The Ulster of which I shall write in these few pages is the Ulster of four sea-bordering counties only, Donegal, Derry, Antrim, and Down, since beyond doubt these exceed the other five in attractions. Only let a word be said of two great lakes. Lough Erne, which belongs mainly to Fermanagh, though bordering Donegal in part, is to its champions the Cinderella of Irish waters, and some day it will come into its inheritance of fame. Lough Neagh, with its eighty miles of shore, divided among five counties, has never been seen by me but in tranquil loveliness, one vast sheet of shimmering blue; and whether at Antrim, where many memories have their monuments, or at Toomebridge, where the Bann flows out majestically, has seemed well worth a day's journey--the more because its beauty is set among lands not fertile, yet prosperously tilled and inhabited by people, not rich indeed, yet safely removed from the stress of poverty. Not far from it is Armagh, a cathedral city, richer in associations than any in Ireland. If I do not write of Armagh, it is because the oldest of these associations has its monument also at the southern gate of Ulster, where the division of the province is best marked.
Carlingford Lough, according to modern geography, marks that division, but in truth the lough's southern shore, the rocky promontory of Cooley, belongs to Ulster by all titles, though it be included in the modern county of Louth. A steamer will carry you from Holyhead to Greenore (where is a hotel with the inevitable golf links) and land you nominally in Leinster. But all that mountainous headland is inhabited by folk who still keep the Gaelic speech alive among them, and whose remote forbears owned in far distant times the overlordship of Ireland's most famous champion, when Ulster had a pagan chivalry, the Red Branch Circle, which is to Irish legend what the story of Arthur's knighthood is to British romance, or the tale of the Nibelungs to Germany. Cooley (in Irish, _Cuailgne_) was the fief of Cuchulain; and the Brown Bull of Cooley was the object of that great foray made by the rest of Ireland upon Ulster, which is related in the oldest and finest of all Celtic hero tales.
Cuchulain's dwelling was outside Cooley, outside Ulster proper; his stronghold was Dundealgan, the "Thorn Fort" which gives its name to Dundalk. It was an outpost guarding that pass in the hills, the gap of the north, through which the railway, leaving the plains of Leinster, winds into the mountainous and threatening regions of Armagh and Down.