”As walking westwards one slowly crosses the great central plain of Ireland one experiences at first a sense of absolute loneliness. When I started it was raining. Not hard like it does at home, but with a soft, gentle downpour that before many minutes had sodden even through the straps of the pack on my back. The road was good enough for anything: very nearly as good it was as our best in England; and with next to no traffic on it, one could safely take its very centre. But it was the desolation that worried me. Hour after hour and one would pass perhaps one ass-cart with a load of turf. Far to the south and west one could see through the rain the hazy outlines of some mountains, but for miles round my road the monotone of the mist stretched almost unbroken.

There did not seem to be even fields in our sense, and next to none of the cheerful red brick of the English farm-house. Every few miles a grazier’s lime-washed cottage would loom up in the distance, and that was all. Even the miniature hillocks of turf, stacked brick fashion as it had been cut from the bog, took on almost the aspect of mountains in that desert of rainy loneliness.

The Emerald Isle’ they call it! It was the greyest world that the mind could conceive. You cannot miss the way of course, but it is about the only blessing. The roads are sign-posted even better than in England, but there are no milestones. And you can reckon your walking in terms of hours. And the next day will be just about the same as the first.

Then gradually, as you get used to it, you will begin to see things. You are not of course in the Gaeltacht, where they really speak Gaelic; but even the English does not mean quite the same as it does at home. The chemist’s shop somehow becomes a ‘ Medical Hall’, and a ‘ Victualler’ means a butcher. On the other hand, a public-house is generally a ‘grocery’, and it was with a little thrill of pleasure that I first heard of a ‘Grocer’s Curate’ as the most delightful of euphonisms for a bartender. What on earth a barmaid would be I do not know. But then they generally do not have any. Even the writing is changing a little. It is generally in Gaelic with the English underneath, but as often as not a shop sign will have even Roman characters in as near the shorthand-like curves of the Celtic as may be. You can see how the change is coming. Shops to English notions are oddly unspecialized, with a few shirts and perhaps a toy hurley-stick all mixed up with a row of devotional books. Once I saw

a sign that advertised its owner as “Grocery, Greengrocery, and Fruiterer, Wine and Spirit Merchant, and Funerals Provided ‘, and once I saw a rosary which might have cost fourpence hanging up forlornly as second-hand. And wherever the shop could possibly manage it every mortal thing would be advertised as ‘ Irish’, from gramophone records to maps. The Free State must, one imagines, be the world’s most economically-patriotic country. Some one told me how they admired the Prince of Wales as a true Sinn Féiner. Buy British’, it comes in all his speeches. Only of course we don’t. But these Irish people were buying Irish. “Burn everything English that comes into Ireland, except the coal.’ That used to be the old cry. Now it is no longer needed. For they do buy Irish.

So one by one, and ever so slowly, the little towns began to succeed one another: Ballinasloe, Kilcullogh, Athenry, Oranmore, and the rest. And it was not a little bit like I had expected. According to guide-books I had read they should have been dirty, squalid places, with ragged children playing on the filthy stones outside each tumble-down cabin door. There ought to have been hordes of beggars pursuing the Saxon stranger with whining lies. But it was all wrong. I think my guide-books must have been old-fashioned. Really, when you come to a place like, say, Ballinasloe you find a wide street of houses at least as solid as any in my own London suburban road, pavements swept perfectly clean, very few people visible at all and certainly no beggars, and a general atmosphere of virtuous respectability that strikes one as almost oppressive. After, in fact, a very long day’s hard walking in the rain, it will presently dawn upon the Saxon stranger that if there is any one thoroughly dirty in the town it is himself. The guide-book, I think, must have forgotten to correct a legend a century or so out of date.

So the townlets passed, and by and by as I grew, so to speak, more into tune with the place, each one began to provide its incident or so. It was in Athenry, I think, that I saw my first Feast. It is a tiny town with some simply enormous ruins, a castle and an abbey and bits of some city walls. There was a battle there that I never heard of, but a man who shaved me in a little shop knew all about it, dates and all. And in the very middle of the place stand the remains of a medieval stone Calvary. You leave it behind you, and bearing straight on pass on the right where the boys were playing fives against the huge derelict chancel of the abbey. And a wonderful fives court it must have made. Then you pass a stone where some one has cut in letters meant to outlast the ages his imperishable convictions of ‘Up Duffy’, and a hundred yards farther on you can begin to see the thing.

There was a ridge in the distance, and outlined on it against the skyline I could see an endless procession. Not all together, but in ones and twos and threes, all making unhurriedly for the same goal. Then as I got nearer still I could see other columns radiating from other points of the compass, with here and there a jaunting-car picking its slow way over the field roads, or even a motor bumping painfully over the stones and ruts. Closer still and I was actually amongst the people. Quite ordinary folk they were little family parties, couples, mothers with babies, single young men, and all with the same set look of cheerful solemnity. And most of them as they passed each other would exchange a word of low-voiced greeting. Even for the stranger there was a salutation. From the men, that is. For the women would look gravely down upon the road. And I noticed the same thing all through Ireland.

So in another minute or so I was at the place itself–a little hollow with three or four trees in the swampy ground beside a stream, and in the centre one tree growing from a pool. And this was the Holy Well itself, the very life and being of the whole Feast. Now, whether or not there ever was an Apparition here is officially unsettled. This was no Lourdes, and the Church had made no pronouncement, but left it free to individual faith to believe or not to believe. Only for miles round they did believe. And for miles round scores of other Holy Wells up and down all Ireland they were believing too. Only this was the first that I had ever seen.

