The westward gaze

In the opening pages of The Land of Wales (1937), Eiluned and Peter Lewis explained that the traveller setting forth from Paddington or Euston is ‘about to travel backwards, as well as westwards, for Wales is a storehouse of the past’. This was an enchanted past, where ‘[t]races of submerged forests, stories of sunken cities and lost kingdoms haunt the coast from end to end’.⁹ Travel writers described their westward journeys as affecting voyages in time as well as in space, which began in the bustling metropolis and progressed along the framework of railways and roads to the ends of the land.¹⁰ There was no agreed landmark that denoted the beginning of western terrain. As suggested by Eiluned and Peter Lewis, the anticipation and excitement associated with the west could impress itself on the traveller’s mind from as far away as London. Similarly, it was while visiting London that the Irish travel writers Somerville and Ross decided to escape the terrible weather for the Connemara mountains and the ‘glories’ of their native country.¹¹ Major cities also provided a plausible and convenient setting for the opening scenes of travel narratives, even if the enchantment of the west was not yet apparent. Nugent Robinson’s ‘A Dash Through Connemara’ (1881) began in the dining room of the Gresham Hotel in Dublin, and A. G. Bradley’s journey to north Wales (1898) began with a disagreement with the porter at London Paddington station about how to correctly pronounce ‘Shrewsbury’.¹² J. Ewing Ritchie escaped ‘the heat of a London summer’ for the Western Islands of Scotland, and Alexander Smith invited the reader to ‘leave London or Edinburgh, or whatever city your lot may happen to be cast in’, and accompany him to Skye.¹³ In this way, travel narratives mirrored the practical guidebooks, which suggested tours of western landscapes that began in major cities such as London, Dublin, Edinburgh and Glasgow.

Once the traveller had departed, there was a wide variety of places and narrative devices that conveyed the allure of the west. Border regions such as Shropshire were significant spaces in which the westward gaze was enacted.¹⁴ For example, A. G. Bradley began his book In Praise of North Wales (1926) by remembering when, at the age of seven, he ‘stood on the top of a Shropshire hill’, and ‘dim shapes of, to me, strange and weird contour rose high upon the far western horizon. My hostess told me that they were the Welsh mountains’.¹⁵ H. V. Morton – who articulated the westward gaze in several of his travel books – employed the same motif as he approached Wales through the Border Marches. Passing through a landscape of ‘gentle hills’ to Ludlow, Morton’s mind turned ‘again to Wales’. He stopped at Ludlow Castle, climbed up to a sentry walk and, ‘gazing through an arrow-slit, saw far off to the westward the blue hills of Wales’.¹⁶ Morton relished being in ‘the wildness of a No Man’s Land between two countries’, and his anticipation was repaid when he entered Wales on ‘a morning of sheer enchantment’.¹⁷ Shropshire’s liminality – a region caught between England and Wales – was the point at which travellers began to perceive changes in their surroundings, and their sense of familiarity and certainty began to wane.¹⁸ Even travellers for whom Shropshire was the destination felt drawn to the western horizon. In a BBC radio programme called ‘The Welsh Marches’, S. P. B. Mais climbed the Stiperstones and gazed westwards towards ‘the dim outlines of the cones and peaks and ridges of the Welsh mountains’.¹⁹ Mais repeated the westward gaze later in the programme when, after ascending the Long Mynd, he ‘got a superb view away to the west over the dim pastureland of Shropshire below to the high mountains of Central Wales in the blue mist behind the sinking sun’.²⁰ ‘The Welsh Marches’ was printed, together with several other travelogues, in a book called This Unknown Island (1922), and a photograph accompanying this chapter placed the reader on the Wrekin, looking west towards the peaks Aran Fawddwy and Aran Benllyn in the distance.²¹

Descriptions of anticipation and enchantment also characterised journeys to Skye. There were several routes to choose from, but many travellers followed in the footsteps of Samuel Johnson, who began his Journey to the Western Highlands in Edinburgh and approached the Hebrides from Inverness.²² Johnson’s itinerary was roughly replicated by Morton, who felt he had left ‘the rich Highlands’ behind and entered ‘a wilderness of rock’ on the road from Fort Augustus to Fort William. At this point, the supernatural allure of Skye was perceptible:

I could, it seemed, smell the sea at last; and those dim hills to the westward must be the mountains of the Isle of Skye. There is a queer magic in these gaunt hills. It is the strange unearthliness of the west coast of Ireland … the strange rocks that rise up from moors might be enchanted men, and there is something supernatural even in the grouse that bang up from the moor and settle gracefully behind the next stone wall.²³

Seton Gordon also recognised what he described as the ‘almost fairy-like beauty’ of the ‘phantom-like’ Cuillin when looking westwards from Lochalsh,²⁴ and for Mary Donaldson Skye was ‘mysterious’, ‘shimmering’, and ‘unearthly’.²⁵ Geographically, Skye was located to the north as well as to the west of urban centres such as London, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Oban, and its mixed Norse-Gaelic past makes it a place where the imagined geographies of ‘north’ and ‘west’ overlap. However, Skye was more commonly thought of as part of the ‘Western Highlands and Islands’ and, as such, unequivocally situated within the enchanted west.

