In Wicklow And West Kerry
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John M. Synge >> In Wicklow And West Kerry
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IN WICKLOW AND WEST KERRY
BY JOHN M. SYNGE
1912
Notice
In WEST KERRY was partly re-written from articles which appeared in
the Shanachie, where some of IN WICKLOW also appeared; the remainder
of the Wicklow articles were originally published in the Manchester
Guardian.
The publishers desire to thank the editors of the Manchester
Guardian and the Shanachie for permission to reprint the articles
which appeared in their columns.
IN WICKLOW
The Vagrants of Wicklow
Some features of County Wicklow, such as the position of the
principal workhouses and holiday places on either side of the coach
road from Arklow to Bray, have made this district a favourite with
the vagrants of Ireland. A few of these people have been on the
roads for generations; but fairly often they seem to have merely
drifted out from the ordinary people of the villages, and do not
differ greatly from the class they come from. Their abundance has
often been regretted; yet in one sense it is an interesting sign,
for wherever the labourer of a country has preserved his vitality,
and begets an occasional temperament of distinction, a certain
number of vagrants are to be looked for. In the middle classes the
gifted son of a family is always the poorest--usually a writer or
artist with no sense for speculation--and in a family of peasants,
where the average comfort is just over penury, the gifted son sinks
also, and is soon a tramp on the roadside.
In this life, however, there are many privileges. The tramp in
Ireland is little troubled by the laws, and lives in out-of-door
conditions that keep him in good-humour and fine bodily health. This
is so apparent, in Wicklow at least, that these men rarely seek for
charity on any plea of ill-health, but ask simply, when they beg:
'Would you help a poor fellow along the road?' or, 'Would you give
me the price of a night's lodging, for I'm after walking a great way
since the sun rose?'
The healthiness of this life, again, often causes people to live to
a great age, though it is not always easy to test the stories that
are told of their longevity. One man, however, who died not long
ago, claimed to have reached one hundred and two with a show of
likelihood; for several old people remember his first appearance in
a certain district as a man of middle age, about the year of the
Famine, in 1847 or 1848. This man could hardly be classed with
ordinary tramps, for he was married several times in different parts
of the world, and reared children of whom he seemed to have
forgotten, in his old age, even the names and sex. In his early life
he spent thirty years at sea, where he sailed with some one he spoke
of afterwards as 'Il mio capitane,' visiting India and Japan, and
gaining odd words and intonations that gave colour to his language.
When he was too old to wander in the world, he learned all the paths
of Wicklow, and till the end of his life he could go the thirty
miles from Dublin to the Seven Churches without, as he said,
'putting out his foot on a white road, or seeing any Christian but
the hares and moon.' When he was over ninety he married an old woman
of eighty-five. Before many days, however, they quarrelled so
fiercely that he beat her with his stick, and came out again on the
roads. In a few hours he was arrested at her complaint, and
sentenced to a month in Kuilmainham. He cared nothing for the
plank-bed and uncomfortable diet; but he always gathered himself
together, and cursed with extraordinary rage, as he told how they
had cut off the white hair which had grown down upon his shoulders.
All his pride and his half-conscious feeling for the dignity of his
age seemed to have set themselves on this long hair, which marked
him out from the other people of his district; and I have often
heard him saying to himself, as he sat beside me under a ditch:
'What use is an old man without his hair? A man has only his bloom
like the trees; and what use is an old man without his white hair?'
Among the country people of the east of Ireland the tramps and
tinkers who wander round from the west have a curious reputation for
witchery and unnatural powers. 'There's great witchery in that
country,' a man said to me once, on the side of a mountain to the
east of Aughavanna, in Wicklow. 'There's great witchery in that
country, and great knowledge of the fairies. I've had men lodging
with me out of the west--men who would be walking the world looking
for a bit of money--and every one of them would be talking of the
wonders below in Connemara. I remember one time, a while after I was
married, there was a tinker down there in the glen, and two women
along with him. I brought him into my cottage to do a bit of a job,
and my first child was there lying in the bed, and he covered up to
his chin with the bed-clothes. When the tallest of the women came
in, she looked around at him, and then she says:
"That's a fine boy, God bless him."
