenane, we have crossed the lofty watershed, and the Maam now helps to drain the vast watery basin of Lough Corrib. Sheep and cattle that have been driven down from the high grazings are standing huddled together in the valley bottom in piteous plight, often bogged half way up to the hocks in swamp. They have been collected for the fair on next Monday at Leenane, and in this part of the valley are two or three large hill farmers, one of them owning nearly 250 cattle. Cattle [prices] have fallen, as well as the fleeces of the sheep; but the sheep themselves fetch fair prices…

A little further, and we are among holdings of the smallest size, the cultivated patches dwindling as the hovels become more and more miserable, till things are almost their worst near the bridge of Maam. Strange to say, the men are not extraordinarily poorly clad, for nowhere hitherto, not even near Gweedore, have I seen such deplorably dressed women. The ragged petticoat came barely below the naked knees, while over the head and the tattered gown that clung close to the person, was a flimsy shawl, their only protection against the downpour that must long before have soaked them to the skin. Little girls, in low, thin frocks without even the shawls, were cowering under cover of the banks of peat as they looked after a couple of sheep or a cow. No wonder that the faces of these poor people were soured and sad, as they well might have been in much brighter weather.

If agitation smoulders down where the tenants are prosperous, it must certainly find inflammable materials among a population like this—wretched and hopeless, bigoted and brutally ignorant. And so it does; for this is “Joyce’s Country,” of infamous reputation for its outrages, undoubtedly the most bloodstained of the districts of Ireland…

Not many miles from Leenane, we passed a lane leading across to Maamtrasna and Lough Mask, which lies about eight miles away to the north-east among the mountains. We may take it as a proof of the recent improvements of the county, thanks to the strict enforcement of the Crimes Act, that a small temporary police barrack, erected at the corner of the lane has been removed on the morning of that very day.

We passed a string of carts carrying away planks, roofing, and furniture, under the escort of the late occupants of the barrack. They were falling back upon the posts near Maam-bridge beyond which I remarked an unusually good house of a couple of stories in a singularly bleak situation. There being no sort of outbuildings to indicate a farmsteading, I asked to whom it belonged and found that it was the central fortress of the police in these wilds, no fewer than 14 men being quartered there. Even the upper windows were protected by loopholed iron plates against volleys of ball.

A few miles further, we can upon the little Mountmorres property, but prettily planted, an enclave in the great estates of Lord Ardilaun. It was the property of the unfortunate Lord Mountmorres, and inquiring who occupied the house at present, I was told that it is also tenanted by policemen. In fact no small number of men must be indispensable to picket and patrol even the more habitable outskirts of that savage and inaccessible country. As near the Bloody Foreland, so here the aborigines have scarcely been disturbed from time immemorial. Nine-tenths of them are said to bear the names of the ancient septs of the Joyces or the Coynes.

Even through rain and mists, it was a magnificent view of the wild hydrography of Loughs Mask and Corrib, with the rugged neck of land that divides them for the road climbs by zigzags to a great elevation… Immediately below is the broad expanse of Lough Corrib, dotted about with its rocky or wooded islands…

All that country through which we have been passing since we left Leenane is unfit for human habitation; and we may read the consequences of its misappropriation in its record of outrages and crimes. Great part of it belongs to Lord Ardilaun [an heir to the Guinness fortune], notoriously one of the most liberal landlords in Ireland; but when his lordship’s father bought it, he had to take over the starving paupers with the land, and he could not get rid of them if he would. Thanks to emigration, they are thinning now, and a happy thing it is for all parties. Yet this wild valley is rich in the extreme, were it only turned to its natural uses. Nowhere have I seen finer grazing, and many of the cattle and the sheep were in high condition, and, with some judicious hill-draining, we should say in Scotland that it has magnificent ground for a first-class deer forest. How far the deer would do well on these bare Connaught hills, in the West Irish damp, I do not know, and in any case, the surrounding peasants would soon make short work of them.

Lord Mountmorres’s house was made familiar to English people by many views in the illustrated papers at the time of the murder… It looks more like the residence of a second-rate Mid-Lothian farmer than of a nobleman… Two miles on the Leenane side of Cong, my friendly driver turned up a side-road for 150 yards. He pulled up before a gap in a loose stone wall, which had evidently been repaired comparatively recently. Either by change or designedly, the top stone in the breach was a small black slab, much like a tombstone in miniature; and that slab marks the spot when the ruffians fired on their victim.

And to have done with the melancholy list of outrages, the next day, Mr. Burke, Lord Ardilaun’s agent, pointed from the high grounds in Ashford-park to a strangely beautiful scene among the lovely Lough Mask mountains. Where the summits rose on either side with the grandest effects, a mountain gradually fell away into a long promontory… “That,” said Mr. Burke, “is the point of Kilbride; up the valley among those high hills to the left is Maamtrasna [site of the murder of a Joyce family]; while the loch arm winding at the back of the promontory is Cloughbreck, where the Huddies [Huddys]—the bailiffs who were sewn up in sacks—were thrown into the water by their murderers. [The Lough Mask Murders]

As for Cong, it is a mean village, very strikingly situated, among barren rock, rich wood, and rushing waters…

Lord Ardilaun now possesses some 15,000 acres in the neighbourhood. It was in 1852 that the late Sir Benjamin Guinness bought Ashford of Lord Oranmore as a small residential estate, being captivated by the extreme beauty of the spot, and intending merely to build a cottage ornée. In 1860 he added the adjacent Rosshill, sold to him by Lord Charlemont and Lord Leitrim [assassinated in 1878 near his Donegal estate], who had married the two Miss Berminghams, who were co-heiresses. Oddly enough the next purchase in 1864 was also from co-heiresses—from the Misses Blake, nieces of the late Valentine Blake. .. It was about the same time that 2,000 of the most poverty-stricken of the acres which I passed through in the neighbourhood of Maam were acquired from Sir Richard O’Donnell, whom I mentioned in a letter from Westport as the former proprietor of Achill Island. Lastly, in 1870, 6,000 acres around the white shooting lodge on the Lake of Kylemore, were bought from Mr. Finlay, a newspaper proprietor in Belfast, who had himself purchased them not very long before from the D’Arcys of Clifden, one of the oldest of the old Mayo families. So here, at least, in comparatively recent times, not a few of the “good ould families” have been selling.

Lord Ardilaun has a great extent of his hill-grazings in his own hands—in fact, pretty nearly the whole of the country between the bridge of Maam and Lough Mask; and, in particular, the entire estate of Rosshill, owing to large tenants going bankrupt.