The anticipation of going westwards compelled travellers to pause and consider what lay before them, and this motif was reproduced by travel writers in Connemara and Cornwall. When Michael Floyd reached Galway, he explained to his readers that:

all Connemara lies before you, with its brown hills and blue waters, its gorge-like valleys and tracts of boggy moorland; a region as wild and sparse in habitation as any in Ireland, and as beautiful as any in the world.²⁶

Similarly, upon reaching the River Tamar, Katherine Bates took stock of Cornwall, ‘that rocky promontory’ that ‘seems to belong more to the kingdom of the sea than to England’.²⁷ The Tamar was significant as a threshold that marked one of the points at which the traveller felt they had entered the west, and for many writers it marked a sharp boundary between England and what Bates called ‘the veritable Pixydom’.²⁸ Molly Hughes described the Royal Albert Bridge as the route by which ‘we leave “England”’ and enter ‘the country of the Celts’, and once the Tamar had been crossed ‘the difference between the rich Devon land and the ruder scenery of Cornwall, with its lonely little whitewashed cottages, can be immediately perceived’.²⁹ Variations of this formulation abound in travel narratives, including Havelock Ellis’s Tamar, which ‘divides from the rest of Great Britain an ancient land’, and Charles G. Harper’s description of ‘the Cornishman’ who ‘may be heard talking of “going to England,” when he intends crossing the Tamar’.³⁰

In Irish literature, the River Shannon symbolised a similar transition between the anglicised east and the mythic Celtic west.³¹ However, Harry Speight (writing under the name Johnnie Gray) was much further west when he noticed that the landscape began to change. Combining the stock images of poverty and beauty common to descriptions of the Irish west, Speight explained that from Balla ‘we caught sight of the beautiful Connemara mountains, growing ever more beautiful and distinct as we approached our journey’s end’, and west of Castlebar the countryside became ‘wild’ and ‘anything but inviting’.³² For Morton, too, the change in atmosphere occurred further west than the Shannon. Instead, it happened ‘suddenly’ when the traveller left Galway ‘due west by the coast road’ and entered a region ‘in which Progress – whatever we mean by it – has broken in vain against grey walls; it has been arrested by high hills and deep lakes to the east and by the sea on the west’.³³

In contrast to moments of sudden insight gained by crossing definitive thresholds, many travellers instead came to the gradual realisation that the west was different. In his introduction to the Cornish section of Burrow’s Guide to Devon and Cornwall (1921), the Cornish writer Arthur Quiller-Couch described the effect of westward travel on the visitor. It began as ‘a vague feeling that it [Cornwall] differs somehow’, which eluded precise definition. The feeling is, he wrote:

more than the sum of many small impressions which on his way westward have accumulated until, as he pushes down the narrowing peninsula … he suffers a curious apprehensive sense of drawing near to the end of all things. ‘The Land’s End’ – finis terræ, finisterre – has taken on a real meaning for him.³⁴

Once the edge of the land had been reached, the westward gaze extended across the sea and towards the horizon. No sooner had he gained a little elevation on the eight-mile stretch of road between Llanbedr and Barmouth, A. G. Bradley looked out over Cardigan Bay, at which point his thoughts turned to ‘the drowned country of Gwaelod’ beneath the sea.³⁵ Some travellers marvelled at clear, panoramic views of rocky headlands, islands and seascapes, but it was more common for them to revel in conditions of mist and haze and in the atmosphere of sunset and darkness, which helped to produce a sense of ambiguity and mystery that deepened the enchantment of the west.³⁶ In 1884, the novelist Dinah Craik wrote an evocative description of Land’s End in what her title claimed was an ‘unsentimental’ journey through Cornwall. She approached Land’s End when the day was ‘darkening’ and ‘a soft greyness began to creep over land and sea’. Combined with the sharp sea air, the conditions produced an atmosphere in which Craik’s nerves ‘were strung to the highest pitch of excitement’. After following her guide along a dangerous path, Craik stood ‘at the farthest point where footing is possible, gazing out upon that magnificent circle of sea which sweeps over the submerged “land of Lyonesse,” far, far away, into the wide Atlantic’.³⁷