" How do you know it's a boy,' says my woman, "when it's only the
head of him you see?"
"I know rightly," says the tinker, "and it's the first too."
'Then my wife was going to slate me for bringing in people to
bewitch the child, and I had to turn the lot of them out to finish
the job in the lane.'
I asked him where most of the tinkers came from that are met with in
Wicklow. 'They come from every part,' he said. 'They're gallous lads
for walking round through the world. One time I seen fifty of them
above on the road to Rathdangan, and they all matchmaking and
marrying themselves for the year that was to come. One man would
take such a woman, and say he was going such roads and places,
stopping at this fair and another fair, till he'd meet them again at
such a place, when the spring was coming on. Another, maybe, would
swap the woman he had with one from another man, with as much talk
as if you'd be selling a cow. It's two hours I was there watching
them from the bog underneath, where I was cutting turf and the like
of the crying and kissing, and the singing and the shouting began
when they went off this way and that way, you never heard in your
life. Sometimes when a party would be gone a bit down over the hill,
a girl would begin crying out and wanting to go back to her ma. Then
the man would say: "Black hell to your soul, you've come with me
now, and you'll go the whole way." I often seen tinkers before and
since, but I never seen such a power of them as were in it that
day.'
It need hardly be said that in all tramp life plaintive and tragic
elements are common, even on the surface. Some are peculiar to
Wicklow. In these hills the summer passes in a few weeks from a late
spring, full of odour and colour, to an autumn that is premature and
filled with the desolate splendour of decay; and it often happens
that, in moments when one is most aware of this ceaseless fading of
beauty, some incident of tramp life gives a local human intensity to
the shadow of one's own mood.
One evening, on the high ground near the Avonbeg, I met a young
tramp just as an extraordinary sunset had begun to fade, and a low
white mist was rising from the bogs. He had a sort of table in his
hands that he seemed to have made himself out of twisted rushes and
a few branches of osier. His clothes were more than usually ragged,
and I could see by his face that he was suffering from some terrible
disease. When he was quite close, he held out the table.
'Would you give me a few pence for that thing?' he said. 'I'm after
working at it all day by the river, and for the love of God give me
something now, the way I can get a drink and lodging for the night.'
I felt in my pockets, and could find nothing but a shilling piece.
'I wouldn't wish to give you so much,' I said, holding it out to
him, 'but it is all I have, and I don't like to give you nothing at
all, and the darkness coming on. Keep the table; it's no use to me,
and you'll maybe sell it for something in the morning.'
The shilling was more than he expected, and his eyes flamed with
joy.
'May the Almighty God preserve you and watch over you and reward you
for this night,' he said, 'but you'll take the table; I wouldn't
keep it at all, and you after stretching out your hand with a
shilling to me, and the darkness coming on.'
He forced it into my hands so eagerly that I could not refuse it,
and set off down the road with tottering steps. When he had gone a
few yards, I called after him: 'There's your table; take it and God
speed you.'
Then I put down his table on the ground, and set off as quickly as I
was able. In a moment he came up with me, holding the table in his
hands, and slipped round in front of me so that I could not get
away.
'You wouldn't refuse it,' he said, 'and I after working at it all
day below by the river.'
He was shaking with excitement and the exertion of overtaking me; so
I took his table and let him go on his way. A quarter of a mile
further on I threw it over the ditch in a desolate place, where no
one was likely to find it.
In addition to the more genuine vagrants a number of wandering men
and women are to be met with in the northern parts of the county,
who walk out for ferns and flowers in bands of from four or five to
a dozen. They usually set out in the evening, and sleep in some
ditch or shed, coming home the next night with what they have
gathered. If their sales are successful, both men and women drink
heavily; so that they are always on the edge of starvation, and are
miserably dressed, the women sometimes wearing nothing but an old
petticoat and shawl--a scantiness of clothing that is sometimes met
with also among the road-women of Kerry.
