The great masses of basalt which lie upon the original chalk bottom of this part of Ireland, here form a high plateau or table, tolerably flat on the summit, to which one gradually ascends from Ballycastle by a winding road. The highest edge of this plateau is turned towards the sea, whence it inclines inland, with a gentle slope, for about half a mile, when it mixes with other heights and risings of the highlands of the county of Antrim. The inclined surface of this plateau is covered far and wide with grass, moss, and moist boggy soil, and affords pasture for the cattle of a couple of little farms. Next the sea, it ends abruptly in a steep cliff, from four to six hundred feet high, and here the naked black basalt is every where visible. The highest point rises to 636 feet above the level of the sea, and is called Cape Benmore. The visitor drives up as far as a little farm, called the Farm of the Cross, which lies in a hollow immediately behind the Head, where the sloping masses mingle with other hills, and where the waters have collected in two little lakes, of which one is called Lough Dhu, or the Black Lake, and the other Lough Nacrana, or the Lake with the Island. At this farm I had to leave my car, and continue the ascent on foot. The farmer, Patrick Jameson, whose cattle graze on the summit of Benmore, and his servant or neighbour, were our guides.
We first went round the little lakes, one of which, Lough Nacrana, is remarkable for a small island in its centre. The farmers told me that the people say that this island was made by the Druids, and used by them in their religious rites. At all events, at least in its present form, it is the work of art; for it rises in a perfectly regular oval form above the surface of the lake, and seems to be built of fragments of basalt, such as lie in vast numbers round the shore of the lake. I have not been able to find any thing respecting this lake and its artificial island in any book, and am willing to believe that the Druids might have chosen this wild spot for the scene of their religious ceremonies. The little farm is the only thing in this wild place that does not remind one of the superhuman works of nature. As Benmore is mentioned by Ptolemeus (it is his Robogdium Promontorium,) it is a proof that it was known and famed as something extraordinary even before the Christian era.
From the little Druidical temple-lake, we now ascended to the very top of the cape, by extremely unpleasant paths, for one foot always trod in the wet bog, and the other on pointed rocks. The further we went, however, the more convenient and dry became the path, and above, at the edge of the cliff, it was perfectly level and dry. The storm, too, had somewhat impeded us in our ascent; but when we reached the crown of the hill it ceased completely, and became a perfect calm, which did not move a hair of our heads. This calm at first surprised me not a little, till my guide called my attention to the fact, that the wind struck quite against the perpendicular face of the rock, and was turned off broken, and sent upwards, and consequently produced, not a horizontal current of air, but a vertical one towards the sky. The cliff is so perpendicular, and the edge so sharp, and the wind blew so perfectly at right angles against the wall of rock, that the air immediately behind the up-rushing current was quite still. Further up in the air, the vertical current was, of course, again carried along with the storm from the north; and at a distance of from 500 to 600 paces, the wind again swept along the ground; while still further on, at a distance of 700 or 800 paces, its whole force was felt. The current of air therefore flowed in a great arch over our heads, beneath which we enjoyed a perfect calm.
Basalt, it is well known, is found partly in large, thick, compact, and shapeless masses, which, however, break according to certain laws, assuming certain regular forms. Sometimes, however, basalt is also seen in a certain regular and columnal structure. These columns or pillars are generally as close to each other as if they were cemented together. But wherever the mass has been
On the summit of Benmore Head, we had the nearest promontory of Rathlin Island, Rue Point, exactly opposite us, at a distance of about four miles. The eastern side of this promontory is formed of columnar basalt, like the structure of Benmore Head. Perhaps these two columnar shores were once connected, and were torn asunder by some violent convulsion of nature. The long coast of the western, or Kenramer wing of Rathlin was so clearly visible, that we could see the Church Bay most distinctly, and distinguish the districts of Kenramer and Ushet.
A mountain was shown to us as the site of King Bruce's Castle; and the high chalk cliffs, with their cap of basalt, we saw with such distinctness as to be able to study their structure. I could
In the middle, between Rathlin and the coast of Ballycastle, a speck was pointed out to me, caused, as was said, by the meeting of seven tides. The sailors call this point Slough na Moran. It is a whirlpool, produced by the meeting of the ebbing and flowing tides, and eddies and counter-eddies, assisted perhaps by submarine rocks.
While contemplating Rathlin island, and Bruce's Castle, I thought of Shakspere's Tempest, and the island of the banished duke Prospero. Might it not be possible that Shakspere, who doubtless had heard of Bruce and Rathlin, took from this event in Bruce's life his idea of making a lonely island, the abode of a banished prince, the scene of a drama? The wild inhabitants whom Bruce took into his service, are represented by Caliban. Shakspere only transferred his island to the sunny south, which is most suited for lively dramatic action and poetry. Here, in the cold, dull, windy north, hover only the lyric cloud-forms of Ossian's heroes.
