Fifty-One Years of Victorian Life. Countess of Margaret Elizabeth Leigh Child-Villiers Jersey
Churches seem to have pleased us much better. I do not know whether the guides and country people generally are as free with their legends now as they were fifty years ago, but they told us any amount of stories to our great satisfaction. Brough, the guide at the Seven Churches, was particularly voluble and added considerably to the tales of St. Kevin given in the guide-book. St. Kevin, as recounted by Moore in his ballad, pushed Kathleen into the Lake when she would follow him. I remember that Brough was much embarrassed when I innocently asked why he did this. However, he discreetly replied: “If your honourable father and your honourable mother want you to marry a gentleman and you don’t like him, don’t push him into the water!” Excellent advice and not difficult to follow in a general way. When St. Kevin was alive the skylark used to sing early in the morning and waken the people who had been up late the night before at a wedding or merrymaking. When the Saint saw them looking so bad he asked, “What’s the matter?” On hearing that the lark would not let them get any sleep, he laid a spell that never more should lark sing above that lake. This encouragement of late hours seems rather inconsistent with his general asceticism. St. Kevin was more considerate to a blackbird than to the laverock. The former once laid her eggs on his extended hand, and he kept it held out until she had had time to build her nest in it and hatch her young.
Brough was even better acquainted with fairies than with saints. He knew a man at Cork named Jack M’Ginn, a wool-comber, who was carried away by the fairies for seven years. At the end of that time he accompanied them to a wedding (fairies like weddings). There was present a young lady whom the fairies wanted to make sneeze three times, as if they could do so and no one said “God bless her” they could take her away. So they tickled her nose three times with horse-hair, but as they were withdrawing it the third time Jack cried out in Irish “God bless her.” This broke the spell, and Jack fell crashing down amongst the crockery, everyone ran away, and he arose retransformed to his natural shape.
Another acquaintance of Brough’s—a stout farmer—met one evening three fairies carrying a coffin. Said one, “What shall we do for a fourth man?” “Switch the first man who passes,” replied the second. So they caught the farmer and made him carry it all night, till he found himself in the morning nearly dead not far from his own door. Our guide enjoined us to be sure, if fairies passed us in the air, to pick some blades of grass and throw them after them, saying “Good luck to you good folk”: as he sagely remarked, a civil word never does harm. As more prosaic recollections, Brough told us of the grand fights at Glendalough, when the young men were backed up by their sisters and sweethearts. The etiquette was for a young woman to take off her right stocking, put a stone in it and use it as a weapon, “and any woman who fought well would have twenty young farmers wanting to marry her.”
KILLARNEY
We stopped at Cork, whence we drove to see Blarney Castle and its stones. In those days, and probably still, there were two, one called the Ladies’ Stone, which we three children all kissed, and another suspended by iron clamps from the top of the Castle, so that one had to lie down and hold on to the irons with one’s body partly over an open space—rather a break-neck proceeding, particularly in rising again. Only Gilly accomplished this. The railway to Glengariff then went as far as Dunmanway, whence it was necessary to drive. We slept at the Royal Hotel where we arrived in the evening, and to the end of my life I never shall forget the beauty of Bantry Bay as we saw it on waking next morning with all its islands mirrored in purple shadows. But the whole drive to Killarney, and above all the Lakes as they break upon your sight, are beyond description. We saw it all in absolutely glorious weather—possibly rare in those regions, but certainly the Lakes of Killarney impressed me then as more beautiful than either the Scottish or the English Lakes because of their marvellous richness of colour. After fifty years, and travels in many lands, I still imagine that they are only excelled in colour by the coral islands of the Pacific; but of course the Irish Lakes may dwell in my memory as more beautiful than they really are, as I saw them first when I had far fewer standards of comparison. Anyhow, they were like a glorious dream. We spent some enchanting days at Killarney and saw all the surrounding beauties—the Gap of Dunloe with the Serpent Lake in which St. Patrick drowned the last snake in Ireland (in a chest into which he enticed the foolish creature by promising to let it out again), Mangerton, the highest mountain in Ireland but one, and Carrantuohill, the highest of all, which my brother and sister and I were allowed to ascend on condition that the guide would take good care of us. However, when out of our parents’ sight he found that he was troubled with a corn, and lay down to rest, confiding us to a ponyman who very nearly lost us in a fog. The ponies could only approach the base, the rest was pretty stiff climbing.
