Carlyle visited Lord Hill at Gweedore in 1849, and this is the way in which he described his host afterwards: "A handsome, grave-smiling man of fifty or more; thick, grizzled hair; elegant nose; low, cooing voice; military composure and absence of loquacity; a man you love at first sight." This was indeed high praise from a man of Carlyle's cantankerous temper. Lord Hill was so popular with his tenantry that when his horse broke down they would take the animal out of the shafts, fasten ropes to the car, and pull it home triumphantly with the owner seated in state, no matter how many miles they had to cover. He was a most courteous and obliging man. I well remember how, in the early sixties, he walked a considerable distance and took particular pains to show me the best fishing spots on the river.
They tell a joke at the hotel, on an English dude who asked Pat, the gillie, "Aw, my good man, do you mind telling me what--aw--sort of fish you catch here?" "Well, to tell ye the truth," was Pat's quick reply, "ye niver can tell till yez pulls 'em out!"
There was a big fishing crowd there, and when I announced at dinner that it was more than forty years since I had sat at that table and fished in the river, they all doffed their caps to me--metaphorically--and gave me more salmon and other good things than I could eat or drink.
We hadn't time to fish, and so we pushed on next day through the Rosses district, with all its innumerable fresh-water lakes and salt-water inlets. So intermingled were they that it was hard to decide which was which, and we finally got to know that where wrack grew on the shore the water was salt and connected somewhere with the sea. We stopped at Dunlow for lunch and then descended into the Gweebarra River valley and crossed the large, new steel bridge of that name, erected by the Congested Districts Board to give the people employment on that and the roads connecting with it at both ends. The way lies through an untamably wild country, but with such constant and shifting panorama of mountain scenery that the attention is never fatigued. You see in review the Dunlewy Mountains, Slieve Snaght, Errigal, Dooish, and the Derryveigh chains; in fact, if the weather is fine--and it all depends on that--there is scarcely such another mountain view in the kingdom.