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Christmas on The Galtees
by
William O'Brien
PREFACE
It has been thought well to re-publish the following letters, in a
connected shape. They are the fruit of a ten-days' visit to the estate of Mr.
Nathaniel Buckley, around the Galtee Mountains, undertaken at the wish of
the Proprietor of the Freeman's Journal. My instructions were, to see for
myself, to avoid heated or exaggerated language, and to tell the plain
truth - whatever it might be - without fear or favour. I have striven to
do exactly this, and no more. Three of the five letters were written from
notes taken on the spot, in the intervals of laborious journeys, from house to
house, through a difficult country. It has been judged proper to reprint
them just as they were written, "with all their imperfections, on their
heads." I approached the estate, prepared to find that there had been more
clamour than was just over the misery of the tenantry; I left it in
despair of ever being able adequately to put before the eyes of the public, for
their pity and indignation, the shameful scenes which passed under my own
eyes, in a time of peace, and in the name of law.
WILLIAM O'BRIEN
Dublin, March 6th, 1878
CHRISTMAS ON THE GALTEES
-----o-----
1.
Mitchelstown, Christmas Eve, 1877
MR. PATTEN SMITH BRIDGE told Lord Chief Justice May that the whole 517
tenants who populate the 22,000 acres of mountain and lowland under his
sway had already settled except 47, and he had reason to believe that they
would be "settled" when he went home. There was laughter in court at this. I do
not know whether it was intended for grim humour, but the settlement has
taken the form of a sheaf of processes of ejectment for the January
Sessions in Clonmel. Mr. Bridge has left the Galtees for the Christmas holidays,
and, however it may have been in the Castle, it must be owned that in the
cabins singled out for the process-server's visits, as well as in those which are
spared for another sessions, the season of Christmas peace and pleasure
has little meaning around the Galtees. The exact number of processes served I
have yet to cast up one by one as I visit the holdings, but it is certain
that a selection of the recalcitrants has been made, and that a large
section of those who did not, and declare they cannot, accept the
revaluation have been respited, for reasons quite beyond their own
comprehension. The question then comes to be once more of cruel
urgency -Is this whole wail over the Galtee tenancy a gigantic conspiracy against
truth, or is it the cry of honest industry driven to despair? Has public sympathy
been trifled with, or has it only been half aroused? Have we here a
cunning and secretive peasantry, with rags on their backs and gold in the thatch,
striving to shelter themselves by a parade of mendicancy and filth from
paying the honest value of their holdings? Or are they really a race of
humble toilers whose sweat and substance has wrung-alas! not even bread
but sustenance-from the barren bosom of mountains and fens; who have waged a
lifelong battle for existence against rocks and heather, against a subsoil
of sandy mud, against nature in her stubbornest and most grudging mood;
and who today find themselves face to face with strangers who have
appropriated and trafficked in their improvements and sentenced them to rents which
will, in due process of law, chase them from the fields they have created? Is
their case, in fact, a libel upon a good landlord and a conscientious
agent or is it a damming proof that under the aegis of the Land Act, Irish
tenants still owe it to the mercy of their masters that they are not stripped of
all that a life's industry has laid up for their declining days, and sent upon
the world with only the consolation of a legal viaticum? It will be the
business of these letters to make some small contribution of evidence upon
this bond, such as a person quite severed from the dispute, who uses his
eyes and ears cautiously, and frankly describes his experiences, may glean
from careful investigation on the spot. There is no disguising the
diligence with which I commence the task. I do not for a moment pretend to
review the revaluation further than the facts, when brought together may
affect it; and even an enquiry into the actual condition of a community
spread over a tract of wild hills some thirty miles around, where there
are so many diversities in the quality of soil and stock and habitations, and
so many exaggerations on both sides to be discounted, is beset with
difficulties, the more especially that - as will be seen in the sequel - Mr
Bridge's explanation of what I may see are denied me. The dread that any
inaccurate statement or incautious word of mine may be twisted to the
disadvantage of creatures whom I have seen bowed to the verge of despair,
weighs even more heavily that the consciousness that every sentence is
written under the sword of a capricious law. My plan is, however, a humble
one. It is to visit personally not only the doomed homesteads, but as
large a proportion as possible of all others lying in my track over the estate,
townland by townland; to describe the peasants' homes and mode of life; to
satisfy myself, as far as a layman may, of the nature and value of their
crops; to see their stock for myself, and see what quality of land is this
for which a few shillings an acre is a rack-rent. The facts thus collected
I shall first embody in as plain and succinct a narrative as may be.
Afterwards I shall state the impression left upon my own mind, leaving it
to the judgment of sober public opinion to say whether they shall have been
justified by dry facts.
Subject: Christmas on the Galtees 2
The townland of Skeheenarinka extends from the little village cross of
that name over the crest of a bare hump of mountain, rising to a height that
must be quite 2,000 feet above the sea level, considering that Galteemore,
which rises just behind, and does not greatly overtop it, is 3,012. Neither of
the peaks looks nearly so high from the level of the adjoining village. On the
southern slope, where the sun most rests, the face of the hill is scored
with great stone fences, marking out, terrace above terrace, the patches
of reclaimed land, until they merge in the untamable belt of heather, not a
stone's throw from the top. I saw it on Sunday at its best, when scarcely
a breeze stirred below and it was lighted by a sun of very unusual
brilliancy for the winter solstice; when, too, the houses and the people were in
their Sunday trim, and the cattle basking in unwonted warmth. My visit was made,
I need scarcely say, without the smallest previous notice. It will be
readily understood, also, that even if a perfect stranger could have treaded his
way alone through a maze of mountain borheen, he could not have penetrated for
a moment the suspicious reticence natural to people under the pressure of
heavy calamity, without the passport of a familiar face. I was happy
enough in this respect to have obtained the guidance of the Very Rev. Dr. Delany,
P.P. of Ballyporeen. His wide parish embraces most of the Buckley estates,
and his great heart all their misery. Many a time during the day, as he
struck a faint track across some remote glen, or greeted some astonished
mountaineer with a reminder that he had not been to Mass that day, his
cheery smile, his gentle reproof, his word of comfort, his complete
knowledge of everybody's little troubles, and the whole-souled confidence
with which his interest was repaid, recalled the best that I had over
heard or read of the relations of an Irish priest with his people. The dogs in
remote Highland cabins know him while they barked at me. "Will I tell him,
Doctor?" asked one old fellow whom I was questioning about his relations
with Mr. Bridge. And when the approval was smilingly given he who had been
taciturn as Jules Verne's Phileas Fogg grew as voluble as the small
dressmaker in "Little Dorrit."
