KERRY, CONNEMARA AND CLARE 229 



without reckless pace-breaking, at ten miles an 

 hour. 



From Kerry to Connemara is to go from soft 

 beauty to splendid tumbled grandness. The air 

 blows softly, but here the peaks are flung up 

 rocky and bold, a jumble of jagged mountain 

 tops, reaches of heather all pink and red and 

 cream in August ; wide loneliness of brown bog, 

 ripple of lakes, little and big, and tumble of rock 

 frothed streams. 



The Connemara people are a piece of old Ireland, 

 still left untouched. Irish is their own language 

 — talked with a softness which must be heard 

 to know its music. Here men still wear homespun 

 and the women red petticoats, and you will see 

 them riding two on a horse, the woman on a 

 pillion. They have old-fashioned fairs there, 

 patterns^ they call them ; and they firmly believe 

 in the fairies. If you walk yourself at night on the 

 Connemara hills, with the lakes whispering close 

 by, the bog pools gleaming, and nothing about 

 but the little sheep on the great crags above you 

 one can almost imagine little people coming out 

 to dance among the heather beUs, or grouping 

 on the rocks close to the brown waters of the lake. 



We have a favourite boatman there, a man of 

 sixty, sun tanned, as active as if half his years had 

 never passed, and his stories are things never to 



' So called from the word Patron — " Patron Saint " — each fair is 

 held in honour of some saint. 



