Breffny of the O’Rourkes

WHEN one looks back from a distance at one’s native place through the blur and haze of twenty years there is a danger of idealisation; for no colours are so bright as the vivid tints of boyhood. But with Leitrim—or rather South Leitrim, the part with which I was most familiar in those days—the case is curiously different. Surveyed even through memory’s glasses the colour scheme is quiet and the whole scene one of gentle, unbroken contours. Everywhere there are large stretches of soft brown bogland, countless small farms with tiny lime-washed homesteads, sleepy one-street villages of a few hundred inhabitants, a great, dark, slow-moving river, and in the far background the huge mass of Sliabh-an-Iarainn, a mighty rampart shutting off the rugged north.

This southern portion has a placid beauty that is all its own. Stand on its highest hill—Sheemore, triple-crowned with cairns and honeycombed with ancient caves—and on a sunny day you will see on all sides vast stretches of level brown lowlands with a score of lakes lighting up the landscape like shields of burnished silver. Stand on Carrick Bridge of an evening at sunset and watch the mighty river advance majestically as it takes a slow and dignified sweep round the headland before turning southwards, and you will wonder how it is that our Irish landscape painters have never discovered the magical beauty of a spot like this. The dark waters, hardly seeming to move, appear to be dreaming of great days gone for ever.

A little further down is Jamestown, now a mere hamlet, with nothing left but its great castellated archway to remind us of the powerful stronghold that once it was.

(In passing, my blessing on the public-spirited County Council which has recently refused to demolish this fine old relic in the interests of the speed-hogs!)

North and South.

If you ask an Irishman where he comes from and he answers “Leitrim,” that will not convey very much to you—if you are a Leitrim man. For in this county there is all the difference in the world between North and South. Take a look at the map and you will agree that Leitrim is an irregular longitudinal strip hemmed in by five counties and divided into two almost equal parts by the broad expanse of Lough Allen, with only a narrow “bridge” of territory connecting the two portions.

Once you pass Lough Allen on the northward journey you immediately become aware of an extraordinary contrast. Gone are the quiet tones and the level lowlands, and you are now approaching a hillman’s country, stern and rugged, a country of mountainy lakes and glens, the natural home of a hardy fighting race. Speak to the people and the contrast is no less remarkable. Instead of the soft musical accent of the South, you hear voices that speak with a quick, sharp accent, slightly touched with a Northern “burr.”

You are now in Breffney, Breffney of the O’Rourkes, the dreaded “Brenny” of which the old English chroniclers wrote with wholesome awe, the last of all our strongholds to submit to the invader. In front of you is Dromahaire, a village with more historic associations than any of its size in Ireland.

It has long been claimed that Dromahaire is the prettiest village in the country. At any rate, if a prettier there be I have not seen it. Irish villages are seldom things of beauty, but here the little town seems to have captured some of the loveliness of its surroundings.

To the east lies Knocknarea, with its royal mound; to the north the purple heights of Benbulben, and, at its very feet, the enchanted waters of Lough Gill, “Lake of Brightness.” No wonder Bulfin, after he had discovered it in one of his rambles, wrote: “It must be awful for anyone born here to have to go away and never come back!”

But there is more here than mere scenic grandeur to stir the heart and capture the imagination. There is not a crag or a peak, a hillside or glen, which is not rich to overflowing with associations of our early history.

Here from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries the O’Rourkes held sway, a sway often disputed but never broken. Here stood their central stronghold, from the battlements of which the chieftain could look and see, carefully and strategically situated, his ring of half-a-dozen castles that guarded the Breffney country. Here came MacMurrough to steal the wife of an O’Rourke and to set alight a baleful fire which has not even now been quite extinguished.

There were other great names in Leitrim—the Maguires, the O’Reillys, the MacGaurans—but the great name of O’Rourke overshadows all.

Brian of the Ramparts.

“Brian of the Ramparts”! “Brian of the Battle-axes”! Isn’t there something in the very names that conjures up at once a vision of Irish gallantry and valour? “I found him the proudest man I ever met,” said Elizabeth’s Deputy, Sir Henry Sydney, speaking of Brian na Murtha, and the bearer of the name of Sydney was surely a good judge of pride. When betrayed by James of Scotland and put on trial in London for his crime of having given succour and hospitality to the shipwrecked sailors of the Spanish Armada, Brian refused to doff his hat to the English lordlings or to answer them in English. They had no Irish, he had very little English, so he addressed them—this barbarian chief—in Latin.