As the foot of the mountain, where the path begins to be steep, we entered
a thatched cabin by the roadside, in front of which, as is usual with
cottiers of the more wretched class, a foul pit of liquid manure was smoking. A man
with his head between his hands was bent over the fire, and a few children
stuck in the chimney-corner. The man started to his feet with a guilty
look as the priest entered; he was tall and strong limbed, but had a cowed and
haggard face. "You weren't at Mass this morning, Mick." The man turned up
his broken shoes, which had not indeed troubled shoemaker nor shoeblack
for many a day; he had no coat, a flannel waistcoat, and a brown hat,
and his shirt was not clean, though it was Sunday. Let me say here that in at
least half-a-dozen other instances during the day we came across similar
truants with similar excuses; and I do not think it was home attractions
that kept those men in their noisome dens poring over the fire while the
sun was shining and their neighbours going to Mass. This was Michael Dwyer;
and he had one of the processes of ejectment behind the dresser. "It is the
only Christmas-Box we got yet, God help us," said an old man later in the day,
who had been similarly served. A pot was boiling on the fire. It contained
potatoes, the Sunday dinner for the family - ten of them all told. I took up
some of the potatoes lying in a heap in the corner; they were many of them
rotten, all of them wet and miserably small. Several of them I could
bruise into a pulp between my fingers. And these were grown on lowlands, in a
field that looked as rich as the best of its neighbours. Potatoes have been bad
everywhere this year; but these are not like any other potatoes I ever
saw, except those picked out as refuse for the pigs in more favoured spots. I
have not yet seen in Skeheenarinka a single potato as large as an orange.
The cabin forms but one chamber, in which the whole family of ten are
somehow accommodated by night. There are two bedsteads; what the other
arrangements are I dare not guess. This man's holding is measured at 4a. 1r., of which
the old rent was £1 2s 4d., and the new £1 15s. His own belief (which, of
course, goes for what it is worth) is that the four acres include large
patches which were taken from him to be attached to the schoolhouse. I
only mention it as one of the several cases in which the tenants profess
themselves satisfied that a new survey would show them to be charged (not,
of course, wilfully) with more land than they occupy. Dwyer states he
twice offered Mr. Bridge the increased rent in full and it would not be taken
unless he signed an agreement as tenant from year to year. He was employed
as a quarryman by Mr. Bridge up to the time of these troubles, and he
states that he was not only then disemployed, but, that another tenant
- John
Jackson - has refused to employ him alleging instructions which I cannot,
without more authority, give currency to. His whole tillage this year was
one acre of potatoes, and of these only six baskets were left on Sunday.
His whole stock is, in his own words, "one old cow that my wife bought for 25s."
I saw the old cow grazing in the best field in solitary majesty, and though
she was decidedly a bargain at the money, I doubt whether she would bring
double the price this moment in any market in Munster. Cheek by jowl with
this grassy field, lying flat beside it, separated by a fence, lay a tract
of virgin moor, covered with stunted heather, and interspaces of utterly
barren sand, with here and there a tuft of yellowish grass- a not inapt
picture, even in quite civilised latitudes, of what the land was, and what
the patient dint of industry has made it. This, then, being the sum of
Dwyer's ways and means, it only remained for him to show that he is £21
indebted to the bank to convince me that, assuming his figures to be correct, the
farm would not, as he himself put it, give a meal of yellow stirabout to
ten Christians, only that he ekes out his means by doing jobs as road
contractor.
A pair of horses well skilled in mountain climbing awaited us on the
borheen outside, for the owner of the post car had made a special clause the
previous day against trusting his vehicle into the byroads. For a couple of
hundred feet we ascended a rough but fairly passable mountain path, some
eight feed wide. Thence to the top it grew more and more contracted and
jagged, as if the mountain streams had in winter coursed down the centre,
and torn a channel for themselves, and very quickly the horses had to pick
their steps in single file. Our second visit was to the house of Patrick
Burke, about the level of Galtee Castle, which lay in its bodyguard of
woods to our left. Burke's old rent for a farm that he believes to be about 16
acres was £4 18s 7d; it has been raised to £8. There has been no movement
whatever towards a settlement since the trial; yet, to his amazement, no
process of ejectment has been served upon him. He was at Mass when we
called. His wife appeared as wretched as if the process had already come.
The cabin, poor as it was, had the earthen floor neatly swept and the
dresser of blue delft shining. A streak of green slime came down the wall,
where the rain trickled down and collected in a hole in the floor, out of
which it had to be bailed with a cup, "and if you scrubbed it three times
a day you could not keep the floor dry under you." The five members of the
family sleep in two beds in the bedroom, whose poverty she shrank from
exposing, but stated they had to put a sop of straw under their feet to
keep the floor dry. This class of accommodation, which may be taken as a
fair average of the mountain cabins, except that I saw only three others
in which the rain penetrated the dwelling house to any appreciable extent, is
what I have generally found in the cabins of the poorest sort of labourers
elsewhere, neither better nor worse; but the den in which three people are
huddled together in the adjoining cowhouse is an outrage upon
civilisation. I had to stoop on entering its crazy door, and as soon as I could make out
anything in the gloom (for it is neither lighted by window not ventilated
by chimney) I discovered that I stood up to my ankles in a fetid pool of
rainwater mixed with the droppings of cattle. Propped up on wattles in a
corner of this stifling den was a filthy bag of straw, littered with some
foul rages and a tattered coverlid; and here I was gravely, but with
manifest shame, assured that a man with his wife and daughter sleep
nightly, while the cow lies down in the sodden manure beside them. I met this
wretched wife (whose clothing by day was all but as scanty as by night)
coming down the mountain barefooted, as we were leaving. She was radiant
with thankfulness. She was after begging a mess of India meal from a
neighbour for the Sunday banquet of herself, her husband, and daughter,
and she had the stuff tenderly rolled up on her red cotton handkerchief. And
she thanked God more fervently, I am afraid, that most of us do for merry
Christmas dinners. But she had another cause of joy; she held out
triumphantly to the Rev. Dr. Delany an American letter she had just
received with an enclosure of £1 from her daughter in distant Newhaven,
Connecticut.
But to return to her landlady, Mrs Burke, who was herself without a dress,
and only wore torn blue flannel petticoats. Her own blanket is pledged for
7s. "When we were married, the poor man's coat was in pawn, and I had to
pledge one of my own dresses that I got in service to release it for the
wedding; but sure it went again, and we never saw the sight of it since.
He got a present of a coat six years ago from a neighbouring man, and there
it is to this day. And as God is my judge," she cried, vehemently, "I never
saw that man drunk" I went out upon the farm and saw it dug in several places.
It really looked one of the best holdings on the mountain at that
elevation. Yet even in the lowest parts there was a tract of wet rea, and the upper
border was still thick with stones and heath. Two large fields were red
with potatoes, and I counted six pits. One of the fields, said Mrs. Burke, was
sub-let as a garden for a £1 a year. In his affidavit her husband swore he
would not get £3 for the grazing of his whole farm. I drove the spade some
eight inches into the upper potato field; after two efforts I brought up
about four inches of dark soil, beneath which there was a miserable
compost of wet sand, perfectly incapable of secreting the moisture that trickles
down eternally from the heights. At another trial I broke-spade not
ground.