As the traveller ascends the basaltic mass of Benmore Head, he perceives several hollows in the mass, beginning at the edge of the precipice, and running inland, parallel to one another. The farmers of the neighbourhood had here and there bordered them with walls of loose stones, and used them, they said, as boundaries for their fields, and enclosures for their cattle. These hollows are caused by great fissures or clefts, which stretch from the shore far inland, and are again filled with basalt. As they were either not completely filled, or the filling substance was less enduring than the chief mass, these dykes, as the English term them, are still perceptible on the surface. Wherever the filling material has again fallen out of these dykes or fissures, there are wide clefts. One of these, on Benmore Head, is used by the inhabitants of the coast as a regular passage down to the sea. This path they call Fhir Leith, or ‘the Gray Man's Path.’ The Gray Man, who is almost ceaselessly travelling this path, is the storm. The wind that rushes up from it is so strong, that, the instant I set foot in it, my cloak, hat, books, and maps were whipped away into
A vast and mighty column has fallen right across the Gray Man's Path, and is fixed like a wedge between its walls, yet leaving room enough to pass beneath it. One cannot avoid hastening past it, for it looks as if it were about to fall still farther. But it has been meditating this fall from time immemorial, and many generations have passed through uncrushed. At the top, the fissure is very narrow, being only eight or ten feet wide; but it becomes wider towards the bottom. Mighty columns are ranged along on either side; but in the fissure itself they are broken off, so that one can step from the head of one to that of another, and descend as if on a flight of irregular stairs. The heads of these broken pillars are almost all flat, and afford a tolerably level surface, on which one can occasionally sit down to rest, as on a stone seat. These columns do not all consist of one piece, but are composed of a number of blocks, placed one over another. The separate blocks are not, however, always easily distinguishable, because they are very firmly and closely fitted together; but when the columns fall, these joinings open, and they divide into the pieces of which they were originally composed. The component blocks of the pillars of Fair Head are, I think, from ten to fifteen feet long, while the entire columns are from 200 to 250 feet in height. We shall afterwards see that when the columns are most elegantly formed these blocks are shorter and smaller.
The entire weight of this stratum of columnar basalt, 250 feet thick, rests on a bed of clay-slate (Thonschieferlage), which again rests on a substratum of stone coal. This is the reverse of what we might expect; for the heavy, almost indestructible, iron-hard basalt, ought properly to lie beneath, and the brittle clay-slate and coal strata to rest upon it. The basalt columns owe their frequent falls to the brittleness and unenduring nature of the clay-slate which forms their foundation. The joinings of the columns also assist these falls; for the water which penetrates them in the autumn being frozen in the winter, it enlarges the fissures with irresistible force, till at length, after centuries of unobserved toil, they become so wide, the substratum of clay-slate so crumbled away, and the pillars overhang so much, that they lose their balance, topple over some stormy winter's night, when all the elements are in uproar, and are dashed into hundreds and thousands of fragments, and partly ground to dust amid the roaring breakers. As the stratum of clay-slate upon which the columnar basalt rests is 400
Below, where the Gray Man's Path ceases, and the substrata of clay-slate and coal begin, all is covered with ruins, with blocks of columns, with fragments of rock, big and little, with entire pillars, and portions of pillars. In Germany, and also in France and England, there is a game called Lenorchen35 in some parts of Germany. A number of finely divided little sticks are thrown together on the table, so that they lie across and beneath and leaning and resting upon each other, as chance placed them, and the task assigned to the players is, cautiously to remove the little splinters, one by one, without touching or shaking the others. Here, in the lower regions of Fair Head, it looks as if a party of Titans had been playing at this game with columns of basalt, for the pillars and fragments of pillars are heaped upon one another in every possible direction. Here and there many lie together, and look like the ruins of some great and noble building; sometimes they lie in a mass, horizontally, one upon the other. One might imagine that the giants had collected a parcel of Egyptian pyramids, obelisks, Pompey's-pillars, Stephen's-towers, and castlewalls, to play a game of jackstraws with them. It is fortunate for travellers that they no longer play at them, and that, though apparently so loose, yet in fact they are all so firm that one can climb over them without fear. Many blocks have fallen into the sea, and the waves dash high above them into the clefts, fissures, holes, and breaches. Remarkable and grand from below is the view of the great arch of columns, which adorns the brow of the promontory, like a mural crown on the head of a Roman citizen. The vast cleft of the Gray Man, seen from here, looks like a line or a small chink in the immense mass; and the pillar across it, which, when above, one expects to fall every moment, is here scarcely distinguishable from the rest, and not the least of its threatening aspect is visible.
