It was pouring rain, it often is pouring
rain. I took shelter in the hotel whose steps rise from the railway
station. There, in a quaint little corner room with a broad strip of
window, I settled myself to write with the light of a poor candle, and
the rain fell outside. Athenry bristles with ruins.
King John has another castle here all in ruins. There is a part of a
wall here and there, and the arch of a gate which has been patched up
and has some fearful hovels leaning up against it. It has the ruins of
an abbey and of a priory. The names of Clanricarde and De Birmingham
linger among these ruins; the modern cabins, without window pane or any
chimney at all, but a hole in the roof, are mixed up with the ruins
also.
The well-fed maid at the hotel informed me that they were very poor.
There is no work and no tillage, the land being in grass for sheep. "I
do not believe any of them know what a full meal means. No one knows how
they manage to live, the creatures," said the maid, comfortably. So the
night and the morning passed at Athenry, and we passed on to the village
of Oranmore.
LI.
GALWAY AND THE MEN OF GALWAY.
From Athenry and its ruins went to Oranmore and its ruins. The poverty
of Athenry deepens into still greater poverty in Oranmore. The country
is under grass, hay is the staple crop, so there being little tillage,
little labor is required. They depend on chance employment to procure
the foreign meal on which they live. Some depend for help to a great
extent on the friends in America.
There is a new pier being built here, for an arm of the sea runs up to
Oranmore. They told me that this pier was being built by the Canadian
money. It will be a harbor of refuge for fishing craft and better days
of work and food may yet dawn upon the West.
Behind the pier are the ruins of a large castle which belonged to the
Blakes, one of the Galway tribes. It was inhabited by the last Blake who
held any of the broad acres of his ancestors within the memory of the
old people. I stood in the roofless upper room which had been the
dancing saloon, penetrated into galleries built for defence lit only by
loop holes, went down the little dark stair into the dungeon, tried to
peer into the underground passage that connected with the seashore,
ascended to the battlements and looked over the lonely land and explored
multitudes of small rooms reached by many different flights of stone
steps.
These people are largely of the Norman blood. Oh, for the time when
peace and plenty, law and order shall reign here; when the peasant shall
not consider law as an oppressor to be defied or evaded, an engine of
oppression in the hands of the rich, but an impartial and inflexible
protector of the rights of rich and poor alike!
A young priest told me here that the clergy about this place were
opposed to the teachings of the Land League - did not countenance it
among their people. A Catholic gentleman in Roscommon told me the same
concerning the bishop and clergy of his own locality.
The tillage about Galway is careful and good, what there is of it. I saw
great fields of wheat that had been cleared of stones, by generations of
labor I should say. I had this fact brought to my mind by some peasants
in the neighborhood of Athenry, in this way: "A man works and his family
works on a bit of ground fencing it, improving it, gathering off the
stones; as he improves his rent is raised; he clings to the little home;
he gets evicted and disappears into the grave or the workhouse, and
another takes the land at the higher rent; improves from that point; has
the rent raised, till he too falls behind and is evicted; and so it goes
on till the lands are fit for meadowing and grass, and the holdings are
run together and the homes blotted out." Of course I do not give the
man's words exactly, but I give his thoughts exactly.
Galway was something of a disappointment to me at first, it had not such
a foreign look as I expected. It is a very busy town, has every
appearance of being a thriving town, every one you meet walks with
purpose as of one who has business to attend to. It is refreshing to see
this after looking at the hopeless faces and lounging gait of the people
of many places in the west. Wherever the tall chimneys rise the people
have a quick step and an all-alive look.
I wandered about Galway, and to my great delight had a guide to point
out what was most worth looking at. Of course I heard of the bravery of
the thirteen tribes of Galway, who snapped up Galway from the
O'Flaherties and assimilated themselves to the natives as more Irish
than themselves. After walking about a little I did notice the arched
gateways and the highly ornamented entrance doors which they concealed.
The first place of interest pointed out to me was Lynch castle. From one
of the windows of this castle Warder Lynch, in 1493, hung his own son.
It is said from this act the name Lynch Law arose. The Lynch family,
originally Lintz, came from Lintz in Austria.
This mayor or Warder Lynch was a wealthy merchant trading with Spain. He
trusted his son to go thither and purchase a cargo of wine.