The upper part of this field was still dotted with boulders and scrubby
patches returning to, or never wholly recovered from, wilderness and this
season's crop of stones (the only bounteous crop on Skeheenarinka) lay
thick around. They never since the famine years had enough potatoes to carry
them through the year, said Mrs Burke, and she would be been proud if they hold
during the winter this season. They sowed five barrels of oats, for the seed
of which they paid £4 10s; upon this and other crops they put two bags of
superphosphate at 21s. the bag. They paid 7s. a day with diet for
ploughing and harrowing (for only two farmers on the mountain who I met had either a
horse or a plough); they paid a half sovereign for mowing. And she showed
me the note from Mr "Sam Burke, of Cahir, to whom her husband sold all but
five barrels of the oats for £6 1s. 6d.. Three small cocks of oaten straw,
however remain, as cattle food. They tried quarter of an acre of turnips;
"We could not get a mess for the cow out of them," was Mrs. Burke's
summary of the result. The stock transactions are more extraordinary
still. There is a cow, a heifer, and a goat. Her husband bought a cow on 23rd May
for £13 10s on credit, and he had to sell her again for £8 when his
creditors clamoured for payment. The present cow was bought in
Mitchelstown on the 10th January, two years ago, for £9 17s. 6d. of which £4 is still
due. All this is, of course, mere exparte statement, as is the assertion
that a debt of £60 is handing over their cabin, that "they were always
living on credit, but there is no credit to be had now since this man came
down on us." Bills in the bank and private bills were shown me, but
perhaps
it is of somewhat more importance that when I questioned the husband some
hours later, in a distant part of the townland, his answers tallied almost
exactly with his wife's save that he mentioned two sheep where she had
only mentioned one. Burke brought forward at the same time a man who said he
had been his security for the price of one of the cattle, and said he had to
give the cows bran every day of the year, or they would run dry. When
questioned as to the cost of the bran, he said he did not know how much a
cwt. It was, as he got it "on time" but he made a very questionable
statement that his cattle used ½ cwt. Per week--say 3s 6d. worth. "How
much money have you in bank now:" "God help me, I have plenty of it to pay
them!" was the immediate response. One word more of Mrs. Burke. I spoke of
Christmas. She pointed to a neck of mutton, about 3lb of it, that hung
over the fireplace. This was to be the Christmas dinner of the family. "tis
only a pig's heart or a bone of pork that we could get cheap for a festival."
At the other side of the borheen lives one of the "settled" tenants the
most wretched I had met yet. This is the woman, Johanna Fitzgerald, whose
husband has gone to England as a labourer to earn bread for her four children.
Mrs. Fitzgerald has not been seen at chapel that morning, but her bare feet and
course petticoat made a pretty eloquent apology. The children, who played
about the door, had clean faces and clean rags, and the earthen floor was
newly swept. A mess of Indian meal was in the pot for dinner. The family,
of course, slept in one room; and a man and wife, who are lodged in
consideration of help on the farm, stretched by night on the floor inside
the doorway. Except a few blue plates, the dresser was only stocked with
marmalade pots, whose contents were never emptied on the Galtees. Mrs.
Fitzgerald said she had not heard from his husband these five weeks, and a
shilling was all the money she had in the world. Her rent was raised from
£2
10s. 4d. to £4 4s. Her stock of potatoes was out this month past, "except
a
handful of seed," and from this to August yellow stirabout must be bought
on credit. Her other tillage was half an acre of oats, which cost her £1 for
seed, 7s. for labour, and 10s. for a cwt. Of superphosphate (which she had
not paid for yet). The whole crop was sold to James Fitzgerald, a
neighbour, for £2, straw and all. Two geese and some hens made a total of her live
stock. It was pitiful to see the open mouthed surprise with which a woman,
supposed to be the mistress of some twenty acres, gloated over the couple
of pieces of small silver given to the children, the eagerness with which she
pounced upon them, and the extravagant thanks with which she repaid them.
Christmas on the Galtees 3
An ascent of ten minutes more brought us to a point at which we had to
dismount and toil across a rocky track, while the horses were led by an
easier path higher up the mountain. We were upon the farm of Darby
Mahony, and our way lay across a stony field upon which the process of
reclamation had commenced. Long rows of tough scraws, delved out of the heather, lay
with the heath turned downwards for burning the best side uppermost.
Anything like soil was not three inches deep; patches of verdure,
however, appeared elsewhere in the field. Great heaps of sandstone were collected
in the centre, which had been dug out with crowbars, and were waiting to be
smashed with a sledge-hammer previous to being either piled on the
fences, or the biggest of them buried underground. All the fences on this part
of the mountain are built stouter than Roscommon stonewalls, with the
boulders dug out of the fields. "Sure we would not mind," said Darby Mahony, "if
they let us alone; but we have no sort of spirit to root a stone or put
on a bit of thatch owing to this man always promising to turn us out." His
son is a powerfully-build young man- a patient and hard-working drudge, I can
easily believe - but dulled and broken-spirited as I have seen few young
men at his age. Mahony has been served with a process of ejectment. His
rent was raised from £2 to £4 and he says, "If I was obliged to go into the
poorhouse I could not pay it." So strongly persuaded is he that the
measurement of 16a. 1r. 27p. is double the extent of his actual holding
that, according to his own statement, he waited on Mr. Bridge twice with
an offer to pay the expense of a survey himself if he should turn out to be
wrong, Mr. Bridge paying the expense in the other event; the answer was
that no credit would be allowed for a survey, and none was made. The bulk of
his farm is semi-reclaimed pasture, but the rest melts into the unbroken mass
of rock and heather which crowns the mountain. "What's there is but little"
said the tenant, "but whatever is there, we made it." "I am old enough
to recollect," said another old fellow, who had been to the metropolis,
during the late trial, "when you might as well graze a cow down the middle of
Sackville street as turn her loose on that mountain." Mahony tilled altogether two
acres this season, so his statement runs. He paid £1 for seed oats for
half an acre, and 7s. for the plough. Yet he never threshed the grain, and a
swathe which he pulled out of the stack showed the ears had never filled,
while the straw was scarcely a foot long at its best. His livestock is
made up of two cows and a stripper, two yearlings, a donkey, a sow with eleven
bonnives, and one sheep "nearly as old as himself." I saw this gaunt and
ragged bell-wether toddling among the stones, and making the usual
allowance for exaggerated language, it was a miserable mountaineer. Mahony says he
gets but 2-1/2lb. of wool off her yearly, and that these are expended in
knitting stockings. The cattle are average mountain cattle, and an
affidavit made by Mahony's son states that a firkin and a half of butter
per dairy cow is their utmost produce with constant hand-feeding. The Cabin
and its appointments are of the average poverty and cleanliness. The out
office is tottering and covered with rotten thatch, through which the green
trail of the water runs down the walls-a cosy shelter for dairy cattle during
the week or fortnight yearly when the farm is snowed up. The Rev. Dr. Delany
rallied the old fellow on a congenial topic when he pointed to the
distant Commeragh Mountains, and said, "Darby, the O'Mahony's were not always on
the top of Skeheenarinka." But proud as the little old man is of his sept
and its glories, he was not be roused; he shook his head heedlessly, and
pulled out a notice of a bill in the bank for £6, to be met the next day,
while he had not half the amount. He made me out in Mitchelstown today
to show that he had discharged the debt by borrowing the money from a
neighbour.
A horse, he asserted, would not draw more than 4 cwt. to the
height of his farm, and the horse would cost 4s a day.
