After all there seems to have been close connection between the far east and this Emerald Isle. At these seven churches of Clonmines, there was once held a Moorish slave market, and one cannot but think that that keening for the dead must have come from the chant which one may still hear amongst the followers of the prophet.
Clonmines, which is named from the silver mines near-by, was "a very ancient corporation but quite ruinated" even in 1684 when we find it so described in an old manuscript of Wexford. In the time of the Danes it possessed a mint for silver coining and was surrounded by a fosse. On the shores of its river or tide inlet, called the Pill, the descendants of the first English conquerors still lived in the days of Elizabeth, in fact we find yet living in one of these ancient towers, the descendant of the man, Sir Roger de Sutton, who built it _seven centuries ago_--a love of home which passes understanding, for that abode to-day could not be considered as agreeable under any circumstances.
This little river was considered of such importance in the days of Henry VI. that an act of Parliament was passed for the building of towers upon its banks "that none shall break the fortifications or strength of the waters of Bannow."
Even in Henry IV.'s time one John Neville was appointed keeper of this water, and the feudal tenure by which the Hore family held their manor of Pole was for the keeping of a passage over the Pill when the Sessions were held at Wexford. But King and noble reckoned without the storms of winter, which year after year drove the sands of the sea inward, filling the harbour and finally destroying all the towns on its banks. One of them, Old Bannow, we have already visited, and we leave this of Clonmines, to-day a ruin past all redemption, inhabited by that one family whose members have watched the years go by just here for seven centuries.
As we glide off through the winding lanes, the birds are talking to themselves in the hedgerows, and could tell us much about it all I doubt not, while far away on the soft air sounds the throbbing and the sobbing of the sea.
Close by the roadside we come upon an evidence of one of the quaint customs still to be met with in this section. There is a certain tree--why so selected does not appear--which is regarded as holy, and every funeral which passes leaves a small cross at its base, so that to-day the pile of rude wooden emblems of our faith reaches half way up its trunk. There are no shrines around the place or any other evidence that it is regarded as sacred or used as a point for devotion, simply that mass of plain wooden crosses mounting high around its trunk, and numbering many thousands, each one representing the passing of some poor soul out of this earthly sunshine and into the shadow of the grave.