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Romantic Ireland. Volume 2/2. Mansfield Milburg Francisco
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isbn http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/46439
Автор произведения Mansfield Milburg Francisco
Жанр Книги о Путешествиях
Издательство Public Domain
Killarney’s lakes are irregular sheets of water lying in a basin at the foot of a very high range of mountains, set with islands and begirt with rocky and wooded heights. They are three in number; what is known as the upper, the middle or Muckross Lake, and the lower lake, – the northernmost, – more properly called Lough Leane. The middle lake is also called the Torc. A winding stream, known as the Long Range, unites the different bodies of water. The chief of the natural beauties of the Long Range is the Eagle’s Nest, which rises sheer from the water’s edge 1,700 feet. The upper lake is the most beautiful of all, though the smallest of the triad. It is studded with tiny islands and girt with mountain peaks, bare and stern above, but clothed with rich foliage at their base. The middle lake is also a beautiful, though more extensive, sheet, and contains but four islands, as compared with thirty in the lower lake and six in the upper.
The Colleen Bawn Caves – reminiscent of Gerald Griffin’s story, “The Colleen Bawn,”
and Boucicault’s famous play of the same name – are also in the immediate neighbourhood of the middle lake. Torc Cascade and Torc Mountain lies just to the southward, and is justly famed as one of the brilliant beauties of the region, as it falls in numerous sections over the broken rock to fall finally in a precipitous torrent of foam to its ravine-bed below.
Ross Castle, like Muckross Abbey, is one of Killarney’s chief picturesque ruins. It is on an island in the lower lake, and was built ages agone by the O’Donoghues. It was the last castle in Munster to surrender in the wars of the seventeenth century, giving in only when General Ludlow and his “ships-of-war,” as his narrative called them, surrounded it. MacGillicuddy’s Reeks lie farthest to the westward in the Killarney region. The name of this stern and jagged range sounds somewhat humourous, and in no way suggests the majesty and splendour of these hills; for they resemble the great mountains of other parts only by reason of their contrast with the low-lying land around their bases. One portion, indeed, rises a matter of 3,400 feet, and forms the most elevated peak in Ireland, grand and majestic, but, for all that, not a great mountain, as is so often claimed by the proud native. The celebrated Gap of Dunloe is far more deserving for its natural scenic splendour, and, in its way, rivals anything in Ireland.
The popular method of imbibing the charm of Dunloe is a combination of picnic, al fresco luncheons, and donkey-riding. This answers well enough for the “tripper,” but is as unsatisfying to the real lover of nature as an imitation Swiss châlet set out in a London park, or a Japanese tea-garden built out of bamboo poles from Africa.
The Gap of Dunloe is a grand defile, perhaps five miles in length, which can only be explored and truly enjoyed by a pilgrimage along its solitary and rugged road on foot. Its scenic aspect is gloomy and grand, with mirrored lakes, lofty mountains, and a thick undergrowth of heather and ivy. It is, however, in no manner theatrical. Through this wild glen ripples the river Lee, linking its five tiny lakes as with a silver thread.
At the upper end of the gap one emerges into “The Black Valley,” somewhat apocryphally stated to be “a gloomy, depressing ravine.”
The sun, it appears, does not shine down its length for long in the day, as it is flanked on either side by precipitous hills. The average imagination will not, however, conjure up any very dark suspicions with regard to its past, judging from the aspect of the valley between the hours of nine in the morning and two in the afternoon. Both before and after these hours there is no sunlight; and, because of the dense, long-reaching shadows which are projected across it, it was so named.
There is a good week’s rambling here to spots already famed in history for their beauty; but one must search them out for himself as a personal experience.
England’s poet laureate has written in praise of Killarney in a fashion which should please his severest critics, those who have mourned the lack of a single thought in his verse. This is certainly not true with regard to his prose, which, in the following lines, so justly and appropriately describes the charm of South-west Ireland:
“Vegetation, at once robust and graceful, is but the fringe and decoration of that enchanting district. The tender grace of wood and water is set in a framework of hills, – now stern, now ineffably gentle; now dimpling with smiles, now frowning and rugged with impending storm; now muffled and mysterious with mist, only to gaze out on you again with clear and candid sunshine. Here the trout leaps, there the eagle soars; and there, beyond, the wild deer dash through the arbutus coverts, through which they have come to the margin of the lake to drink, and, scared by your footstep or your oar, are away back to the crosiered bracken or heather-covered moorland. But the first, the final, the deepest and most enduring impression of Killarney is that of beauty unspeakably tender, which puts on at times a garb of grandeur and a look of awe, only in order to heighten by passing contrast the sense of soft, insinuating loveliness. How the missel-thrushes sing, as well they may! How the streams and runnels gurgle and leap and laugh! For the sound of journeying water is never out of your ears; the feeling of the moist, the fresh, the vernal is never out of your heart… There is nothing in England or Scotland as beautiful as Killarney; … and, if mountain, wood, and water, harmoniously blent, constitute the most perfect and adequate loveliness that nature presents, it surely must be owned that it has, all the world over, no superior.”
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