Michael Regan's is the adjoining farm, verging on the top, in character
almost exactly the same, and in extend about 47 acres, as he himself
roughly estimates it; 74a 2r. 35p. statute measure, according to the figure in
the valuation. He also has been served with an ejectment. His rent was
raised from £5 9s 6d to £15 16 6d. He was out when we called, and although he
came into Mitchelstown to-day to proffer me his statement, inasmuch as his
evidence was extracted, no doubt fully, at the trial, I do not care to
return to it, further than to say he swore that he had ten children;
that his father and himself built the house and reclaimed the land; and, that
his stock consisted of six mountain cows, six yearlings, three calves, a
horse, ten sheep, two pigs, and nine bonnives. Close by lives the Widow
English, whose rent was raised from 19s to £2 1s, and who, although she
has
accepted the new tariff from the beginning, in as poorly housed, and as earnest as
any of her neighbours in declaring that the farm would not give them
stirabout only that two of her sons have been taken into the employment
of Mr. Bridge. One of her sons fills poor Hyland's place as coachman at a
wage of 10s a week, without diet or other perquisites than clothes, and his
brother is a labourer on the same terms. The next cabin on our way was
that of another of the arranging tenants, Edmund Fitzgerald, who accepted an
increase from £1 7s. 6d. to £2 17s. 6d. Not a soul was within except
four pretty children, the eldest of whom was not six years old. Three of the
little creatures were stowed into a high wooden cradle, in which they
were rocking themselves joyously at some distance from the fire, while the
eldest, with the aid of a big dog, was gravely mounting guard over the
tiny trio in the cradle. The place was scrupulously clean. There were even
touches of a rude elegance her and there. The bedroom had been roughly
boarded in the good old times, though the timber was in many spots
displaced, or rotting of age and damp. The bed furniture, though poor
was clean. A half-pint champagne bottle, transformed into a medicine bottle,
was on the shelf. Imagine the adventures of that bottle from the moment
it was primed with glowing liquor in some sunny vineyard of the Vonges until
fate made it a receptacle of castor oil in a thatched cabin on
Skeheenarinka. There was a little fireplace also in this bedroom, and on
the mantelpiece two plaster-of-paris statuettes of the Blessed Virgin,
the solitary representatives of the fine arts that have yet crossed my view.
Yet the young mistress of the house, whom we met in the borheen, a tidily
dressed, fair-faced, though care-worn housewife, looked and spoke as
despondingly as if her fate, too, were to be decided at the Clonmel
sessions.
We were now able to resume the saddle for a ride through a narrow and
broken causeway, bordered by a deep channel, around the shoulder of the
mountain, where the sight of the cultivated plains disappeared, and we were gazing
into the gloomy and forbidding chasms that opened between Lyreen and the
bold front of Galteemore - places where the gamekeeper and a stray
sportsman staying at the Mountain Lodge along penetrate. Here I came across a
farmer with the only good frieze coat I saw on the mountain. This was Patrick
Slattery, who's farm in parts looks warmer, and is, at all events, better
cultivated than his neighbours. He has accepted the increased valuation,
and says he can pay it but badly. For forty-one years all his labour and
capital have gone into the land, and to use his own words "it was a
fright to look at when I came there." His next neighbour, Patrick Carroll, who
came up in flannel jacket and shabby hat, while we were speaking, made a
sad contrast; "He is the most industrious creature on the mountain," said
Slattery. Carroll's holding is one of the highest and his soil is most
thankless. The heather makes constant inroads upon his pasture lands,
and I saw one field of which he had himself built up a thick and almost
continuous wall of large stones five feet high. His rent has been raised from £3
8s. to £8 7s. 6d. He has not settled, and says he cannot; but no process of
ejectment has yet been served. He spoke in a tone of unspeakable
wretchedness of his outlook. His oats this season cost him 16s. a barrel
for five barrels of seed, upon credit; he paid 7s a day for the
ploughing, with oats for the horse, and bread, butter, and tea for ploughman (for in
those regions the ploughman is a superior being); yet he never threshed
the crop.
The potatoes, upon which he spent £4 in manure, will last him
three months more "yellow meal from that to August, and where will I get the
price of it?" His fields are grazed by three milking cows, a heifer and two
calves - nothing more. His dairy transactions for the year were
these: three firkins of utter (three quarters), two of which he sold in Mitchelstown
for £3 a piece and the third, which he sent to Cork, returned him but £2 14s
profit.
Striking a faint and boggy track across the heather, we passed sheer over
the summit of the mountain, turning our back upon that dismal congeries
of glens and precipices known in old topography by the cruelly ironic name
of Paradise, and descending by a new system of dry watercourses upon the
townland of Coolagarranroe. The portion of it over which we had time to
range before darkness descended covers the face of a sister ridge to that
of Skeheenarinka, sloping upwards, with somewhat better-sheltered pasture
lands, to a point at which its crest rises precipitously like a wall of
rock. The cattle here bore marks of better feeding, but the oats and
potato crops were, if anything, more blighted. Michael Noonan is one of those
who has bowed under the valuation. His rent was raised from £2 14s. to £5
14s, and he has undertaken to pay it-"Though, God knows, I might as well pay
for my own coffin." I spoke with his sick wife as she stood at the door of
her miserable cabin, which is sunk in a crevice of the hill, with rain marks
coursing down the walls within, and the usual slough of rotting
abominations steaming in front. She spoke of her affairs in a mood of settled
despondency, as of a fate which it were hopeless to expect to better.
Her husband has strippers and two calves. "We did not get two firkins of
butter out of three of them, and we have not a supper of potatoes in the house.
Every meal we eat from this out will be on credit, and nobody gives us
credit now that can help it." The tottering little cowhouse is her
dairy. "We would not make the bit of butter at all only the Doctor, when he said
Mass here, brought us luck; but sure what is the use of it all?" Her
husband we met crossing the fields shortly after, and he pointed out in
the middle of his pastures a wall of stones -some of them seemingly half a ton
in weight-which had been rolled down from the higher ground after being
rooted out by his own hands.
Subject: Christmas on the Galtees 4
Thomas Kearney's farm of 105a 0r 35p upon which the rent has been raised
from £5 12s 6d to £17 10s, lies close by, part of it smothered with heath,
part laid down in scanty but fairly sweet grass, and 16 acres of light,
cold soil on an exposed slope, with a subsoil of sand and marl reddened for
tillage. Kearney has been served with an ejectment. I saw his seven
cows. "I wish I took them up to Dublin to give evidence in place of myself,"
Kearney remarked as he pointed to his gaunt and shrunken stock. They were
really poor mountain cattle. He states that he made six firkins of butter
this season, which fetched £3 5s. to buy hay and hand-food them from the
1st of November to the 15th of May or they would die in the cold." The rest
of his stock comprises 12 sheep, 6 heifers and 2 sows-those which he told the
Dublin jury would frighten them to look at. Upon cross examination in
Dublin he admitted that he made up a fortune of £80 for his daughter, and
paid £38 for the interest of part of his holdings. Yet this lord of a
hundred acres was dressed in flannel, and his family of ten souls were
after a dinner of Indiameal, and will be so regaled for nine months to come.
His potatoes are gone and his oats were never threshed. Terence Murphy,
senior is another of those under process of ejectment. He holds 14a 1r 14p
statute measure, and Poor-law valuation of which is £3 10s, the old rent £3 15s,
and the new demand £7 7s. His farming operations have been these-An acre of
potatoes cost him £4 8s for seed to James Neill; £1 paid for ploughing;
and £5 10s for 11cwt. of special manure, still unpaid for. He will have
potatoes for six weeks to come, and the rest must be reserved for seed.
