Patriotic Sketches of Ireland (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SKETCH IV. ABOUT three miles from the town of Sligo, lies a beautiful spot, called the glen of Knock-na-ree, from the bold and romantic mountains, along whose base it winds the road which leads to it from the town; it combines many charms of ocean scenery, with many traits of picturesque landscape. The little maritime village of Gibraltar, whose white huts appear glittering among the rocks that skirt the irregular coast; the cloud-capped heights of Bcnbullen and Knock-na-ree, with a distant view of the island of Innismurry, and a faint undulating line of the coast of Ulster; unite within the scope of a Coup-d'oeil, a picture highly animated and romantic. The direct path to the glen is tracked through an expansive meadow, which slopes from the foot of Knok-na-ree towards the bay, and terminating in a certain point, by a narrow defile, forms the entrance of the glen, which winds between a double range of rocks for more than a mile. This romantic glen, rich in all that irregularityso essential to the true picturesque, seems to have been produced by some convulsion of nature; and the rocks in many places are so perfectly concave and convex, that it appears as if another shock would unite them again into one solid mass. The island of Innismurry is celebrated in Irish legend, and is still remarkable for the manners, dress, and customs of its inhabitants. The ruins of the chapel of St. Columbkill, and part of the crosier of St. Molaire, are stillshewn there as relics of the two most famous saints in the calender of Irish canonization; the latter, who was confessor to Columbkill, banished him from Innismurry, his favorite retreat, to Scotland, as a penance for three desperate battles the ambition of his penitent had caused to be fought. The Irish seem to have held all islands in ...