Craik’s sense of wonder and mystery at the periphery was difficult to replicate for travellers who found themselves surrounded by day trippers, guides and the trappings of the tourism industry. For this reason, mist, rain and wind were highly valued for their ability to drive others away. As shown in this book’s opening vignette, it was the ‘furious winds’ and ‘rain and mist’ that enabled W. H. Hudson to find solitude at Land’s End, where ‘its associations, historical and mythical, exercised a strange power over me’.³⁸ Sidney Heath advised his readers not to go to Land’s End during the busy season because ‘health-seeking and somewhat noisy tourists’ disrupt the scene with ‘jarring notes of modernity’. Instead, Heath suggested that Land’s End should be seen ‘under the magic spell of a stormy sunset or a misty dawn’ when the sea heaves ‘with a deep and mysterious ground swell’. Such conditions were, Heath advised, of particular interest to ‘those who are fond of the legends and traditions of the past’.³⁹

Tourist crowds were less common in some areas of western Ireland, which provided more opportunities for effusive and uninterrupted descriptions of the westward gaze. In A Holiday in Connemara (1909), Stephen Gwynn described being ‘lured’ westward by the winding road that brought him to the dark fragments of a ruin, where he took in a view of the sunset and the ‘sombre’ peak of Mweelrea. However, Gwynn’s ‘glorious day’ at the Atlantic seaboard was eclipsed when his friends returned from a day trip to Clare Island and made him ‘almost envious’ with their description of the ‘pure enchantment’ they had witnessed. Gwynn concluded the chapter with an extract from his friend’s diary, which describes their view of the sunset from the steamer and is saturated with the language of ‘enchantment’, ‘intensity’, ‘delight’, ‘magic’ and ‘wonders’. Returning to Killary Harbour was to creep ‘out of fairyland, still dazed a little perhaps by the magical scenes we had witnessed, and our brains still confused by a plethora of vague and unriddled conjectures’.⁴⁰ J. A. MacCulloch was more specific about the ‘Celtic’ character of his conjectures on the Great North Road in Skye, where ‘there is always something mysterious and inviting in this road at which every step carries you farther westward’. For MacCulloch, ‘the charm of the Western Isles beckons you onward like the romantic magic of early Celtic poetry’, and, looking westwards to the Isle of Harris, the ‘soft haze on the distant hills beyond the sea invites you to explore their mysteries’.⁴¹

In these descriptive passages the influence of earlier writers such as Matthew Arnold is clear. In the opening paragraphs of On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867), Arnold described visiting the popular north Wales seaside town of Llandudno. Facing eastwards towards Liverpool, Arnold imagined ‘swarms’ issuing from ‘that Saxon hive’. They were the tourist crowd who made for the ‘attractive’ and charming eastern bay of the Great Orme. But Arnold wanted something more. For him, ‘the horizon wants mystery’, and for this he turned to the west, at which point ‘[e]verything is changed’. He described the ‘eternal softness and mild light of the west’, in which the mountains gradually faded away, ‘hill behind hill, in an aerial haze’. Towards the coast of ‘mystic Anglesey’ the sea ‘disappears one knows not whither’. It was at this point Arnold’s thoughts turned to the story of Llys Helig, ‘a sea-buried palace and realm’ off the coast of nearby Penmaenmawr.⁴²

The westward gaze was drenched in the language of mystery, magic and enchantment, and it thrived in the delicate and otherworldly conditions of mist, haze, sunset and darkness. In this sense, the westward gaze articulated the mysterious and ethereal atmosphere that characterises the Irish Mythological Cycle which, as Douglas Hyde explained in A Literary History of Ireland (1899), emanates ‘a shadowy sense of vagueness, vastness, uncertainty’.⁴³ Similarly, in his essay on ‘The Celtic Spirit in Literature’ (1927), Havelock Ellis recognised the importance of the remote in Welsh tales such as ‘The Dream of Macsen Wledig’, and the power of the ‘terrifying mist’ in stories such as ‘Geraint and Enid’. The remote and misty world of ‘Celtic romance’ explained the love for what the Scottish writer Fiona MacLeod called ‘a rainbow-land … the vague Land of Youth, the shadowy Land of Heart’s desire’.⁴⁴

