Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 2: Great Britain and Ireland, Part 2
General
Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 2: Great Britain and Ireland, Part 2
Great Britain -- Description and travel; Ireland -- Description and travel
Our guard was a genuine Irishman, strongly resembling the late actor
Power in physiognomy, with the very brogue which Power sometimes gave to
his personages. He was a man of pithy speech, communicative, and
acquainted apparently with everybody of every class, whom we passed on
the road. Besides him we had for fellow-passengers three very
intelligent Irishmen, on their way to Dublin. One of them was a tall,
handsome gentleman, with dark hair and hazel eyes, and a rich
South-Irish brogue. He was fond of his joke, but next to him sat a
graver personage, in spectacles, equally tall, with fair hair and
light-blue eyes, speaking with a decided Scotch accent. By my side was a
square-built, fresh-colored personage, who had traveled in America, and
whose accent was almost English. I thought I could not be mistaken in
supposing them to be samples of the three different races by which
Ireland is peopled.
We now entered a fertile district, meadows heavy with grass, in which
the haymakers were at work, and fields of wheat and barley as fine as I
had ever seen.... One or two green mounds stood close to the road, and
we saw others at a distance.
"They are Danish forts," said the guard.
"Every thing we do not know the history of, we put upon the Danes,"
added the South of Ireland man.
These grassy mounds, which are from ten to twenty feet in height, are
now supposed to have been the burial places of the ancient Celts. The
peasantry can with difficulty be persuaded to open any of them, on
account of a prevalent superstition that it will bring bad luck.
A little before we arrived at Drogheda, I saw a tower to the right,
apparently a hundred feet in height, with a doorway at a great distance
from the ground, and a summit somewhat dilapidated.
"That is one of the round towers of Ireland, concerning which there is
so much discussion," said my English-looking fellow-traveler.
These round towers, as the Dublin antiquarians tell me, were probably
built by the early Christian missionaries from Italy, about the seventh
century, and were used as places of retreat and defense against
the pagans.
Not far from Drogheda, I saw at a distance a quiet-looking valley.
"That," said the English-looking passenger, "is the valley of the Boyne,
and in that spot was fought the famous battle of the Boyne."
"Which the Irish are fighting about yet, in America," added the South of
Ireland man.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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