He put down two barrels of seed oats, which the neighbours sowed gratis in
return for like little services done by him; and never threshed a grain
of it. His live stock is made up of three dairy cows and three goats
- neither
sheep, nor lamb, not donkey. His butter is sold in lumps. His family
circle numbers seven, and counts absent ones in America and Australia.
Maurice Gorman has a lease of 116 acres. He is tenant from year to year
of another holding of 29a 1r 21p and from this he is under notice of
ejectment. Gorman appears to be one of the strong farmers of the mountain-one who was
not likely, therefore, to let any plot of land slip through his fingers
for the sake of two guineas a year, if any profit were to be had by keeping
it. The holding now in question is perched highest upon the Galtee range and
is grazed only by cows. It has not been broken for twelve years, and is fast
sinking back into barrenness. The man whom Gorman succeeded in possession
made his living by cutting turf and selling heath for litter. The rent
used to be £2 2s, and was fixed by Mr. Walker at £4 4s.
The short day was already near its death when we recrossed to
Skeheenarinka. Our passage lay across a steep and rocky gorge between whose jagged sides
tumbles down a mountain stream which might easily enough become a torrent.
This is the precipice to the brink of which Denis Murphy invited the Lord
"Chief Justice, with the promise of a "Niagara Megrim," and in sober
earnest a few days after the trial a neighbouring tenant named Thomas Leonard was
precipitated down the gorge, and lies abed to this day with his injuries.
I did not experience any American variety of dizziness in the passage, but I
would have thought twice of clambering up the opposite height, without a
safe guide or in wet weather. We had only daylight for two visits more. One
was to the house of William Neill, who has been under notice to quite, but has
for the moment been spared process of eviction. Another cleanly little
peasant home is this, and another half-dozen dejected people inhabit it.
Neill has a horse, which according to his own assertion, must be fed on
kindlier soil than his. The story of his tillage experiments is the same
tale of blight and loss that was dinned into my ears in every cabin on the
mountain. He has a milch cow and three heifers. He offered the cow at
the last fair of Ballyporeen for £2, and nobody closed with him.
Maurice Fitzgerald is under process of ejectment. He holds 15 statute acres, the
old rent of which was £1 18s 6d, and the new demand £6 10s. He offered Mr
Bridge £4 in vain. His crop of oats was sown under the double advantage
of having the seed himself and having the ploughing done by his neighbours;
yet, he exhibited the note from Mr. Burke of Cahir, for £1 18s 6d, for the
crop, less about 10 stone reserved for himself. He has to pay Lord
Lismore for the grazing of his six sheep and six lambs. The dairy stock comprises
three milch cows, with a heifer in calf. The produce last season was four
firkins of butter, to make up the fourth of which Mrs. Fitzgerald had to
purchase 15 lbs. Two of these fetched £3 9s and the two others sold in
Cork, yielded a united profit of £5 12s 6d.
Thus far a first excursion around Skeheenarinka. Great portion of it has yet to be traversed before
turning to the five or six other townlands embracing the estate.
I thought it my duty to repair to-day to the Mountain Lodge to lay before
Mr. Bridge, if he should be so minded, a frank statement of what I had heard
and seen and to receive with scrupulous respect whatever denial or correction
he should have wished to see placed side by side with evidence inevitably
tinged with one sidedness. Owing to his departure to Roscrea for the
Christmas holidays this intention has been frustrated, and these sheets
must go forth, without possible explanations which, I know, you will readily
give Mr. Bridge an opportunity most fully of making. The Mountain Lodge
[Galty Castle] is
picturesquely seated on a sunny southern slop overlooking a richly wooded
gorge, through which the meandering course of the Funcheon marks the
division between Limerick and Tipperary - opening on one side over the
far-reaching plains bounded by the Knockmealdown Mountains, and upon the
other side into the gloomy heart of the Galtees. It is approached by a
long bye-road outside the village of Kilbeheny.
At the base of the mountain lies the model farm of the estate-that of Mr Holywell, the only English tenant,
I believe, on the property, and manifestly the most skilled agriculturist.
But, then, his fields are the fat of the lowlands, and were thoroughly
drained at the expense of the Land Company before Mr. Holywell set foot
there. His farmhouse is a little mansion, fronted by a well timbered
lawn, and backed by extensive slated stables, barns and out offices. His cattle
and his tillage are of a totally different order from any other I have
seen upon the estate. Both are excellent and do him infinite credit. Higher
up there are large nurseries of young firs, larches, and beech-trees, with
which Mr. Bridge carries on an extensive system of plantations on the
mountain sides. His own avenue is thrown open to the many, for whom it is
a short cut into the glens. The way is bordered on each side by dense
clumps
of rhododenrons, whose flowers in hundreds and thousands make this, I am
told, in summer another Pass of Roses. The avenue winds steeply up until
a bend brings one in full view of the Lodge in its eyrie on the Tipperary
side of the river. It is, in winter, a lonesome looking place, but the
elements
of theatric scenery lie all around, and the woods are richly stocked with
pheasants, hares, woodcocks and the numerous herds of wild deer that
infest the heights of the Galtees. The Lodge is a plain sandstone two story
building with a short foolscap tower, on a little gravelled plateau. The
iron hut in which Mr. Bridge's bodyguard of Constabulary, under command of
Constable Carraher are housed, is pitched in the yard to the rear between
the Lodge and the woods, which stretch over the mountain towards
Tipperary. It is a long, squat iron-proof compartment in which three of the men have
their hammocks swung. Their meals are cooked in a wooden hut facing it,
and their comrades sleep in an adjoining stable. As I rapped at the hall door
of the Lodge an affectionate little beagle rushed up to be fondled. The
servant from whom I enquired whether I could see Mr. Bridge, informed me
that he had left for Roscrea, two days before, and would not be back before
Monday next. To the suggestion that I might leave my card to say who
called, I replied that it was not necessary. As I jumped on the car the
head bailiff O'Loghlen, sprang out of the house, bareheaded and somewhat
flurried, and commenced to gyrate around me in a very amusing way. I
found it necessary to inquire whether there was anything I could do for him.
Very sheepishly he replied, "I thought, you wanted to see Mr. Bridge, sire."
Well?" Mr. Bridge, is from home, sir," Well?" "He stopped for a moment
hesitatingly. I think, sir, it would be well if you left your name, to let him
know who called?" "I don't" Mr. O'Loghlen moved backwards and the car
forwards. It had not gone far down the avenue when the coachman was at
our heels on horseback, and I hear that my visit to Mountain Lodge is
exercising the curiousity of some of the authorities there mightily those leisure
times.
Christmas on the Galtees 5
Mitchelstown, Christmas Day
Two things have forced into notice at every step of my progress
through the Buckley estates. One is that I have not heard from high or low in
town or country, from tenants or dependants, a single good word for Mr.