Though the wind helped us up the Gray Man's Path, it took us not quite an hour to reascend from the surf to the top of the rock. We found our chattels behind the pillar, and I took my dinner in the cabin of my Benmore herdsman. It consisted of whisky, oat-cakes, and four fried eggs. The hostess had a whole crowd of children around her, like most Irish mothers, who are every where very prolific, even on these barren basalt headlands. In Germany, only the fine and fertile tracts are thickly inhabited, and sometimes over-inhabited; but in Ireland, even the turf-bogs and the rocks are crowded with inhabitants, as if human beings were here hatched, like the wild sea-fowl, by hundreds and thousands, in the clefts and fissures of the rocks. Even the little island of Rathlin, with its 1100 inhabitants, is said to contain twice too many. The Catholic priests are partly to blame for this over-population, for they are the most busy match-makers in Ireland. As a chief part of their income is derived from marriages, they are most anxious to unite young people as soon as they are marriageable. If the Roman Catholic clergy were chosen from a higher class, were better paid, and their social position improved, this eagerness for marriage-making would probably cease, and the surplus population of Ireland no longer pressing so heavily on the country, one great source of the misery of the land would be removed.
‘Go a one side, the fox is coming!’ cried the farmer's wife to the little squallers, when they were going to make away with the eggs and oat-cakes intended for me; and thus, with the fox's aid, I at last got something warm to assuage my hunger, although I did not allow the little brood to remain quite so hungry as they had previously been. The children did not understand a word of Irish, but all spoke English, though their mother spoke Irish from her youth. ‘The young people are all going out of the Irish,’ said she. Thus even here in the Glynns—to which district Fair Head also belongs—the English is yearly and daily gaining new victories over the Irish. These people, like most of the inhabitants of the Glynns, were Catholics. On the other side of the river, at Ballycastle, Protestantism again begins. ‘There they are all in the Presbyterian way,’ said the farmer, ‘like the haland (highland) people.’ The weather formed our chief topic of conversation, over our turf-fire,—how severe and disagreeable it was now; how beautiful it had been five days ago; then how this ‘terrible break down’ had come all at once, and how the weather would soon mend again. All the time I was reflecting how nearly the cottage and the palace resemble each other with respect to conversation on the weather, which is a topic not to be avoided any where on the wide circle of the entire world.
In the afternoon I returned to tea to my Misses M'Donnell. ‘Well, have you been satisfied?’ ‘Have you been greatly disappointed?’ were the questions that met me. ‘It usually happens that travellers on our coast return disappointed from their excursions.’
‘You are right,’ replied I; ‘I too have heard of travellers being disappointed with your coast; but I must confess, I consider these men either as persons totally incapable of appreciating the wonders of nature, or as blasée, who assume an air of importance, and wish people to understand that Nature, with all her mighty works, is mere child's-play compared with the pictures their own imaginations are able to create. It is in some measure true, however, that the creations of Nature actually fall short of those of the imagination. I, for instance, can imagine columns, 20,000, instead of 250 feet high, with the fleecy clouds floating about their summits. I can imagine these columns in every possible position, oblique or perpendicular, and divided into stories like a house, so that we can mount from landing-place to landing-place, as in the interior of a tower. We can imagine that Nature has built arches of rock, ten or twenty times as high as the gateway of the Colossus of Rhodes; and that she has placed thousands of such arches, beside and upon one another, in rows, like those of a Roman amphitheatre. Is it not possible, moreover, to imagine, in the middle of a plain, a hole that yawns with a gorge half a mile in diameter, quite round, and six or twelve miles deep? By means of natural steps, one can descend on a two days' journey into this hole, and then, looking up as from an enormous well, contemplate the stars of heaven from the neighbourhood of the centre of the earth.’
‘What cannot the imagination do with ice! Picture to yourself this beautiful crystal-like substance, of the clearest, purest transparency, and now let your uncurbed fancy build out of it a palace, worthy of standing at the North Pole for the ice-king. Heaven-high columns of greenish ice; beautiful arches, great and small, thrown from column to column, spring so high that the clouds, gilded by the sun, sport in play from capital to capital. The ice must be clean, and not covered with snow or mud, as in Switzerland; and in the night-time the Aurora Borealis may dance and glisten around it, and here and there shimmer through its transparent walls. And yet no such thing exists in nature.’
‘Many other incredibly splendid and magnificent spectacles we may imagine, such as may possibly exist on the wild moon, or on some other still ruder planet. All men, I believe, do this more or less; for we have all more or less of this magic power we call
The Irish are all very desirous that the traveller should be satisfied with every thing in their fatherland, and that he should bestow becoming admiration on every thing. They are fond of hearing the praises of the traveller, and they expect them. This is because they seldom see travellers in their country, and therefore feel themselves honoured by their visits, as well as because they are most friendly towards strangers, and, as it were, enamoured of their fatherland. The Misses M'Donnell, therefore, who had been anxiously waiting my return, were content with my report, and retired to bed perfectly gratified.