These people are nearly always at war with the police, and are often
harshly treated. Once after a holiday, as I was walking home through
a village on the border of Wicklow, I came upon several policemen,
with a crowd round them, trying to force a drunken flower-woman out
of the village. She did not wish to go, and threw herself down,
raging and kicking on the ground. They let her lie there for a few
moments, and then she propped herself up against the wall, scolding
and storming at every one, till she became so outrageous the police
renewed their attack. One of them walked up to her and hit her a
sharp blow on the jaw with the back of his hand. Then two more of
them seized her by the shoulders and forced her along the road for a
few yards, till her clothes began to tear off with the violence of
the struggle, and they let her go once more.
She sprang up at once when they did so. 'Let this be the barrack's
yard, if you wish it,' she cried out, tearing off the rags that
still clung about her. 'Let this be the barrack's yard, and come on
now, the lot of you.'
Then she rushed at them with extraordinary fury; but the police, to
avoid scandal, withdrew into the town, and left her to be quieted by
her friends.
Sometimes, it is fair to add, the police are generous and
good-humoured. One evening, many years ago, when Whit-Monday in
Enniskerry was a very different thing from what it is now, I was
looking out of a window in that village, watching the police, who
had been brought in for the occasion, getting ready to start for
Bray. As they were standing about, a young ballad-singer came along
from the Dargle, and one of the policemen, who seemed to know him,
asked him why a fine, stout lad the like of him wasn't earning his
bread, instead of straying on the roads.
Immediately the young man drew up on the spot where he was, and
began shouting a loud ballad at the top of his voice. The police
tried to stop him; but he went on, getting faster and faster, till
he ended, swinging his head from side to side, in a furious patter,
of which I seem to remember--
Botheration
Take the nation,
Calculation,
In the stable,
Cain and Abel,
Tower of Babel,
And the Battle of Waterloo.
Then he pulled off his hat, dashed in among the police, and did not
leave them till they had all given him the share of money he felt he
had earned for his bread.
In all the circumstances of this tramp life there is a certain
wildness that gives it romance and a peculiar value for those who
look at life in Ireland with an eye that is aware of the arts also.
In all the healthy movements of art, variations from the ordinary
types of manhood are made interesting for the ordinary man, and in
this way only the higher arts are universal. Beside this art,
however, founded on the variations which are a condition and effect
of all vigorous life, there is another art--sometimes confounded
with it--founded on the freak of nature, in itself a mere sign of
atavism or disease. This latter art, which is occupied with the
antics of the freak, is of interest only to the variation from
ordinary minds, and for this reason is never universal. To be quite
plain, the tramp in real life, Hamlet and Faust in the arts, are
variations; but the maniac in real life, and Des Esseintes and all
his ugly crew in the arts, are freaks only.
The Oppression of the Hills
AMONG the cottages that are scattered through the hills of County
Wicklow I have met with many people who show in a singular way the
influence of a particular locality. These people live for the most
part beside old roads and pathways where hardly one man passes in
the day, and look out all the year on unbroken barriers of heath. At
every season heavy rains fall for often a week at a time, till the
thatch drips with water stained to a dull chestnut, and the floor in
the cottages seems to be going back to the condition of the bogs
near it. Then the clouds break, and there is a night of terrific
storm from the south-west--all the larches that survive in these
places are bowed and twisted towards the point where the sun rises
in June--when the winds come down through the narrow glens with the
congested whirl and roar of a torrent, breaking at times for sudden
moments of silence that keep up the tension of the mind. At such
times the people crouch all night over a few sods of turf and the
dogs howl, in the lanes.
When the sun rises there is a morning of almost supernatural
radiance, and even the oldest men and women come out into the air
with the joy of children who have recovered from a fever. In the
evening it is raining again. This peculiar climate, acting on a
population that is already lonely and dwindling, has caused or
increased a tendency to nervous depression among the people, and
every degree of sadness, from that of the man who is merely mournful
to that of the man who has spent half his life in the madhouse, is
common among these hills.
Not long ago in a desolate glen in the south of the county I met two
policemen driving an ass-cart with a coffin on it, and a little
further on I stopped an old man and asked him what had happened.
