In Wicklow and West Kerry | Page 4

editors of the Manchester Guardian
and the Shanachie for permission to reprint the articles which appeared
in their columns.

IN WICKLOW
The Vagrants of Wicklow

Some features of County Wicklow, such as the position of the principal
workhouses and holiday places on either side of the coach road from
Arklow to Bray, have made this district a favourite with the vagrants of
Ireland. A few of these people have been on the roads for generations;
but fairly often they seem to have merely drifted out from the ordinary
people of the villages, and do not differ greatly from the class they
come from. Their abundance has often been regretted; yet in one sense
it is an interesting sign, for wherever the labourer of a country has
preserved his vitality, and begets an occasional temperament of
distinction, a certain number of vagrants are to be looked for. In the
middle classes the gifted son of a family is always the poorest--usually
a writer or artist with no sense for speculation--and in a family of
peasants, where the average comfort is just over penury, the gifted son
sinks also, and is soon a tramp on the roadside.
In this life, however, there are many privileges. The tramp in Ireland is
little troubled by the laws, and lives in out-of-door conditions that keep
him in good-humour and fine bodily health. This is so apparent, in
Wicklow at least, that these men rarely seek for charity on any plea of
ill-health, but ask simply, when they beg: 'Would you help a poor
fellow along the road?' or, 'Would you give me the price of a night's
lodging, for I'm after walking a great way since the sun rose?'
The healthiness of this life, again, often causes people to live to a great
age, though it is not always easy to test the stories that are told of their
longevity. One man, however, who died not long ago, claimed to have
reached one hundred and two with a show of likelihood; for several old
people remember his first appearance in a certain district as a man of
middle age, about the year of the Famine, in 1847 or 1848. This man
could hardly be classed with ordinary tramps, for he was married
several times in different parts of the world, and reared children of
whom he seemed to have forgotten, in his old age, even the names and
sex. In his early life he spent thirty years at sea, where he sailed with
some one he spoke of afterwards as 'Il mio capitane,' visiting India and
Japan, and gaining odd words and intonations that gave colour to his
language. When he was too old to wander in the world, he learned all
the paths of Wicklow, and till the end of his life he could go the thirty
miles from Dublin to the Seven Churches without, as he said, 'putting

out his foot on a white road, or seeing any Christian but the hares and
moon.' When he was over ninety he married an old woman of
eighty-five. Before many days, however, they quarrelled so fiercely
that he beat her with his stick, and came out again on the roads. In a
few hours he was arrested at her complaint, and sentenced to a month
in Kuilmainham. He cared nothing for the plank-bed and
uncomfortable diet; but he always gathered himself together, and
cursed with extraordinary rage, as he told how they had cut off the
white hair which had grown down upon his shoulders. All his pride and
his half-conscious feeling for the dignity of his age seemed to have set
themselves on this long hair, which marked him out from the other
people of his district; and I have often heard him saying to himself, as
he sat beside me under a ditch: 'What use is an old man without his hair?
A man has only his bloom like the trees; and what use is an old man
without his white hair?'
Among the country people of the east of Ireland the tramps and tinkers
who wander round from the west have a curious reputation for witchery
and unnatural powers. 'There's great witchery in that country,' a man
said to me once, on the side of a mountain to the east of Aughavanna,
in Wicklow. 'There's great witchery in that country, and great
knowledge of the fairies. I've had men lodging with me out of the
west--men who would be walking the world looking for a bit of
money--and every one of them would be talking of the wonders below
in Connemara. I remember one time, a while after I was married, there
was a tinker down there in the glen, and two women along with him. I
brought him into my cottage to