Bridge, not a single violent one against him. The other is that the tenants who
have "settled" - at least the great majority of those whom I have spoken
with - are even more crushed in hope and spirit than those over whom
eviction is impending. They do not cloak their passionate interest in the stand
made by their sturdier brethren. They speak of themselves in tones of misery
and shame. They hail the Rev. Dr Delany with welcomes and part with him with
prayers because they think (and think truly) that he has not yet
abandoned hope. They reiterate in many a variation upon the same
woeful plaint,
that they have bowed under a rent which will crush them. Their apology, put
in plain terms is that, in order to keep the roofs over them for the
present, they have bandaged their eyes to the future. In reference to Mr. Bridge,
again, strangers who have been horrified with blood-stained pictures of
tenantry, might have looked for vengeful fury of language on the part of
some, and tenderness, or at least cautious on the part of semi-dependants
with whom he is presumed to be in peace. The converse is my experience.
Not even the language of outrage from men doomed to ejectment, and words
of wringing bitterness from those whom prudence ought to have silenced. The
strongest term of vituperation I have heard used, even in heat, by the
men under notice was "That man," with a significant nod towards Galtee
Castle, and the best wish, that his shadow had never fallen across the estate.
If there is anything more curious than the utter inoffensiveness and
peaceable longings of the tenantry it is the eagerness with which they look for
redress to the newly-discovered powers of law and public opinion -rare visitors
hitherto to those sequestered glens. The names of their counsel and
champions are constantly on their lips with blessings. They have got dim
revelations that courts and newspapers are made for mountaineers as well
as citizens. Their visit to the capital has given them other material for
fireside talk than how Din Murphy got the better of the Serjeant on the
"cross" or how Shawn Shaughnessy's body-coat was the wonder of Sackville
street. I have generally lighted on them in their cabins in one of two
moods - listless dejection or picturesque vehemence; and in either phase
there is a resistless fascination in their sorrow, emphasized as it is in so
many cases by worn cheeks and hungry eyes, by bare walls and barren heaths.
I went to Mitchelstown workhouse to-day to see the paupers eat their
Christmas dinner. The prospects I had seen from the festive season at
Skeheenrinka excited a curiousity to learn how much worse off an idle
pauper could be than a farmer who has spent all his days creating soil upon the
breast of a mountain. Now, the Mitchelstown Guardians do not feast their
charge with roast beef and plum-pudding and currant cake and tea, nor are
the rooms wreathed with holly, not do kind ladies distribute toys and
sweet bread and coffee, and a solid dinner of one pound of prime boiled beef
and vegetables, with an inexhaustible cauldron of appetising soup. I saw the
old people attack their trenchers, and right heartily demolish their
contents. They were cleanly and warmly clad and shod. I saw parties of
infirm men and women lolling before bright fires in their dayrooms, or
basking in the sun in the exercise yards. I passed through the pure
white dormitories, with floors scrupulously scrubbed and windows half opened to
admit the bracing air from the hills. The mattresses of clean straw
were in the infirmary ward, extended on wooden stretchers, and in the
able-bodied department upon a raised flooring at wide intervals. The bedding was two
pairs of woolen blankets, a pair of sheets, a warm rug and a pillow. I
passed through the children's quarters, where about a hundred
healthy-looking little children are neatly clothed, and fed, and educated, and, I was
glad to hear, admitted almost daily to breathe the air of the free fields. I
saw old, bedridden people, whom the order of the doctor might elevate to a
diet of wine or porter, beefsteak or arrowroot. It was not very splendid as a
prospect in life; but, there were no dripping walls, no scanty clothes,
no clamorous creditors, no hungry stomachs, though these people toiled not,
neither did they spin.
I am not going to say that Christmas on the Galtees was gloomier than in the workhouse. In many homes on the estate, I have
no doubt, there were whatever Christmas comforts humble means could buy. In the very poorest, as far as I know, by whatever pinch or device, some
scrap of meat was foraged out in honour of the first of festivals. The custom
that it should be has the spell of a superstition. But I mean to say
the dryness, and cleanliness, and warmth, the indolence and fare, of the
workhouse would have been luxury; if transferred to two dozen of the
cottier homes of Skeheenarinka, where men have delved all their lifetime for
bread with twice the industry that would have cleared a settlement in the
American backwood. Not a sprig of holly was to be seen in any house I visited. I
looked up once towards where, in the obscurity, I thought I saw a flitch
of bacon hanging up opposite the chimney corner, as I had seen in happier
spots; it was a horse collar. Sweetmeats would be like sending one
ruffles who wanted a shirt. It would be almost a levity to speak of the ordinary
Christmas adjuncts of merry-making. A meal of bread and tea and pork was
the average Christmas banquet. In one house there were 6lb of pork among
ten; in another 3lb of mutton among five. A goose or a bit of bacon was
the mark of superior station. As I drove past the base of the hill after
nightfall, when no cheerful twinkle lighted the cabin windows, and when a
snowstorm breaking over the Galtees overspread it like a shroud, there
seemed to be few spots in Christendom that had less business with a happy
Christmas.
Subject: Christmas on the Galtees 6
St Stephen's Day, Dec 26th
I made the mistake of supposing at first sight that up to a certain
elevation the whole surface of Skeheenarinka Mountain was reduced to
something like civilised cultivation. It seemed as if, in following the
beaten paths which wind about the sides of the mountain and over its brow,
I had seen the worst soil, the worst houses, and the most wretched people to
be found even on the Galtees. I devoted to-day to visiting almost every
homestead on the southern face of the mountain, penetrating thence across
the glens to the recesses of Carrigeen and Knocknagalty. My head almost
swims with the tales of misery, poverty, squalor, and despair poured into
my ears from fifty different sources, and told quite as bitterly by what I
have seen as what I have heard. The southern slope I found to be scarred with
huge tracts of incorrigible morass as well within 500 feet of the bottom
as of the top. The cabins with decaying thatch degenerated here and there
into hovels swarming with hungry-looking children. The fields were grazed
rarely by dwarf cattle shivering on the sheltered side of great stone fences.
The crops were abortive potatoes and short oaten straw. I met only one farmer
during the day who had threshed his oats for sale. On Sunday the influence
of a brilliant sun had softened the most forbidding nights. To-day there
were still spaces of sunshine, but the whole Galtee range was crowned with
snow, and the mountain's breast was swept from time to time by gusts of
icy rain and snow, which drove cold to one's marrow. Once more I had the Very
Rev. Dr Delany's escort, and once more I had reason to thank him for
unlocking to me the ready confidence of every peasant who crossed us.
At 11 o'clock we were leaving the main bridle road at a slight elevation
for a borheen piercing to the middle of the mountain. The first house we
passed was that of the widow of John Hyland, the poor coachman assassinated
at Garrylee. Mrs Hyland obtained £700 compensation for the loss of her
husband; also in the last few months found a new partner in her sorrows.
The adjoining farm is that of Thomas Hyland, the father of the murdered
man. The old man's farm is measured at 19a 0r 33p; but so persuaded is he that
it does not exceed 11 that he demanded a survey, and it was refused. His
rent was raised from £4 16s 3d to £7. He yielded after two years' resistance,
and was obliged by Mr. Bridge, thereupon, to pay the difference between the
old and the new rents for a year and a half, which had been in arrear
since Mr. Walker's valuation. Hyland's land is in portions as good as any on the
mountain, and his farm buildings are really farm buildings, though humble
ones. He has a family of six. One of his sons, James some nine months
after the murder of his brother, was summoned at the prosecution of Mr.
