Round Ireland in Low Gear (36 page)

³⁸
Source: Tomas O’Crohan,
Island Cross-talk. Pages From a Diary
, trs. Tim Enright, OUP, 1986.

³⁹
At the time of Paddy Dignam’s funeral Pearse Street was still called Brunswick Street. It was not until much later that it was renamed after Patrick Pearse, the devout Catholic schoolmaster turned revolutionary, and one of the leaders of the Easter Rising, who was born at No. 27 in 1879.

⁴⁰
Across the Basin was the site of Boland’s Mills, which de Valera made his HQ, as Commandant of the Third Battalion of the Volunteers, on the morning of Easter Monday 1916. Seventeen of these Volunteers, who altogether numbered about 130, occupied a number of houses near Mount Street Bridge; it was here, on the Wednesday following the Easter Monday rising, that these seventeen fought a five-hour action with a British force of battalion strength, causing enormous casualties.

⁴¹
In Dartmoor Davitt, who had only one arm (having lost the other as a child) and was unable to do the normal work in the granite quarries, was harnessed during working hours to a cart which he was made to drag around behind him. He was lucky to get out after seven years on ticket-of-leave, having been sentenced to fifteen.

⁴²
The Autobiography and Correspondence of Mary Granville
, ed. Lady Llanover. 6 vols, 1861–2.

⁴³
A slane is what I know as a turf spade; a turf spade has a narrow, straight-edged steel blade with what is known as a wing set at right angles to it. Its purpose is to detach a turf at a single stroke of the blade. The proportions of the blade and the wing vary according to the size of turf required and the type of bog.

⁴⁴
After the Firbolgs’ defeat, they retreated to the Aran Islands and other islands off the coasts of Ireland and Scotland. On Inishmore, according to legend, they built the nearly circular fort of Dun Onact, otherwise Dun Eoghanachta, which stands on a knoll west of Kilmurvy. There, having finished the job and being fed up with such arduous labour, they buried their tools in a nearby mound, which is still to be seen.

⁴⁵
The traditional day for performing the pilgrimage is Domhnach Crom Dubh, the last Sunday in July or the beginning of the harvest season, and the day on which the first of the year’s food crop was eaten, all of which appear to indicate that the pilgrimage to the mountaintop has pagan antecedents going back far beyond the lifetime of the Saint, who has no connection with this day. In fact some people still believe that the Friday of Crom Dubh is the day on which the pilgrimage should be celebrated, and do so.

⁴⁶
Until some time in the early nineteenth century, according to the Rev. James Page, author of
Ireland: Its Evils Traced to Their Source
(1836), the station at Leaba Phadraig was performed only by those pilgrims who wanted to have children but had been unsuccessful in doing so. They usually spent the night on the summit, sleeping in or around the Bed.

⁴⁷
A Frenchman’s Walk Through Ireland, 1796–7
, reprinted 1984, Blackstaffe Press, Belfast.