The Letters of "Norah" on Her Tour Through IrelandNorah
History
The Letters of "Norah" on Her Tour Through Ireland
Norah
Ireland -- Description and travel
Of course we hear legend after legend of the threadbare tales of the
Lakes. We heard much of the cave of Dunloe which has many records, in
the Ogham character, of Ireland in the days of the Druids. All this time
we were driving along a road with bare mountains, and tree-covered
mountains rising on every hand. It reminded me in some places of the
long glen in Leitrim, in others of Canadian scenes among the mountains.
We began to be beset by mounted men on scrubby ponies. They gathered
round us, riding along as our escort, behind and before and alongside
urging on us the necessity of a pony to cross the road through the gap.
Their pertinacity was something wonderful.
The carman stopped at a miserable cabin said to have been the residence
of the Kate Kearney of Lady Morgan's song. That heroine's modern
representative expects everyone to take a dose of goat's milk in poteen
from her, and leave some gratuity in return. The whole population turned
out to beg under some pretext or another. One very handsome girl,
bareheaded and barefooted, and got up light and airy as to costume,
begged unblushingly without any excuse. She gathered up her light
drapery with one hand, and kept up with the horse, skelping along
through mud and mire as if she liked it. I noticed that she was set on
by her parents who were the occupiers of a little farm.
Suddenly our car stopped at a house where all sorts of lake curiosities
were exposed for sale. From this point it was four miles, Irish miles,
through the gap to the lake to the point where we took the boat. This
was one circumstance of which we were not aware when we started; it was
therefore a surprize. I am sorry to say that this gap was a
disappointment to me. It was a difficult path among bare mountains, but
nothing startling or uncommon.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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