In Wicklow and West Kerry | Page 7

Oppression of the Hills

AMONG the cottages that are scattered through the hills of County
Wicklow I have met with many people who show in a singular way the
influence of a particular locality. These people live for the most part
beside old roads and pathways where hardly one man passes in the day,
and look out all the year on unbroken barriers of heath. At every season
heavy rains fall for often a week at a time, till the thatch drips with
water stained to a dull chestnut, and the floor in the cottages seems to
be going back to the condition of the bogs near it. Then the clouds
break, and there is a night of terrific storm from the south-west--all the
larches that survive in these places are bowed and twisted towards the
point where the sun rises in June--when the winds come down through
the narrow glens with the congested whirl and roar of a torrent,
breaking at times for sudden moments of silence that keep up the
tension of the mind. At such times the people crouch all night over a
few sods of turf and the dogs howl, in the lanes.
When the sun rises there is a morning of almost supernatural radiance,
and even the oldest men and women come out into the air with the joy
of children who have recovered from a fever. In the evening it is
raining again. This peculiar climate, acting on a population that is
already lonely and dwindling, has caused or increased a tendency to
nervous depression among the people, and every degree of sadness,
from that of the man who is merely mournful to that of the man who
has spent half his life in the madhouse, is common among these hills.
Not long ago in a desolate glen in the south of the county I met two
policemen driving an ass-cart with a coffin on it, and a little further on I
stopped an old man and asked him what had happened.

'This night three weeks,' he said, 'there was a poor fellow below reaping
in the glen, and in the evening he had two glasses of whisky with some
other lads. Then some excitement took him, and he threw off his
clothes and ran away into the hills. There was great rain that night, and
I suppose the poor creature lost his way, and was the whole night
perishing in the rain and darkness. In the morning they found his naked
footmarks on some mud half a mile above the road, and again where
you go up by a big stone. Then there was nothing known of him till last
night, when they found his body on the mountain, and it near eaten by
the crows.'
Then he went on to tell me how different the country had been when he
was a young man.
'We had nothing to eat at that time,' he said, 'but milk and stirabout and
potatoes, and there was a fine constitution you wouldn't meet this day
at all. I remember when you'd see forty boys and girls below there on a
Sunday evening, playing ball and diverting themselves; but now all this
country is gone lonesome and bewildered, and there's no man knows
what ails it.'
There are so few girls left in these neighbourhoods that one does not
often meet with women that have grown up unmarried. I know one,
however, who has lived by herself for fifteen years in a tiny hovel near
a cross roads much frequented by tinkers and ordinary tramps. As she
has no one belonging to her, she spends a good deal of her time
wandering through the country, and I have met her in every direction,
often many miles from her own glen. 'I do be so afeard of the tramps,'
she said to me one evening. 'I live all alone, and what would I do at all
if one of them lads was to come near me? When my poor mother was
dying, "Now, Nanny," says she, "don't be living on here when I am
dead," says she; "it'd be too lonesome." And now I wouldn't wish to go
again' my mother, and she dead--dead or alive I wouldn't go again' my
mother--but I'm after doing all I can, and I can't get away by any
means.' As I was moving on she heard, or thought she heard, a sound of
distant thunder.
'Ah, your honour,' she said, 'do you think it's thunder we'll be having?
There's nothing I fear like the thunder. My heart isn't strong--I do feel
it--and I have a lightness in my head, and often when I do be excited
with the thunder I do be afeard I might die there alone in the cottage

and