The Oppression of the Hills

Among the cottages that are scattered through the hills of County Wicklow I have met with many people who show in a singular way the influence of a particular locality.  These people live for the most part beside old roads and pathways where hardly one man passes in the day, and look out all the year on unbroken barriers of heath.  At every season heavy rains fall for often a week at a time, till the thatch drips with water stained to a dull chestnut, and the floor in the cottages seems to be going back to the condition of the bogs near it.  Then the clouds break, and there is a night of terrific storm from the south-west—­all the larches that survive in these places are bowed and twisted towards the point where the sun rises in June—­when the winds come down through the narrow glens with the congested whirl and roar of a torrent, breaking at times for sudden moments of silence that keep up the tension of the mind.  At such times the people crouch all night over a few sods of turf and the dogs howl, in the lanes.

When the sun rises there is a morning of almost supernatural radiance, and even the oldest men and women come out into the air with the joy of children who have recovered from a fever.  In the evening it is raining again.  This peculiar climate, acting on a population that is already lonely and dwindling, has caused or increased a tendency to nervous depression among the people, and every degree of sadness, from that of the man who is merely mournful to that of the man who has spent half his life in the madhouse, is common among these hills.

Not long ago in a desolate glen in the south of the county I met two policemen driving an ass-cart with a coffin on it, and a little further on I stopped an old man and asked him what had happened.

‘This night three weeks,’ he said, ’there was a poor fellow below reaping in the glen, and in the evening he had two glasses of whisky with some other lads.  Then some excitement took him, and he threw off his clothes and ran away into the hills.  There was great rain that night, and I suppose the poor creature lost his way, and was the whole night perishing in the rain and darkness.  In the morning they found his naked footmarks on some mud half a mile above the road, and again where you go up by a big stone.  Then there was nothing known of him till last night, when they found his body on the mountain, and it near eaten by the crows.’

Then he went on to tell me how different the country had been when he was a young man.

‘We had nothing to eat at that time,’ he said, ’but milk and stirabout and potatoes, and there was a fine constitution you wouldn’t meet this day at all.  I remember when you’d see forty boys and girls below there on a Sunday evening, playing ball and diverting themselves; but now all this country is gone lonesome and bewildered, and there’s no man knows what ails it.’