Mearing Stones: Leaves from My Note-Book on Tramp in Donegal. Campbell Joseph
than a herb, but beautiful to look at and most serviceable to the dyer; eyebright and purple mountain saxifrage; crested ling; tufts of sea-holly, with their green, fleshy, spiked leaves; and lake-sedge and sand-grass, blown through by soft winds and murmurous with the hum of bees. Donegal, wild though it be in other respects, is surely a paradise of herbs and flowers.
A YOUNG GIRL
A young girl, in the purr and swell of youth. Her shawl is thrown loosely back, showing a neck and breast beautifully modelled. She is barefooted, and jumps from point to point on the wet road. At a stream which crosses the road near the gallán she lifts her dress to her knees and leaps over. She does not see me where I am perched sunning myself, so I can watch her to my heart’s content.
THE GENERAL LIGHT AND DARK
“The words of the maker of poems are the general light and dark.” One feels the truth of this saying of Walt Whitman’s in a place like the Pass of Glengesh, or the White Strand outside Maghery. Chanting a fragment of the “Leaves” one night in the Pass, when everything was quiet and the smells were beginning to rise out of the wet meadows below, I felt how supremely true it was, and how much it belonged to the time and place – the darkness, the silence, the vibrant stars, the earth smells, the bat that came out of the shadow of a fuchsia-bush and fluttered across a white streak in the sky beyond. And I have tried Wordsworth’s sonnet beginning, “The world is too much with us,” by a criterion no less than that of the Atlantic itself, tumbling in foam on the foreshore of Maghery when daylight was deepening into twilight, and the moon was low over the hills, touching the rock-pools and the sand-pools with flakes of carmine light. When I said the sonnet aloud to myself it seemed to rise out of the landscape and to incorporate itself with it again as my voice rose and fell in the wandering cadences of the verse. Nature, after all, is the final touchstone of art. Tried by it, the counterfeit fails and the unmixed gold is justified.
SOUL AND BODY
“It’s a strange world,” said a tramp to me to-day. I agreed. “And would you answer me this, gaffer?” said he. “Why is it when a man’s soul is in his body, and he lusty and well, you think nothing of kicking him about as you would an old cast shoe? And the minute the soul goes, and the body is stiffening in death, you draw back from him, hardly daring to touch him for the dread that is on you. Would you answer me that, gaffer?” I was silent. “It’s a strange world, sure enough,” said the tramp. He rose from the gripe where he lay making rings in the grass with his stick. “Good-day, gaffer,” said he. “God speed your journey.” And he took the road, laughing.
A MAN ON SHELTY-BACK
A man on shelty-back. He has come in from the mountains to the cloth fair at Ardara. He is about sixty-five, black on the turn, clean shaven, but for side whiskers. He wears the soft wide-awake favoured by the older generation of peasants, open shirt, and stock rolled several times round his throat and knotted loosely in front. His legs dangle down on either side of his mount, tied at the knees with sugans. His brogues are brown with bog mud, very thick in the sole, and laced only half-way up. He has a bundle of homespun stuff under his left arm. A pipe is in his teeth, and as I approach he withdraws it to bid me the time of day. “Lá maith,” he says in a strong, hearty voice. I return the greeting, and pass on.
THE FAIRIES
I was in a house one night late up in the Gap of Maum, a very lonely place, yarning with two brothers – shepherds – who live there by themselves. I had sat a long time over the griosach, and was preparing to go, when the elder of them said to me: “Don’t stir yet a bit. Sit the fire out. A body’s loath to leave such a purty wee fire to the fairies.”
STRANORLAR STATION
In a quiet corner, seated, I see a woman come in from the mountainy country beyond Convoy. She is waiting for the up-train. She is dark. Her hair and eyes are very dark. Her lips are threads of scarlet. Her skin is colourless, except for a slight tanning due to exposure to sun and weather. She has a black shawl about her shoulders, and a smaller one of lighter colour over her head. She moves seldom. Her hands are folded on her knees. She looks into space with an air of quiet ecstasy, like a Madonna in an old picture. Her beauty is the beauty of one apart from the ruck and commonness of things… She spits out now and again. I cannot help watching her.
STONES
“Donegal is a terrible place for stones.” “Heth, is it, sir – boulders as big as a house. And skipping-stones? Man dear, I could give you a field full, myself!”
THE STRAND-BIRD
I could sit for hours listening to the “bubbling” of the strand-bird; but that’s because I am melancholy. If I weren’t melancholy I’d hardly like it, I think. The tide’s at ebb and the bollans and rock-pools are full of water. Beyond is space – the yellow of the sand and the grey of the sky – and the pipe-note “bubbling” between. A strange, yearning sound, like nothing one hears in towns; bringing one into touch with the Infinite, and deep with the melancholy that is Ireland’s.. and mine.
SPACE
In towns the furthest we see is the other side of the street; but here there is no limit to one’s prospect – Perseus is as visible as Boötes – and one’s thought grows as space increases.
RABBITS AND CATS
Donegal is over-run with rabbits; and sometimes on your journeys you will see a common house-cat – miles from anywhere – stalking them up the side of a mountain, creeping stealthily through the heather and pouncing on them with the savagery of a wild thing. The cats, a stonebreaker told me, come from the neighbouring farm-houses and cabins, “but they are devils for strolling,” says he, and in addition to what food they get from their owners “they prog a bit on their own!”
THE GLAS GAIBHLINN
“That’s a very green field,” I said to a man to-day, pointing to a field, about two furrow-lengths away, on which the sun seemed to pour all its light at once. “Is there water near it?” “There’s a stream,” says he. “And the Glas Gaibhlinn sleeps there, anyway.” “And what’s that?” “It’s a magic cow the old people’ll tell you of,” says he, “that could never be milked at one milking, or at seven milkings, for that,” says he. “Any field that’s greener than another field, or any bit of land that’s richer than another bit, they say the Glas Gaibhlinn sleeps in it,” says he. “It’s a freet, but it’s true!”
A HOUSE IN THE ROAD’S MOUTH
A house in the road’s mouth – it is no roundabout to visit, but a short cut. Often I go up there of an evening, when my day’s wandering is done, to meet the people and to hear the old Fenian stories told – or, maybe, a tune played on the fiddle, if Donal O’Gallagher, the dark man from Falcarragh, should happen to be present. It is as good as the sight of day to see the dancers, the boys and the girls out on the floor, the old people looking on from the shadow of the walls, and Donal himself, for all his blindness, shaking his head and beating time with his foot, as proud as a quilt of nine hundred threads!
THE QUEST
Where am I going? Looking for the dew-snail? No, but going till I find the verge of the sky.
MUCKISH
“When you see Muckish with a cap on,” said a man to me one day, “you may lay your hand on your heart and say: ‘We’ll have a wet spell before long.’” This mountain, like Errigal, has a knack of drawing a hood of grey vapour round its head when the rest of the landscape is perfectly cloudless – like the peaks of the Kaatskills in Rip Van Winkle.
THE MAY-FIRE
The May-Fire is still kindled in some parts of Donegal. It is a survival of a pagan rite of our forefathers.
“And at it (the great national convention at Uisneach in Meath) they were wont to make a sacrifice to the arch-god, whom they adored, whose