THE O’DONOGHUES
The Upper, the Middle, and the Lower Lake are all lovely, but the last was particularly attractive from its connection with the local hero—the Great O’Donoghue, whose story we gleaned from our guides and particularly a boy who carried our luncheon basket up Mangerton. He was a magician and had the power of taking any shape he pleased, but he ended by a tremendous leap into the Lake, after which he never returned to his home. Once every seven years, however, between six and seven on May Day morning, he rides from one of the islands in the Lower Lake to the opposite shore, with fairies strewing flowers before him, and for the time his Castle also reappears. Any unmarried man who sees him will marry a rich wife, and any unmarried woman a rich husband. Our boatman pointed out an island where girls used to stand to see him pass, but no one ever saw him except an old boatman, and he had been married a long time, so the apparition did not help him. No O’Donoghue has ever been drowned since the hero’s disappearance. We heard two different versions of the cause of the tragedy. Both attributed it to his wife’s want of self-control. One related that the husband was in the habit of running about as a hare or a rabbit, and as long as she did not laugh all went well, but when he took this flying leap into the water she burst into a fit of laughter and thereby lost him permanently. Our boy guide’s story was more circumstantial and more dramatic. According to him, the O’Donoghue once turned himself into an eel, and knotted himself three times round Ross Castle, where he lived (a super-eel or diminutive castle!). This frightened the lady dreadfully, and he told her that if she “fritted” three times on seeing any of his wonders she would see him no more. Some time after he turned himself into a goose and swam on the lake, and she shrieked aloud, thinking to lose him. Finally he brought out his white horse and told her that this was her last chance of restraining her fears. She promised courage and kept quiet while he rode straight up the Castle wall, but when he turned to come down she fainted, whereupon, horse and all, he leapt into the water. The boy also declared that in the previous year he was seen by two boatmen, a lady and a gentleman, another man, and some “company,” whereupon the lady fainted—recalling the lady of O’Donoghue, it was the least she could do. In the lower Lake may still be seen rocks representing the chieftain’s pigeons, his spy-glass, his books containing the “Ould Irish,” and his mice (only to be seen on Sundays after prayers). In the Bitter Lake, which was pointed out to us from a distance, is the fairy-island where he dances with the fairies.
MYTHS AND LEGENDS
The O’Donoghue in his lifetime had his frivolous moments. He once changed a number of fern fronds into little pigs, which he took to the fair at Killarney and sold to the jobbers. They looked just like other pigs until the purchasers reached some running water. As we all know, running water dissolves any spell, and the pigs all turned back into little blades of fern. As testimony to the authenticity of this tale the water was duly shown to us. The O’Donoghue, however, knew that the jobbers would not remain placid under the trick, so he went home and told his maid to say, if anyone asked for him, that he had gone to bed and to sleep and could only be wakened by pulling his legs. The jobbers arrived, received the message, went in and pulled his legs, which immediately came off! Off they ran in alarm, thinking that they had killed the man, but the good O’Donoghue was only having his fun with them, so called them back and returned their money. We picked up a good deal of fairy-lore during our sojourn in the south of Ireland, and I record it as it may have passed away during the past half-century. The driver who took us to the Gap of Dunloe told me that in his mother’s time a woman working in the fields put down her baby. While she was out of the way the steward saw the fairies change it for a fairy-baby who would have been a plague to her all her life. So as the child was crying and shrieking he stood