Romantic Sligo
MYTHS SUFFUSE THE air like spray. They fall on the simplest things and cover them like hoar-frost; or the shimmering webs that mist the fields in summer. The eye obscures itself. Objectivity is impossible where so many reliques excite the mind; dolmens, cairns, stone circles, forts, cromlechs, trilithons, all suggestive of events not merely great but superhuman. One look at that flat-topped plateau of Knocknarea, one hint of its associations, one glimpse of the enormous cairn surmounting it—as large at close quarters as one of those man-dwarfing slag-heaps of the Black Country—is enough to subdue all disbelief; and since it is one of the first natural objects to catch the eye, one approaches this region subject to it even before one has well entered it. People say this vast cairn is the tomb of Queen Maeve, the legendary Queen of Connaught, an amazon who emerges from the epic tales about her with a stature greater than any Boadicea or Brunhild. Yet the name, in local tradition, means the Hill of Kings rather than “of the queens” (more romantic antiquaries wished to call it the Mountain of the Moon), and that tremendous mythical battle fought back on the Plain of Moytura, beside Lough Mask, is also traced here in an epic flight through the entire length of Connaught, to end with a battle where the remnants of the Firbolg were cut to pieces on the sands below by the following Tuatha de Danaan. In ordinary conversation any intelligent Sligo man will point you out the track of that flight, and resurrect from the place-names the evidence for whatever version of the tradition has come down to him. Yet another tradition relates Knocknarea and Carrowmore (both sets of monuments are connected) to a revolt supported by Ulstermen, against a Connaught king of the sixth century, Eoghan Bel. He was killed in that fight, but before he died ordered his men to bury him standing, his red spear in his hand, facing the route of the fleeing Ulstermen; and some hold that he was buried under the great cairn of Knocknarea. Only stone implements have been found about both Knocknarea and Carrowmore, marking them as reliques of semi-civilization.
To the north, across Rosses Point, rises the broken snout of Ben Bulben. With that blunt promontory goes the far later epic of the Fenian cycle—the story of Fionn, and Oisin, Diarmuid and Grainne, Oscar and Caoilte and Diorruing. It is the place where the second great Irish love-story came to its tragic end, the counterpart, and probable derivative of the magnificent, earlier story of Deirdre. As the high-king Conchubar desired Deirdre, and she loved Naoisi, so the leader of the Fianna, Fionn, desired Grainne, and she loved Diarmuid. She eloped with him. They fled all over Ireland, and everywhere you are pointed out those caverns and cromlechs which the people call “Leabuidh Dhiarmada agus Grainne,” the Bed of Diarmuid and Grainne. In the end Diarmuid made peace with Fionn, but Fionn harboured a relentless jealousy, and planned a boar-hunt to which Diarmuid was enticed. The hunt ended on Ben Bulben, where the boar ripped the bowels of Diarmuid. Even then Fionn might have saved him by bringing to him magic water in his hands from a well not nine paces away. Three times Fionn, under threats from Oscar, came with the water, but each time his jealous heart made him spill it between his fingers, and Diarmuid died.
It is a story less noble in its conclusion, as it is less ancient, than the Deirdre story; where Deirdre fell with her lover into his grave, Grainne let the old man wean her from her loyalty, and married him. “Fionn,” records the old story, ‘left not playing her with sweet words until he had brought her to his own will, and he had his desire of her. After that Fionn and Grainne went their way, and no tidings are told of them until they reached the Fianna.” The Fianna had, in their hatred of Fionn's treachery revolted against him. “When they saw Fionn and Grainne coming towards them in that guise they raised a shout of derision and mockery at her, and she bowed her head in shame....”
Yeats, looking up at Knocknarea, mingled the two periods:
The host is riding from Knocknarea
And over the grave of Clooth-na-bare,
Caoilte tossing his flaming hair,
And Niamh calling, “Away, come away.”
He offended against no canon. The folk mingle them as wildly. An old nurse of a friend of mine, in Sligo, used tell him the story of Deirdre and of her exile in Scotland in terms of the modern Burns and Laird direct route from Sligo to Glasgow, saying, “They then wint on a honeymoon to Glashgow.” Yeats himself heard an old man tell stories of Fionn in one of which Fionn threw a bailiff over a haycock while on the way to a police-court, and I have, myself, worked over several of these Ossianic tales which the people have confused and mixed up to their hearts’ content for greater relevance to their own humble lives, bringing stories as old as Knocknarea into the period of Michael Davitt and landlordism.
