who breed
here regularly. I believe that the valley of the Erriff was once well
populated, but that after the famine the people were cleared off
nearly 20 square miles of land to make way for the great grazing farm
now divided between two occupants. As I have stated in previous
letters, the resentment of the surrounding inhabitants at this
depopulation of a vast tract of country is ineradicable. In the
wretched huts which appear at wide intervals on the sea-shore the
miserable people sit over the fire and talk of the old times when they
might go from Clifden to Westport and find friends nearly everywhere
on the road, while now from the last-named place to this--a distance
of 18 Irish miles--the country is simply wild mountain, moor, and
bog, bating the little Ulster Protestant village, not far from
Westport (a curious relic of '98), a few herds-men's huts, and the
police-station at Erriff Bridge. To those who, like myself, love
animals, the drive is by no means uninteresting. As the car jolts
along past "Hag's Valley," a dozen curlews take wing, and a little
further on the shrill cry of the redshank strikes on the ear. Now and
then a hare will start among the bent-grass, while aloft the falcon
rests poised on her mighty wing. But saving these wild animals, the
beautiful blackfaced sheep, and black Galloway calves, the country has
no inhabitants. What little was once cultivated has reverted to rough
pasture, covered with bent or sedge and a little grass, or to bog
impassable to man or any creature heavier than the light-footed fox,
who attains among these mountains to extraordinary size and beauty.
But hares and grouse, and even stray pheasants from Mr. Mitchell
Henry's woods at Kylemore, will not convince the fragment of
population around the great grazing farms that things are better now
than of yore; and there is some reason for believing that disturbance
is to be apprehended in this part of the country. The warning to Mr.
Barbour's unfortunate herd can hardly be a separate and solitary act
of intimidation and oppression. The work of one herd is of no great
matter. But the distinct warning given to the poor man at Erriff
Bridge to give up his livelihood on the first instant is possibly part
of a settled scheme to reduce great grazing farmers to the same
condition as landlords. They are to be frightened away, in order that
squatters may pasture their cattle on "the Devil's Mother," as the
Tiernaur people have done the