Nor are these immense outlines the whole of what is to be seen in this
great range of mountains. Every glen has its beauties: there is a
considerable mountain river, or rather torrent, in every one of them; but
the greatest are the Funcheon, between Sefang and Galtymore; the
Limestone river, between Galtymore and Round Hill, and the Grouse river,
between Coolegarranroe and Mr. O'Callaghan's mountain; these present to
the eye, for a tract of about three miles, every variety that rock,
water, and mountain can give, thrown into all the fantastic forms which
art may attempt in ornamented grounds, but always fails in. Nothing can
exceed the beauty of the water, when not discoloured by rain; its lucid
transparency shows, at considerable depths, every pebble no bigger than a
pin, every rocky basin alive with trout and eels, that play and dash
among the rocks as if endowed with that native vigour which animates, in
a superior degree, every inhabitant of the mountains, from the bounding
red deer and the soaring eagle down even to the fishes of the brook.
Every five minutes you have a water-fall in these glens, which in any
other region would stop every traveller to admire it. Sometimes the vale
takes a gentle declivity, and presents to the eye at one stroke twenty or
thirty falls, which render the scenery all alive with motion; the rocks
are tossed about in the wildest confusion, and the torrent bursts by
turns from above, beneath, and under them; while the background is always
filled up with the mountains which stretch around.
In the western glen is the finest cascade in all the Galtees. There are
two falls, with a basin in the rock between, but from some points of view
they appear one: the rock over which the water tumbles is about sixty
feet high. A good line in which to view these objects is either to take
the Killarney and Mallow road to Mitchelstown and from thence by Lord
Kingsborough's new one to Skeheenrinky, there to take one of the glens to
Galtybeg and Galtymore, and return to Mitchelstown by the Wolf's Track,
Temple Hill, and the Waterfall; or, if the Cork road is travelling, to
make Dobbin's inn, at Ballyporeen, the head-quarters, and view them from
thence.
* * * * *
Having heard much of the beauties of a part of the Queen's County I had
not before seen, I took that line of country in my way on a journey to
Dublin.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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