Beyond the houses and the limekiln and the glimpse of Sessiagh's delusive waters (Heaven knows how many blank days I fished there!) is a line of grassy hillocks--the mass of Horn Head blocks the view beyond them to the west, but full north, suddenly, held in the curve between two of these little summits, you catch sight of the Atlantic blue. Blue, it may be, or purple, or greyish green, or black almost, with white spray flying; but there it is, held as if in a cup--the very quintessence of the saltness, the strength, and the freedom of the sea. When the herring are in, you shall see it dotted over with smacks and yawls, and here and there a curragh crawling slowly on the water like some black insect; or at night all a-twinkle with lights, till you rub your eyes and wonder if a town has not suddenly sprung into being. And all about, the steep shores of the bay are patched and striped with careful tillage, crops, well-tended, nestling in for shelter under every rocky hummock; and nestled, too, into the folds of the ground, are the white-fronted houses, with stone pegs across their eaves for cording to lash the roof secure against their terrible gales.
It is worth while being there in bad weather, to watch the run of sea on those cliffs; sometimes, in a sinister calm, rolling in mountain-high, tearing itself to whiteness on the long black spines of rock; and then, after this forerunner, comes the storm itself. It is then, when you see the smacks running in for shelter, or when, after a night of this, you see them put out to pick up costly nets that have been cut adrift to save men's lives, and that still must be recovered even at grave peril--it is then you will realize how these people take a grip of their country and cling to the foothold for which all life is a struggle.
Yet life goes merrily there. In the winter through some parishes there will be dancing almost every night in one cottage or another, and the crowd is thick on the floor and about the big turf fire.
[Illustration: MUCKISH AND ARDS FROM ROSAPENNA, SHEEPHAVEN, DONEGAL]
These people are for the most part pure Irish, and west of Dunfanaghy all are Irish speakers. Under Irish rule it was the territory of the M'Swineys, chief urraghts of the O'Donnell, and Doe Castle, at the outfall of the Lackagh, was the fortress of the chief of the name. Owen Roe O'Neill made his landing here, Cromwell's most formidable opponent in Ireland--removed at last either by sickness or poison. Here Red Hugh O'Donnell was fostered by Owen M'Swiney of the Battle Axes before the treacherous kidnapping at Rathmullen. There were three M'Swiney clans--M'Swiney Doe, M'Swiney Banaght in the west of the county, and M'Swiney Fanad in the peninsula that divides Mulroy from Swilly. Each had its own war tune, and a schoolmaster friend of mine--himself a Sweeny--who collected native airs, had got two of the three, but not the third; until at last he heard of an old bedridden man in Fanad who might have it. He rode the twenty miles from his home at Gartan, with fiddle on his back, and found the old peasant wavering on the brink of death, yet still able to frame feebly the whistle or lilt, which my friend picked up on the strings of the fiddle bit by bit, till gradually he had it all, and, there and then, by the dying man's bedside, set the cabin ringing with the oldtime war march of his clan.