liortahork, Bloody Foreland, :Burlibeg, Croiiy, Minaleck, Rannafast; Annagry, and Errigal snow-white to the left, and Tory like a heavyheaded monster coming out of the ·sea, and the salt water whitening in surf around a hundred islands. There was a Gaelic college which has a Lright p:ace in the memories of many Ulster peo{Jle. There were the kir:.clliest, softest-spoken people in the world. :There were boats and fishing and tales of the sea, and the ;:;andeel stra,nd whlch on the night of a full mean and an ebhed spring tide was a fragi:e, diaphanous, black-and-silver fringe to the Contin~nt of Europe. Nowadays the knowledge that every one who has looked on Donegal thinks it beautiful brings pleasure and not puzzlement-a sign, I suppose, that we grow up and learn that nothing in the world i's absolutely one's own. I turn to the Jatest book published about Ulster and read: ··Donegal is not only Ulster's most beautiful county ibut many people consider it the finest scer.ery in Ireland. I would place only one county befo!'e it, namely Kerry.'' Let me make the reservation that Donegal and Kerry are equally beautiful, with contrasting tyipes -vf b€i:;mty: D0negal blo·::·.de, Kerry brunette; Donegal classical, Kerry romantic; Donegal hlue with sharp edges, Kerry brown with blurred edges; or any other words you fancy that will emphasise their differences in co:our and shape. I go back more than a hundred years to read in his Sketches In Donegal what that bitter old scholar, Caesar Otway, ·wrote of the view from the top of Muckish. And I think of an· the men who have looked on Donegal and praised it in the intervening time, men who were born there and foreigners from other counties and other lands : W. H. Maxwell to whom also it was a land of wild adventure ; Charles Lever, Dinah Mary Craik who wrote John HaMfax, Gentleman; Seamus McManus, who visits Mountcharles every year; Forrest Reid, who sent some of the dreaming boys of his nove~s there; Allingharrt who wrote so nostalgically of Bally:shannon and the Erne ; Patrick MacGill, who came from Donegal to work first in West Tyrone; Stephen Gwynn ar.d A. E.; the priest who used the pseudonym of Paul Peppergrass when he W!'Ote in Shandy Maguire the fine description of Barnesmore; the brothers Mac Grianna and the Irish writers that have come so plentifully ~rom the barren and love:y western places; the late M. J. MacManus. who went there every year and who died there in a place that he considered the mt0st beautiful in Ireland. There are a few of the writers who have praised it in words, speaking for the many people who would have wished so to praise it, but l1acked the power. Donegal absorbs all these praises;, written or spoken or merely felt inarticulately ; and like a fair woman who has the .advantages fl]so of wisdom and perPPtual youth the place remains unspoiled and unchanged. 3~8.
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