'This night three weeks,' he said, 'there was a poor fellow below
reaping in the glen, and in the evening he had two glasses of whisky
with some other lads. Then some excitement took him, and he threw
off his clothes and ran away into the hills. There was great rain
that night, and I suppose the poor creature lost his way, and was
the whole night perishing in the rain and darkness. In the morning
they found his naked footmarks on some mud half a mile above the
road, and again where you go up by a big stone. Then there was
nothing known of him till last night, when they found his body on
the mountain, and it near eaten by the crows.'
Then he went on to tell me how different the country had been when
he was a young man.
'We had nothing to eat at that time,' he said, 'but milk and
stirabout and potatoes, and there was a fine constitution you
wouldn't meet this day at all. I remember when you'd see forty boys
and girls below there on a Sunday evening, playing ball and
diverting themselves; but now all this country is gone lonesome and
bewildered, and there's no man knows what ails it.'
There are so few girls left in these neighbourhoods that one does
not often meet with women that have grown up unmarried. I know one,
however, who has lived by herself for fifteen years in a tiny hovel
near a cross roads much frequented by tinkers and ordinary tramps.
As she has no one belonging to her, she spends a good deal of her
time wandering through the country, and I have met her in every
direction, often many miles from her own glen. 'I do be so afeard of
the tramps,' she said to me one evening. 'I live all alone, and what
would I do at all if one of them lads was to come near me? When my
poor mother was dying, "Now, Nanny," says she, "don't be living on
here when I am dead," says she; "it'd be too lonesome." And now I
wouldn't wish to go again' my mother, and she dead--dead or alive I
wouldn't go again' my mother--but I'm after doing all I can, and I
can't get away by any means.' As I was moving on she heard, or
thought she heard, a sound of distant thunder.
'Ah, your honour,' she said, 'do you think it's thunder we'll be
having? There's nothing I fear like the thunder. My heart isn't
strong--I do feel it--and I have a lightness in my head, and often
when I do be excited with the thunder I do be afeard I might die
there alone in the cottage and no one know it. But I do hope that
the Lord--bless His holy name!--has something in store for me. I've
done all I can, and I don't like going again' my mother and she
dead. And now good evening, your honour, and safe home.'
Intense nervousness is common also with much younger women. I
remember one night hearing some one crying out and screaming in the
house where I was staying. I went downstairs and found it was a girl
who had been taken in from a village a few miles away to help the
servants. That afternoon her two younger sisters had come to see
her, and now she had been taken with a panic that they had been
drowned going home through the bogs, and she was crying and wailing,
and saying she must go to look for them. It was not thought fit for
her to leave the house alone so late in the evening, so I went with
her. As we passed down a steep hill of heather, where the nightjars
were clapping their wings in the moonlight, she told me a long story
of the way she had been frightened. Then we reached a solitary
cottage on the edge of the bog, and as a light was still shining in
the window, I knocked at the door and asked if they had seen or
heard anything. When they understood our errand three half-dressed
generations came out to jeer at us on the doorstep.
'Ah, Maggie,' said the old woman, 'you're a cute one. You're the
girl likes a walk in the moonlight. Whist your talk of them big
lumps of childer, and look at Martin Edward there, who's not six,
and he can go through the bog five times in an hour and not wet his
feet.'
My companion was still unconvinced, so we went on. The rushes were
shining in the moonlight, and one flake of mist was lying on the
river. We looked into one bog-hole, and then into another, where a
snipe rose and terrified us. We listened: a cow was chewing heavily
in the shadow of a bush, two dogs were barking on the side of a
hill, and there was a cart far away upon the road. Our teeth began
to chatter with the cold of the bog air and the loneliness of the
night. I could see that the actual presence of the bog had shown my
companion the absurdity of her fears, and in a little while we went
home.
The older people in County Wicklow, as in the rest of Ireland, still
show a curious affection for the landed classes wherever they have
lived for a generation or two upon their property. I remember an old
woman, who told me, with tears streaming on her face, how much more
lonely the country had become since the 'quality' had gone away, and
gave me a long story of how she had seen her landlord shutting up
his house and leaving his property, and of the way he had died
afterwards, when the 'grievance' of it broke his heart. The younger
people feel differently, and when I was passing this landlord's
house, not long afterwards, I found these lines written in pencil on
the door-post:
In the days of rack-renting
And land-grabbing so vile
A proud, heartless landlord
Lived here a great while.
