GROUSE-SHOOTING IN MAYO 



(Little Nephin), a respectable mountain of 2,065 ^^^^j 

 beyond which rose Slieve Car. Under and upon 

 Nephin Beg the main part of our shooting was to take 

 place to-day. The stream we followed took us — rising 

 ever to higher ground — through a pass in the hills of 

 the wildest and most romantic beauty. It was wonder- 

 ful how our nags picked their way along the steep 

 sides and amid the rocky boulders of this lovely stream. 

 Every now and again foaming torrents — up which, 

 nevertheless, the salmon and white trout manage to 

 make their way — were below us or alongside. A 

 journey of rather more than an hour at length brought 

 us on to our ground. Here great deep corries and 

 stern, dark, yet magnificent mountains lay around us. 

 In this country the wild red deer of Ireland found a 

 congenial home until some sixty years ago, when the 

 last of them were shot by the country people. W. H. 

 Maxwell, whose delightful book. Wild Sports of the 

 West, is well known to sportsmen, lived in a remote 

 lodge upon the coast not far from here, and shot over 

 much of these solitudes. In his time — the first quarter 

 of the nineteenth century — red deer were still moder- 

 ately abundant, although even then much poached by 

 the peasantry and small farmers of the countryside. 

 A gentleman who knows this district well — shooting 

 with us on the day I write of — informs me that there 

 were plenty of red deer in the Mayo mountains until 

 towards the close of the eighteenth century, when the 

 French landed in Killala Bay, to the north-east of 

 Mayo. These invaders brought with them large num- 

 bers of good smooth-bore muskets, with which they 

 armed the Irish peasants. So soon as the French had 

 been disposed of by the British Government, the Mayo 

 peasants turned their attention to the game of the 

 country they inhabited, and, thanks to the excellent 



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