[Illustration: _A Detail of Sligo Abbey_]
as great in their way as those farther down-stream. Sir Joseph Paxton called them "the most picturesque in the world," but one should judge for himself. They are marvellously effective, however, for the river falls nearly 150 feet in three miles or less.
Sligo itself, in spite of its commercial importance, is not greatly appealing in its interest, if one excepts its old abbey, now a ruin, but once an exceedingly ambitious Dominican establishment. Founded in 1252, it was destroyed by a fire in 1414, though immediately rebuilt. Its Gothic is of that superlative quality known best in the superb monkish erections of the Continent of Europe. There are various monuments yet to be seen therein of local and historical interest, but the chief attraction is what remains of the beautiful cloister, fairly perfect as to preservation, and surrounding three sides of a rectangle. There are forty-six arches, each about four feet and a half in height, all elaborately carved, and quite different one from another.
By an ancient and inalienable right, the abbey grounds are still used as a Roman Catholic burial-place.
The Bay of Donegal, and indeed the whole Donegal district, is mellowed and tempered by the everflowing Gulf Stream, which, so the scientists say, were it diverted by any terrestrial disturbance, would give to the entire British Isles the temperature and climate of Labrador. As this event is hardly likely to take place, and certainly cannot be foretold, the interest in the subject must rank with that which one takes in the announcement of the statisticians, for instance, that an express-train travelling at sixty miles an hour would take millions of years to reach Saturn, were it once headed in that direction and had the elevating and sustaining qualities of an air-ship.
Certainly, the mean temperature of the whole south and west coast of Ireland is marvellously mild, and that of Donegal is exceptionally so.
The cliffs of Slieve League, which form a jagged, many-coloured precipice, rise at a sharp angle from the northern shore of Donegal Bay to the summit of the storm and wave-riven mountain, a rock wall 1,972 feet high. It is a grand and noble headland, as a glance at the map will show, and is one of the most lofty elevations seen from Bundoran and the southern shores of the bay; moreover it is accounted unique in all the world, by reason of its marvellous colouring.