Bridge for gathering a load of heath off the mountain, and suffered seven
days' hard labour in Clonmel. The lad admits, however, that although he
had permission from the gamekeeper to cut heath away in a poorer plot, he did
not take it in the place indicated, and I am disposed to think the
gamekeeper was not far wrong in accusing the young fellow of threatening
that he would take it "in spite of Bridge or bailiff." Close by, lies a
wretched patch of tillage, surrounded by a couple of acres of
irreclaimable "rea" [scrub land]. Edmund Coghlan paid 3s a year as sub-tenant of this
to a farmer named Michael Cull. Under the revaluation his holding was made a
separate one, and charged with £1 a year. Coghlan's son is in the
employment of the gamekeeper. His family numbers eight souls. He
accepted the terms of the valuation - "But sure my property would not support us
three months in the year, only I earn my board myself as a thatcher and
labouring through the country".
We emerged now upon an expanse of savage heath, broken by pools of water,
and browsed by a few goats. In the corner of this wilderness it raised
the heap of jagged stones and rotten thatch which answers Laurence Cranitch
and his eight children for a home. Mr. D J Reardon, at the trial, described the
place as unfit for the habitation of a beast, and the bed as a handful of
rags. Mrs Cranitch's housewife's pride has been stung by the description,
as she somewhat tartly explained to-day, and I fancy that in her case, as
in many others, the evidence given at the trial as to the prevalence of filth
in hovels of the more wretched sort has worked a reformation, for she had
the place as tidy as was consistent with a damp floor, slimy walls, and
worthless furniture. But I noticed that the bedroom was not open to view;
her husband, she said (who is in Mr. Bridge's employment), had taken the
key in his pocket. Poor creature! "Tis easy for them to talk of fine houses,"
says she, bitterly, "when I have to borrow the boots to go to Mass;" and
she pointed to her own ragged pair of brogues. Upon a space of some eight
Irish acres, nineteen twentieths of it a boggy waste, attached to this crazy
cabin, with a small cow and a donkey for live stock, and ten mouths to
feed, a rent of £3 18s 10d, has been imposed instead of £2 of old.
Hardly a less wretched cabin or a less wretched slice of mountain is that
of the Widow Roche hard by - the thatch, as usual, old and patched with heath;
the green rainmarks disfiguring the walls in half a dozen places; the
floor, damp as it is, and indented with holes in which the rain, is swept; the
whole effects worth some fifteen shillings. The family sleep in two straw
beds in a suffocating little apartment, some seven feet by ten, and the
rain pours through the thatch within a few inches of the head of the bed in
which a withered little old man, Mrs Roche's father-in-law, lay for three months
this year with swellings and pains in the bones. How a sanitary officer
could permit a man ill of rheumatism to linger in such a den I cannot
imagine. Yet Mrs Roche states that her husband lay sick here for a year
and a half, and died of dropsy and rheumatic pains. Dr Fenton, indeed, who
visited him on a dispensary red ticket, advised him not to stay in a wet
house but to go to the workhouse, where he would have nourishment. He did
for a time go to Clogheen workhouse hospital, where he was told that if he
had come six months earlier he would have been cured. He returned,
however, to the cabin to die. So said Mrs Roche, and she informed me that her rent
had been raised from 18s to £2 4s, and that her husband had accepted the
terms from the commencement. "Sure only the mercy of God I don't know
where 'tis to come from. There we have a handful of little croghauns that will
last us a couple of months longer, and no milk for them but to eat them
dry; and then the work will be to get security for the price of the yellow
meal." She had three-quarters of an acre of oats this year, for which she bought
two barrels of seed on credit, paid 7s and diet for ploughing, and 3s for
mowing. She threshed it with wattles and gave it to the cow. "A head of
cabbage here is not the big of your fist, and no sort of turnips comes
on unless a knob on the stalk." Mrs Roche has one sow.
Not far off we came upon Richard Leonard's house and met a sickly man of
middle age, once endowed with a powerful frame, tottering about the door,
with six young children around him. The creature pressed his hand to his
breast, and complained of an "impression" there, he had the marks of
consumption stamped unmistakably on his worn cheeks, and shivered in the
cold. The hut, made of loose stones and torn heath, had not even the
smallest apology for a window, and no safety-valve from suffocation but
the holes in the roof, and the larger hole that answered for a chimney. A
glance within showed nothing but "darkness visible." Leonard came to the
mountain fifteen years ago, appropriated a bit of course sand mottled with
heather, built this hut, and lived on unmolested until he had delved a
patch of potato ground out of the waste. Until the re-valuation he paid no
rent; since then he has to pay 7s 6d a year. Four goats and a sow are his
worldly goods.
After parting with Leonard we rode through an untracked expanse of rock,
sand, heath, and bog up the steep face of the hill; we struck once more a
borheen, through whose rocky course a donkey was toiling painfully up
under a barrel of water. This brought us into the farmyard of Thomas Hyland, one
of the highest on the mountain. Hyland has been served with a process of
ejectment. His holding is measured at 56a 2r 31p statute measure. His
rent was £5 1s 6d; the rent demand is £10 10s. the great bulk of his holding
is mere stunted heather, spotted here and there with tufts of sickly grass.
The rest is chiefly light pasturage, claimed and unreclaimed lie side by side;
and the contrast makes me incredulous that men ever dreamed of supporting
life by a struggle of this sort against unconquerable sterility. His farm
premises bore the strongest evidence of enterprise and of unceasing toil.
The outhouse and offices, worn, indeed, by rain and weather, but among the
most complete in Skeheenarinka, were built by himself and his father - by
their own hands and their own pockets. The foundations had to be scooped
out some ten feet on the steep side of the mountain: the snow every year
envelopes the place for a fortnight; a coat of it lay melting through the
roof when we saw it. The wind and rain are beginning to eat through the
thatch of the dwelling house; still it is a clean place, and there is a
cowhouse roofed with timber, a piggery, a little stable for the horse, and
a carthouse in which he has got up a rude cutting machine to grind furze into
fodder for his cattle and horse. A huge mass of manure, probably 200
loads, was piled in the farmyard against next season - if next season should find
Hyland on Skeheenarinka. Last season he sowed an acre of rye. The field
had to be turned up with spades, the ground being too precipitous for
ploughing. He paid 15s for the seed, £3 for the assistance of eight or
nine men, and the ten or eleven stones of corn it produced were used in feeding
the cattle. He sowed an acre and a-half of oats. This field also had to
be tilled with spades. The seed cost him £3 10s; the labour £4; and he never
threshed a stone of the oats. "For twelve years I never sold a grain of
it, but to throw it to the cows." His farm-stock consists of 6 milking cows,
4 yearlings, 1 calf, 5 sheep, 2 pigs, a horse and a donkey. Hyland himself
states that fodder costs him £12 a year; that from September to May they
must be almost exclusively hand fed; and that the cold is so excessive
that good cattle quickly degenerated there, and last winter twelve months the
cows were near perishing of cramps. "What we'd got out of them in the
summer would hardly feed them in the winter." And begor, all the help we
ever got from Mr. Bridge was to have me fined £1 for cutting a barth of
heath on the mountain to put a coat of thatch on the roof". In his reclamation
work Hyland found that lime only burned up whatever little surface he
could make, and he had only to fall back upon the slow process of decomposing
straws of heather in farmyard manure, and thus creating an artificial soil
upon the gravelly foundation. He had to open deep drains in order to bury
the big stones, and build four-foot stone fences with the remainder.