There is a strong Protestant colony in Sligo, and a solid and well-to-do colony. Yeats alone of all their generations seized on the magic of the Gaelic world. It is moving, today, so soon after his death, when somebody points out a place, say Glencar, and adds a half-line of a poem, “the woods above Glencar.” They take on a new quality at once. It is the same when you go up the lovely, dreaming water of Lough Gill and see Innisfree, and Dooney Rock, and if you can go ashore you may find a rock where he lay one night as he recalls half-seriously, half self-teasingly, in Reveries:
“My father read me some passage out of Walden and I planned some day to live in a cottage on a little island called Inishfree, and Inishfree was opposite to Slish Wood where I meant to sleep. I thought that having conquered bodily desire and the inclination of my mind towards women and love, I should live, as Thoreau lived, seeking wisdom. I set out from Sligo about six in the evening, walking slowly, for it was an evening of great beauty, but though I was well into Slish Wood by bedtime I could not sleep, not for the discomfort of the dry rock I had chosen for my bed but from my fear of the wood-ranger....” Then he tells of his weary return and how the servant chuckled a ribald chuckle at the notion that he had been sleeping in a wood: she thought that she knew far better what he had been up to, and would go into fits of laughter for months after if any reference was made to the expedition, saying, “You had good right to be fatigued.”
I was touched to find a photograph of this rock in Tadgh Kilgannon’s guide to Sligo, marked, Inishfree. Yeats’ Bed in the Foreground, with a note, which some of our more pious folk might find irreverent, that “in centuries to come it will, no doubt, be known as Yeats’ Bed, and as frequented and reverenced by the ubiquitous, inquiring tourist as St. Kevin's Bed (in Glendalough) is today.”
The town has its later, stirring, associations—Red Hugh O’Donnell, Sarsfield, and not least Sir Tadgh O'Regan, the last native defender of Connaught, of whom one may conveniently read in Colonel Wood-Martin's local history. Sir Tadgh comes after the fall of the Gaelic world at Limerick, and the victory of the Williamites, as a link with the modern Ireland: one of the few leaders left behind by the Wild Geese when Sarsfield led them to France. He had held out in Tyrone only until his men were eating raw horse-skin, He was ragged, holes in his boots, a rag for a cravat, hunchbacked, on an old spavined nag that kept kicking and whinnying as he parleyed with Schomberg. When Connaught was cut off he held out to the last, surrendered on honourable terms, and thereafter the game was in the hands of the raparees, the on-the-run men of the bad century, the progenitors of the I.R.A. of our day.
It is a lovely site for a town, the Garravogue broadening into a bay, big steamers lining the quays, the old seamen’s pubs, small; very cosy at night, with squared windows facing the river where the lights from the opposite side fall daggering into the water. Every side street seems to lead to a bridge, since the town is divided by the river, and though the main streets are narrow and undistinguished, they have a busy, rattling, sociable air, and in no country southern town have I seen so many cafés and tea-shops. Up the hill on the north side of the town there are some fine old houses and some very quaint and homely ones. Here and there the streets widen into something that is almost a square, and in so small a town to meet unexpectedly the Abbey, the cathedral, the lovely Norman church of St. John’s, several lesser churches and chapels, gave added force to the first impression I got of a varied and articulate society with a tradition behind it.
So ensconced in time, it is a town that could, I felt, wind many tendrils about the heart. It is a welcoming town. In others, through the west, I have felt “This is remote, but I feel no sense of loss.” Here I did not once even think that I was remote. There was, more than in any other place that I have been, of its size, extraordinary feeling of selfsufficiency. They have done very well here in music and drama; they hold two Feiseanna, or art-festivals, every summer, and the standards are extraordinarily high. And when I began to consider this, and wonder why it is so, I could only think that this is because the life-modes are more varied here than in those other places, because there is a variety of classes, and traditions—the best Protestant stock in all Ireland is in Sligo—and because of that surrounding dignity of history and fable which tempts one to liken this little port to some port-city on the Piraeus where the gods smiled on every hearth, or thundered in every storm, and no man thought that there existed beyond the hills any world but his own.
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