Leinster : Beautiful Ireland Series

Book excerpt: Leinster : Beautiful Ireland Series Leinster is the richest of Irish provinces, the heart of Ireland, and for beauty it can challenge any of its sisters, save in one respect only: it lacks the beauty of wildness. What it has to show of most beautiful lies within twenty miles of the capital. There is no city north of the Alps which has so lovely surroundings as Dublin—or so varied in their loveliness. Sea and mountain, plain and river, all come into that range of exquisite choice. But everywhere in it the beautiful frame of nature has been modified and beautified by man. Since it is not possible, in the small space available, to describe exhaustively the features of this great province, which stretches from the sea to the Shannon and from the Mourne Mountains to Waterford Haven,[Pg 6] a selection must be made and indicated at once. First, then, the county of Dublin itself, infringing a little on Kildare. Secondly, the Wicklow Mountains and their glens. Thirdly, that rich valley of the Boyne, which was the heart of the ancient kingdom of Meath. But, before details are dealt with, some general idea of the topography must be given. Suppose you are on deck when the mail boat from Holyhead has been two hours out, or a little more (I write here for strangers), you will see Dublin Bay open before you. To your right, making the northernmost horn of the curve, is the rocky, almost mountainous, peninsula of Howth, and ten miles north of it you see its shape repeated in the Island of Lambay. Except for that, to the north and to the west, coast and land are all one wide level, far as your eye can reach—unless by some chance the air be so rarefied that you discern, fifty miles northward, the purple range of Carlingford Hills (still in Leinster), and beyond them, delicate and aerial blue, the long profile of the Mourne Mountains, where Ulster begins. But to the south of the city (where it lies in the bight of the bay, spilling itself northward along the shore to Clontarf of famous memory, and southward to Kingstown and beyond) mountains rise, a dense huddle of rounded, shouldering heights, stretching away far as you can see. Near Dublin they almost touch the[Pg 7] shore: one rocky spur comes down to Dalkey Island, which was the deep-water landing place before Kingstown harbour was built: it rises into the peaked fantastic summit of Killiney Hill. Beyond it the coast curves in a little, giving a bay and valley in which lies Bray, our Irish equivalent for Brighton. The Bray river marks the limits of County Dublin; and beyond Bray again is the high, serrated ridge of Bray Head, fronting the water in a cliff. Landward from it rises, peak by peak, that exquisite chain of heights which from Little Sugarloaf to Great Sugarloaf runs back to connect here once more the main body of mountains with the sea.