We called to the Widow Leonard, who was in bed ill. Her rent has been
raised from £2 6s 6d to £3 0s 6d. A few cheap religious prints hung over
her head. Thomas Leonard holds some twenty-one English acres, with the
usual mixture of barrenness and reclamation. His old rent was £2 6s; his
new rent, £6 8s 6d. He has been served with notice to quit, which has not
yet, however, been followed up by a process of ejectment. About a year
ago, when he approached Mr. Bridge for a settlement, he was told that the
arrears must be paid up since 1879. "I would give it up to him first," cried
Leonard; "and if there was any sort of a roof over me 'tis little I'd
grudge it."
We had not completed the circuit of Skehennarinka, and visited almost every
cabin on the mountain. Through an intricate tangle of dry watercourses
and torn roads, we began to descend westwards into a deep defile, clothed with
fir plantations on one side, and bounded by the rocky acclivity of
Carrigeen on the other, while the Funcheon tumbled down through the centre. The
horses had to be led during the descent. On crossing the rude bridge over the
Funcheon [stream]we were in Limerick. In the depth of one of the wild glens that
open on all sides from the river we came upon the wretched habitation of
James Murphy, at Knocknagaltee. He came over the fields to welcome us - a
queer figure, active, but uncouth, deadened and almost apathetic in
spirit. He wore a rag on the crown of his matted hair, and an old blue coat,
streaming in a hundred shreds. This man has been served with a process
of ejectment. His rent has been raised from £4 7s 4d to £10 10s 0d upon a
farm nominally rated at 95a 0r 9p statute measure. I did not boil a single
pratie this year," he said, "not one. It's Indian meal we're eating all
through." When asked if he could honestly manage to pay the increased
rent, "I would stop till he leveled down the house about me first," was the
reply. "My father lived here before me," he continued, "for 80 years. I was not
12 years old when I remember rooting that unfortunate rock, and from that day
to this sorra the day's confort we ever had there." He dug portions of the
semi-reclaimed heather, and after imperilling the spade, brought up three
inches of black soil with a substratum of more yellow mud and clay. In
another field,a thoroughly reclaimed one, I noticed at the edges soil
nine inches deep, with a fair only foundation. Perhaps the aspect of the place
was not served by a snow-storm which was beating about it; but it appeared
to be a dismal and unkindly spot. A cow, he stated, that he would bring
from good land, after three months here would not be worth 50s. In proof of
this he trotted out a little cow, which looked young and hardly enough, but,
which was visibly cramped from the cold, as well as wretchedly bony and
course-coated. He asserted that he sold a cow this year at Ballyporeen
for 50s. His stock consists of four cows, the produce of which this season
was three firkins, less, 25lbs which had to be bought to complete the
quantity. His tillage was confined to an acre of oats, an acre of potatoes, and a
cabbage-garden. For barrels of seed oats cost him £3, four bags of
special manure cost him £5, and he neither boiled a potato nor threshed a grain of
oats - for forty years he never sold any.
Subject: Christmas on the Galtees 7
We crossed another mountain stream, spanned by a bridge without parapets,
and leaving the shaggy ravine behind mounted the opposite slope on the
steep road to Carrigeen. The wife of the first tenant we met told an
extraordinary and all but incredible story about the terms on which her
husband, John Murphy, came to a settlement with Mr. Bridge. Her husband,
who holds about 25 Irish acres, and has ten children, had his rent raised
from £7 8s 6d to £14 8s. After some two years he accepted the terms of
the valuation, and he has had (so this extraordinary but obstinate statement)
not only to pay the new rent, but to pay arrears and expenses to the
amount of £18 4s, being the difference between the old and new rents from the
date of the notice of the increase! But more extraordinary still, this woman
asserts that, being totally unable to meet those arrears at the time, her
husband was, by Mr. Bridge, obliged to sign an agreement to pay 18s a year,
in addition to the increased rent, as interest, until the principal sum of
£18.4s has been wiped off! I hesitate to believe that there must not be a
mistake somewhere. I asked if her husband had got any copy of the
agreement signed by him, and was told he had got none whatever. I would not give
currency to the story at all, but that I am assured on authority I cannot
well doubt that there are several other cases which I have yet to
discover.
The following extract of Mr. Justice Barry, on the occasion of granting
the conditional order against Mr. J S Casey, [reporter who originally
wrote about Patton Bridge and his treatment of the Buckley Estate
tenants] sheds a strange light upon this
extraordinary story:-
But what was the course adopted upon this estate in the Galtees? The
purchase is made in 1873; a stranger unknown to the tenants, of whom
integrity or skill they know nothing, is brought down in July; he
completes his valuation about November, and in January, 1874, printed notices are
sent to the tenants informing them that their rent is to be so-and-so
(specifying the amount fixed by Mr. Walker) from the 26th March then next. I have
professionally and judicially come in contact with many cases of
controversy between landlord and tenant; I have seen and heard the usual charges and
counter charges of harshness on the one hand and dishonesty or
unreasonableness on the other, sometimes proved and sometimes disproved,
but such a demand by agent or landlord as that made by those notices under
such circumstances never fell within my observation. The demand was wholly
unenforceable in law, and, so far as I see on the facts before us,
indefensible as a matter of dealing between man and man. In point of law
the landlord could no more enforce the advanced rent from 26th March than
he could enforce its payment retrospectively for the ten years. The
tenants were entitled by law to hold at the old rent until the end of the
year, and the service of these notices must therefore be regarded as an
attempt, and so far as I can see, an unjustifiable attempt to exact,
through the terror of apprehended eviction, that increase on the coming half year
which he could not obtain by any legal process.
"We never will be able to pay it nor to pay what's due," said Mrs
Murphy. "We had 6lb of pork yesterday for our Christmas dinner among twelve.
'Twas the poorest Christmas day we ever had, striving to pay everybody his
dues, and sure it's equal if we're there at all next Christmas."
We clambered up a rocky watercourse into the heart of the hills. The
snow beat in our faces, out feet and hands were pierced through and through
with cold. The road dipped and fell in the midst of rocky desolation. The
horses started nervously at the streams that crawled across the roadway,
and the rude red sandstone flags that now and again extended right across
beneath their feet. On one of the coldest and windiest summits of this
wild region stands the hut of Shawn Shaughnessy-the foulest and dingiest human
habitation I have yet put foot in. The whole construction is about nine
feet square, and beside it the tottering walls of a roofless outhouse.
Right in front of the door of the dwelling-house is built a wall to keep
out the wind. It has the effect also of completely keeping out the light,
save what struggles in through the broken window or the broken roof.
I looked
in twice, as it seemed into utter darkness, before I could trust myself into
the pestilential blackhole. Then, by groping around I nearly stumbled
into the smouldering fire. A few moments habitation to the darkness enabled
me to see dimly black walls, an almost empty deal dresser, a spinning wheel,
and an alcove of some sort in the wall, wherein I could make out a poor
straw bed covered with ragged bedclothes. I am to this moment unaware
how this recess is formed, or whether the roof of it is a wall or a bedstead;
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