When his head rolled in the dust beneath Tyburn Tree his son, Brian Oge, was a student at Oxford. But now there was stern work to be done and Oxford knew him no more. His cousin and ally, Red Hugh, was advancing to join issue with Clifford, and at the Battle of the Curlews he gave Brian Oge his opportunity for revenge.

There the Breffney men, with their terrible battle-axes, struck the vital blow, and Clifford, dead amongst a thousand of his men, lay a silent witness of how complete that revenge had been.

After Kinsale.

In Breffney, too, the curtain was rung down on the final act of the tragedy of Kinsale when O’Sullivan Beare and the handful of survivors of the famous march from Berehaven entered the hospitable doors of Brian of the Battle-axes. One thousand strong they had set out, but every inch of the 300 mile march had to be fought, innumerable obstacles to be overcome, trackless mountains crossed and rivers forded in the heart of winter, so that only thirty-five remained to tell the tale around the fires in the halls of the O’Rourke.

Some day an Irish poet will arise and do justice to this epic story, or, perhaps, an inspired film producer will seize on an achievement beside which the treks of the early American pioneers pale into nothingness.

May the sod rest lightly on the ashes of Brian in the old abbey where the Franciscans laid him! He needs no better epitaph than the words of the Four Masters:

“He was a tower of battle in bravery and the guiding star of encounter and conflict; a valiant and defending man who did not allow Breffney to be endangered in his time; a man the most illustrious for justice, hospitality and noble deeds of any that lived of his tribe.”

Learning And Song.

But the story of Leitrim is not all a tale of war. From the very dawn of the Christian era it had its monastic institutions and its seats of learning, like Fenagh in the South and Creevelea, with its Cistercian Abbey, in the North. Patrick himself had built a church in the midst of the “music-loving hosts of fierce engagements,” and he left it in the care of his psalm-singer, Benen, who came of a bardic family.

It is fitting, then, that these wild Leitrim glens should be the last to lose the echoes of our native music and that in later times they should have had so many associations with O’Carolan and Arthur O’Neill, the blind harper, last of a great race. It is still a winter’s tale in Breffney how these musicians were honoured by all, gentle and simple, and their talk and their wanderings are the substance of many a local tradition. It was O’Neill who, when an Anglo-Irish nobleman watching him grope his way to the foot of the table remarked that an O’Neill should sit at the head, answered simply, “Wherever an O’Neill sits is head of the table!”

Then there was Jerome Duignan, of Drumshambo, who, in 1778, accepted a challenge from a Welsh harper to a contest held in the old Irish House of Commons in the presence of the full assembly, and who won the day with his rendering of O’Carolan’s air, “O’Rourke’s Feast” and Myles O’Reilly’s “Lamentation for Limerick”—an air which the Scots have stolen from us and have called “Lochaber no More.”

Nor is the music-loving tradition wholly lost. Leitrim competitors have largely helped to make the Sligo Feis as famous as it deservedly is, and the Carrick Choral Society has worked such miracles in the cause of good music that I am credibly informed that youngsters in the streets are to be heard whistling, not the latest jazz tunes, but snatches from “Rigioletto” and “The Barber of Seville”!

To-Day and To-Morrow.

What of Leitrim to-day? Alas, it has to be numbered amongst the most impoverished of our Irish counties. Until recently, its record of emigration was higher in proportion to its population than any other. Its countrysides are depopulated and I have had the melancholy experience of cycling through parts of it for six and seven miles without once hearing the sound of a human voice.

It contains only three towns of more than a thousand inhabitants. Native industries and handicrafts have almost died out, although there are those still alive who remember successful flax-growing, tanning and wool-weaving. Here and there a derelict mill on the bank of a river swings the mind back to more prosperous days. The mountainy slopes of Sliabh-an-Iarainn are criss-crossed with innumerable grey stone walls enclosing small uneconomic holdings of land that is far from fertile, whilst the occupiers look down with hungry eyes on the rich, green plains of Boyle, empty save for bullocks and sheep and the herdsmen’s huts.

But yet the Iron Mountain itself is one of Ireland’s greatest storehouses of mineral wealth. Fifty years ago it was estimated that the Arigna coal-bed was capable of producing 20,000,000 tons of coal and that the supply of iron-ore was almost inexhaustible. The process of tapping this great source of wealth as pursued up to the present would seem to a mere layman very like trying to empty Lough Neagh with a spoon. There may be, and probably are, difficulties of capital and transport to be surmounted, but here is a job which should surely be after a home government’s heart.

Until something is done in this direction, and prosperity returns to a stricken area, the little farmers on the Iron Mountain must continue to try and win a living among the stones and crags whilst the flocks and herds fatten on the green plain below.