290 CENTRAL IRELAND 



all over the lowlands of Ireland, though their owners 

 would rarely define them as Roscommons. Then 

 there are mountain sheep generally of a more or less 

 Cheviot type and Scotch Blackfaces on the hills of 

 Ulster. But the wet climate, the small proportion of 

 arable land, and the lack of large adjacent meat markets 

 all combine to render sheep comparatively unimportant 

 in Ireland. Our host told us that labour had become 

 a little scarcer; he was paying his men iis. a week; 

 but his chief complaint was of the numerous holidays, 

 as, for example, on that very day his men were off to 

 an athletic sports, which explained the beatings of a 

 distant drum that had from time to time fallen on our 

 ears. When we left we met both men and girls 

 hurrying along the roads, and passed near enough to 

 the field to get a taste of the quality of the whole band, 

 mixed with the cries of the people cheering on their 

 favourites, while we picked our way delicately through 

 a stretch of road littered up with screws and vehicles 

 of every imaginable stage of age and repair. From 

 Kilkea we changed our course a little and headed 

 north-west through Athy, Stradbally, and Maryborough, 

 towards the distant Slieve Bloom mountains. 



The country did not change much in its aspect ; 

 big peat bogs alternated with the cultivated lands, 

 which in the neighbourhood of Stradbally and Mary- 

 borough showed a fair proportion of tillage land neither 

 specially well nor ill farmed. 



The towns for all their wide streets and white- 

 washed houses looked gaunt and dull in the absence 

 of gardens, though the district council cottages were 

 often bright enough, and the chief occupants of the 

 roads were the poultry and the goats, with the ass 

 carts drawing peat. 



West of Maryborough the proportion of grassland 



