The daily morning journal and courier., 1902-08-28
UNTRAVELLED IRELAND.
BEAUTIFUL SCENERY OF THE
 MOURNE.

the Back coantry-Early History
 Recalled by the Local Nomenclature Traditions of the MOurne Moun- tnins.
 Ireland, no doubt, is being found out in the best sense of the word, but it still remains for the average British tourist an undiscovered country. So- cial ignorance of each other clings to the minds of both peoples like grave cloth. There are whole regions of se- oluded scenery which remain unknown, in inc cases out of ten, even to the oc- casional tourist, who supposes himself to know Ireland well. This is not as it should be. The ancient Jape against the travellers who rush abroad at every opportunity, and explore every country but their own, becomes, of course, ab | surd when taken literally, as is often done. There is no more need to exclude Florence and the Rhine from our itineraries than to, reject Dante Or Goethe in our reading. But every good citizen ought to adopt the obvious com promise and to adhere to 1t firmly. If one season is spent abroad, should not | the next be passed at home? There is infinite pleasure and profit in that rule, as those who observe it are aware. If | 1t were more often followed there would be a chance for some British and many Irish backgrounds which remain practically untrodden. Take, for in- stance, the experience of the present writer. Our American had seen far more of Ireland than all but the rarest exceptions among English tourists ever see, and yet he had missed the Mourne. ] But what is the Mourne? Midway be- tween Belfast and Dublin, and within easy reach of either, one of the most distinctive and accessible of the noun tain districts of the British islands lies | beyond the ken of the British tourist. Fifty miles away the peaks of the Isle of Man. are exquisitely pencilled in fine weather upon the rim of the blue. scafell in the English lake district, | Snaefell. in Manxland, and Slieve Don- ard, rearing up with mighty head and shoulders almost directly out of the bay beneath upon the Irish side-these three summts are in line, but thou sand know both the former for one to whom the latter is known. Slieve Don- ard and the phalanx of serried and fantastic summits behind him are a mass of prineval granite, forming the massif of the great round bastion which the southern part of County Down pushes out into the sea to form one of the most characteristic contours of the Irish coast line. Within nearer hail of our own shores as they are than any other group of the. seaward high lands, which hold green Erin so singu- larly in their rocky frame, the Mourne Mountains are yet among the old and mystic haunts of Celtic legend. Their very names, transmitted without change from the remotest time, seem to echo the language of an immemorial past, and to conceal ancient meanings, from which we are shut out far more strictly than from their summits For the Mourne and it's immediate hinter- land. guarded on every side by hill and wave, play in the Gaelic epics, some- thing like the part filled by Cornwall in Arthurian romance. And if the practi- cal man were scorned or skeptical of those memories, which are as in eradicable in, the humblest Celtic mind as is the Shamrock in the soil, the practical man would be wrong.
 1 The peasant does not imagine vain thing when he leans over a.loose hung | gate upon a summer evening, as quiet as the blue peat smoke which curls above the thatch. and watches the dark sweep of mist-clad summits with some vague thought that they hold the forgotten secrets of his race The Mourne Mountains are among the earliest geological formations in either island. Before the Alps had risen they were old. They have been scooped and carved splintered and pinnaced, they | have been cut into sheer precipices and tumbled into chaotic debris by more centuries than have weathered the Matterhorn. To the ordinary climber who does not go up mountains by preference where they drop plumb, but will scramble vigorously to reach 3 great viewpoint by the best paths available, Sieve Bernesgh and his wild neighbors offer some of the toughest and most exhilarating work in the United Kingdom, foothold and hand hold swinging you to the summit at so steep an angle that your head is never much out of the vertical from your heals. Sieve Donard again the mon- arch of them all, towers up in lines modelled with magnificent breadth and energy from the very pebbles of the beach to a height of not much under 5000 feet. Owing to this unique posi- tion, the summit commands a glorious view which ranges upon 8 perfect day over half the eastern coast of Ireland, from Cave Hill, above Belfast, to Howth Head, near Dublin, and em- braces vast sweep of the Irish Sea. And in the heart of the mountains ranged in a double chain are valleys black and savage as the head of En- nerdale tarns like Lough Shannagh, as blue and lonely as any among the Cum berland crags, and softer valleys where the streams leap down ravines of clean granite, and you walk knee-deep among heather so thick and vivid that where 1t comes out upon the upper slopes the purple can be seen for miles away man. ltling the sovereign solitude of the hills.
 But apart from all these influences the wanderer in the Mourne, if he Is fa- miliar with mountains elsewhere. be- comes gradually sensible of some sub- tie and indefnable charm which at first he knows not how to analyze.