Around were the jaunting-cars, their horses freed from the shafts and taking their ease with a forkful of hay. There were half a dozen two-seaters and a good many glittering cycles with flannelled young men who at home would have been playing tennis. There were girls in frocks as smart as any in London, and with them old women in long, heavy, green skirts and huge enveloping shawls and no hats. There was a booth or two with lemonade and cakes and jujubes for the children and a Free State policeman (only they call them ‘Guards ‘) looking on, and a woman with a basket selling rosaries and little medals. As she took my coppers she wished me a good Station and profitable to my soul. It was all most peculiar.

The whole general atmosphere, indeed, was extraordinary. There was neither the awed piety that at home we keep for in church, nor the flippancy that goes with out of church. These people were somehow just gravely cheerful. All of them had either just done something or else were just going to do it. Girls to one side, men to the other, they were taking off or putting on boots and stockings, and as each was ready without giggling or self-consciousness they found a place in the line of people perpetually encircling the well. I did not go myself. I simply did not dare. This is Ireland and I am a foreigner here.

This is not an international Lourdes, and the people would only see an impertinent tourist playing at the thing as he intruded upon their devotions. And I can think of heaps more reasons like that. And at the very end, if you really want to know, I did not go because I did not think myself good enough to go with those people.

What I did do was to peep shamefacedly for a moment within the circle round the well. There was a low wall of whitewashed stones, broken only at one point. It was there that you could see the Well itself. There was not very much to see. A shabby little picture of Our Lady, a rough shelf with some vases of the jam-jar variety filled with flowers (fresh flowers), and half a dozen rosaries and trifles hung in the tree above the pool as thank-offerings for favours granted or prayed for. And that was all. Only round and round the people were going with their prayers, barefooted on the pebbly track. Some indeed were doing it on their bare knees. Fifteen times it was that they went round. Some of them were in little family parties. There was one plus-foured, estate-agent-looking father encouraging two small sons to keep it up. I watched them as they drove away afterwards in the two-seater, the man and his smiling wife in front and the two peculiarly chirpy children in the dickey-seat behind. Most extraordinary it all was.

And the thing was that I had not meant to write about it at all. Back in Fleet Street they had warned me to keep well off politics and religion. They are both of course best left alone when talking about Ireland. And then I had done it. Only I do not see how to talk about Ireland without talking about religion. In a country where every drover on a country fair day will stop the harrying of his beasts to bless himself at the ringing of the bell for the Angelus, and where every man inside a bus will raise his hat as he passes a church door, it is a trifle difficult to ignore the subject. Once later on, I know, down in Waterford, I saw a street of people suddenly burst into a jog-trot. I have seen the same thing in our Rochdale back in the old times of mill-hours, and I have seen it in my own suburb in the days when we used to catch steam-trains, but never till I went to Ireland had I seen grown-ups running for fear of being late at church. As I say, it is a little hard in Ireland to write as though it were England.

In the evening after the Feast came what at home we should call the Fair. The lorries had been just arriving as I passed the field on my way to the Well, and as I returned they were practically unloaded. So I stood and watched the men at their business. It all goes up miles faster than you ever think. First there is a sort of platform, and then they hoist up the steam-engine that works the roundabouts. Then there is the part that you stand on, and finally the scaffold at the top that the hobby-horses hang from. And of course a fearful lot of ladders standing about.

That was the first time that I noticed Terence. I know that was his name, because I heard his mother calling him by it. Terence, on the other hand, failed to hear her, which in the latter end was, as it proved, unfortunate for him. And why I noticed the child was because while all the other boys were simply scampering about delirious with the thrills to come Terence had provided his own thrill by securing a ladder all to himself and mounting to the top of the whole contraption. It is true that one of the fair men immediately lowered him down again, but a boy like that cannot be beaten. Not spiritually, at least.

The thing goes ever so fast, you know, and even while you stare a lorry that shows nothing but a patient row of wooden horses’ noses miraculously unloads itself and the fiery steeds come to galloping life. There was a bit of bother, it is true, with one of the ostriches (I think it was an ostrich; anyway it was green underneath). But then ostriches are always awkward. It is their necks being hinged for travelling, only you do not notice the join when you are sitting on the things. But of course you have them if you want your show to be really an Unparalleled Representation of the Grand National. But even the ostrich was worked into his proper slot at last, and with every horse and every bird securely in his appointed place the steam-organ thing burst into the Hallelujah Chorus and the great electrics began to twirl, throwing monstrous flares and shadows into the foliage of the darkening trees. The Fair had opened at last.

In all the maddened rush of children I looked out anxiously for Terence, and in a sneaking sort of way was glad to see that out of all Athenry (which means the ‘ City of Kings ‘) he was the very first to capture a horse. Against this, on the other hand, I cannot think that once astride it was necessary to shout a lusty offer of ‘ Even money the field.’ Not at five years old. And in any case his odds were all wrong, for, as it happened, his mother caught him up just then, beating him easily by a short head. You will understand of course that though I say ‘ head ‘ it is only my literary way of describing the end of the business. And the end of Terence was about the last that I saw of Athenry. For early next morning I left on my road to Galway.”