CONNAUGHT

Described by Stephen Gwynn

Pictured by Alexander Williams

BLACKIE AND SON LIMITED
LONDON GLASGOW AND BOMBAY
1912

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

I

Connaught—or Connacht, as it is more properly spelt and spoken—is geographically the best-marked among the provinces of Ireland; and, as usual, other discriminations follow. I would not say that it is of all provinces the most Irish; nobody has better rights to stand for Ireland than the "boys of Wexford", and at a Wexford fair or meeting you will see scores of big farmers the very picture of Mr. Punch's John Bull, only not so round about the abdomen. But Connaught, Connaughtmen, and Connaught ways certainly come nearest to an Englishman's traditional conception of Ireland and its inhabitants; the stage Irishman is based upon Connaught characteristics. In West Mayo people do say "shtruck" (or in moments of emotion "shhtrruck"); and you can see still in places the traditional costumes. Shawled heads and bare feet are (thank goodness) to be met with all along the Atlantic seaboard; but the red petticoat (home-dyed with madder, though alas! aniline dyes are fast replacing the costlier and more beautiful crimson) is characteristic of Galway and Mayo; and in remote recesses of Joyce country and Connemara old and lovely fashions of braiding the hair and training ringlets to stray over the forehead still hold their own. In Connemara and on Aran, the tall lad of thirteen may still, though rarely, be seen in the long-petticoated shirt (his only garment) of red or blue flannel; but this is only a relic of sheer poverty. The men's clothes, however, keep to antique and excellent fashions: throughout Galway, east of the Corrib, almost everyone wears the cut-away skirted coat of dark heavy frieze, and for the most part its wearers hold to the custom of clean-shaven face with a narrow strip of close-cropped whisker past the cheekbones. In Connemara the "bawneen" or sleeved waistcoat of whitish flannel is general and very becoming to its wearers, among whom are to be found the handsomest men in Ireland. Kerry women, who in certain parts really have the "black-blue Irish hair and Irish eyes", may perhaps hold their own even with the girls of Connaught; but for fine-looking men I would back Galway against any county in the British Isles.

There is much talk of a Spanish strain on this coast, and undoubtedly commerce was constant between Galway Bay and the Iberian peninsula: but the truth is that you have in western Ireland, as in western Spain, survivals of a race which the red-haired people pushed off the good lands towards the limit of the sea. On the Claddagh at Galway I have seen a man at work in his cottage mending a net, who might have posed for the model of a Basque peasant; and the olive-skinned fisher folk about the great mackerel-curing station at Cleggan (near Clifden) are simply variants of a type that repeats itself along the coasts of Spain.

The people have changed very little in themselves since Lever wrote of them: where food has always been too scarce, as at the extremity of the