When the League it was started,
And the land-grabbing cry,
To the cold North of Ireland
He had for to fly.
A year later the door-post had fallen to pieces, and the inscription
with it.
On the Road
ONE evening after heavy rains I set off to walk to a village at the
other side of some hills, part of my way lying along a steep
heathery track. The valleys that I passed through were filled with
the strange splendour that comes after wet weather in Ireland, and
on the tops of the mountains masses of fog were lying in white, even
banks. Once or twice I went by a lonely cottage with a smell of
earthy turf coming from the chimney, weeds or oats sprouting on the
thatch, and a broken cart before the door, with many straggling hens
going to roost on the shafts. Near these cottages little bands of
half-naked children, filled with the excitement of evening, were
running and screaming over the bogs, where the heather was purple
already, giving me the strained feeling of regret one has so often
in these places when there is rain in the air.
Further on, as I was going up a long hill, an old man with a white,
pointed face and heavy beard pulled himself up out of the ditch and
joined me. We spoke first about the broken weather, and then he
began talking in a mournful voice of the famines and misfortunes
that have been in Ireland.
'There have been three cruel plagues,' he said, 'out through the
country since I was born in the west. First, there was the big wind
in 1839, that tore away the grass and green things from the earth.
Then there was the blight that came on the 9th of June in the year
1846. Up to then the potatoes were clean and good; but that morning
a mist rose up out of the sea, and you could hear a voice talking
near a mile off across the stillness of the earth. It was the same
the next day, and the day after, and so on for three days or more;
and then you could begin to see the tops of the stalks lying over as
if the life was gone out of them. And that was the beginning of the
great trouble and famine that destroyed Ireland. Then the people
went on, I suppose, in their wickedness and their animosity of one
against the other; and the Almighty God sent down the third plague,
and that was the sickness called the choler. Then all the people
left the town of Sligo--it's in Sligo I was reared--and you could
walk through the streets at the noon of day and not see a person,
and you could knock at one door and another door and find no one to
answer you. The people were travelling out north and south and east,
with the terror that was on them; and the country people were
digging ditches across the roads and driving them back where they
could, for they had great dread of the disease.
'It was the law at that time that if there was sickness on any
person in the town of Sligo you should notice it to the Governors,
or you'd be put up in the gaol. Well, a man's wife took sick, and he
went and noticed it. They came down then with bands of men they had,
and took her away to the sick-house, and he heard nothing more till
he heard she was dead, and was to be buried in the morning. At that
time there was such fear and hurry and dread on every person, they
were burying people they had no hope of, and they with life within
them. My man was uneasy a while thinking on that, and then what did
he do, but slip down in the darkness of the night and into the
dead-house, where they were after putting his wife. There were
beyond twoscore bodies, and he went feeling from one to the other.
Then I suppose his wife heard him coming--she wasn't dead at
all--and "Is that Michael?" says she. "It is then," says he; "and,
oh, my poor woman, have you your last gasps in you still?" "I have,
Michael," says she; "and they're after setting me out here with
fifty bodies the way they'll put me down into my grave at the dawn
of day." "Oh, my poor woman," says he; "have you the strength left
in you to hold on my back?" "Oh, Micky," says she, "I have surely."
He took her up then on his back, and he carried her out by lanes and
tracks till he got to his house. Then he never let on a word about
it, and at the end of three days she began to pick up, and in a
month's time she came out and began walking about like yourself or
me. And there were many people were afeard to speak to her, for they
thought she was after coming back from the grave.'
Soon afterwards we passed into a little village, and he turned down
a lane and left me. It was not long, however, till another old man
that I could see a few paces ahead stopped and waited for me, as is
the custom of the place.
'I've been down in Kilpeddar buying a scythe-stone,' he began, when
I came up to him, 'and indeed Kilpeddar is a dear place, for it's
three-pence they charged me for it; but I suppose there must be a
profit from every trade, and we must all live and let live.'
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