In the British context, gazing out to sea is often associated with the myths peddled by historians such as E. A. Freeman, J. A. Froude and J. R. Seely, who connected coastlines and seascapes to ideas of imperial destiny, exceptionalism and colonial expansion.⁴⁵ There is also an inward- looking perspective associated with the Dover cliffs which, as Paul Readman has shown, became an important emblem of ‘a discrete sense of islandhood’, separation from Europe and a distinctive landmark of homecoming.⁴⁶ The westward gaze was different because it sought the elusive and the ethereal – sunken lands that had been lost and intangible islands that could not be conquered or colonised. This perspective is conveyed by William Daniell’s ‘The Land’s end, Cornwall’ (1825), on the front cover of this book, which established a much-replicated image of rocky cliffs tumbling into the sea, drawing the viewer’s gaze out towards the horizon.⁴⁷ In contrast to the Dover cliffs, which represented the familiarity of home, the westward gaze reached its climax at the land’s end, the finisterre, which literally denoted the end of the land but also represented the border between the known world (the ecumene) and the unknown.⁴⁸ In the remainder of this chapter and in the following chapter, the discussion moves beyond the general articulations of mystery and enchantment associated with the westward gaze, and focuses in turn on four sites of modern enchantment: Hy Brasil, Tír na nÓg, Cantre’r Gwaelod and Lyonesse.

Hy Brasil

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, readers and travellers encountered stories of an elusive and enchanted island called Hy Brasil. Occasionally visible from the western coastline but always tantalisingly beyond reach, Hy Brasil is a phantom island that was believed to exist somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, typically off the west coast of Ireland. The island was associated with tales of overseas voyages from Irish mythology, the setting sun in the west and historical accounts of people who claimed to have seen or even visited the island. This version of Hy Brasil was made up of many layers, the earliest of which was cartographical. From the mid-fourteenth century, the island appeared on Genoese and Catalan portolan charts as, or in variations of, insula de brazile, when merchants and navigators explored the Atlantic. The creators of nautical charts inherited classical ideas about the western seas as mysterious and populated by islands such as the Hesperides, the Elysian Fields and Plato’s sunken continent of Atlantis.⁴⁹ Hy Brasil and its variations featured on nautical maps until 1865, and was marked ‘Brasil Rock’ in John Purdy’s Chart of the Atlantic Ocean (1835) and in Alexander G. Findlay’s revised edition (1861), which noted that the islet’s existence ‘has been doubted’, but included an eyewitness account of the island by the company and master of an English merchant ship from 1791.⁵⁰

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Hy Brasil became a literary setting with symbolic and allegorical value in fictional works such as Richard Head’s O-Brazile, or, The Inchanted Island (1675) and the purported eyewitness account of William Hogg published as The History of the Inchanted-Island of O’Brazile (1724). Hy Brasil also appeared in satirical pamphlets such as Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub (1704), serving as a literary device that allowed writers to explore themes such as delusion, deception and that which is unattainable.⁵¹

The location of otherworlds in the west, towards the setting sun, is a common feature of Celtic mythology. However, nowhere in the medieval textual sources of Irish or Welsh mythology is Hy Brasil named as one of the Celtic otherworlds. The association between Hy Brasil and Irish mythology is an invention of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when Hy Brasil became thoroughly Gaelicised. This process began with William Beauford who, in ‘The Ancient Topography of Ireland’ (1786), took O’Brasile (the contracted form of insula de brazil) and, following phonetic spelling conventions used to anglicise Irish names, translated the Romance definite article ‘O’ as ‘Hy’, giving the impression that the name had a Gaelic root.⁵² Beauford described ‘Hy Brasail’ as ‘the inchanted island, the paradise of the pagan Irish’, which was connected to ‘a number of romantic stories’ and, according to the inhabitants of Arranmore, might still be spotted on a clear day.⁵³ Despite criticisms from contemporary antiquarians such as Charles O’Conor, John O’Donovan and James Hardiman, Beauford’s spelling and description of ‘Hy Brasail’ were reprinted in William W. Seward’s Topographica Hibernica (1797), and perpetuated by John T. O’Flaherty’s Royal Irish Academy lecture on the Aran Islands in 1824,⁵⁴ while Beauford’s Gaelic etymology for Hy Brasil was developed in later texts such as Reverend Denis O’Donoghue’s Brendaniana (1893).⁵⁵

Despite his criticism of Beauford, the connection between Hy Brasil and Irish mythology was strengthened by Hardiman. In Irish Minstrelsy (1831), Hardiman cited an unpublished 1636 manuscript called History of Ireland, in which ‘O’Brasile’ is situated off the west coast of Connacht and named as a refuge of the Tuatha Dé Danann, who fled following their defeat by the Milesians.⁵⁶ Hardiman also edited the 1846 publication of A Choro- graphical Description of West or H-Iar Connaught (1684), in which Roderic O’Flaherty describes ‘O’Brasil’ as an ‘inchanted island’ that could be seen from the Aran Islands.⁵⁷ It is important to note that historians have failed to locate the original manuscripts for the unpublished History of Ireland and O’Flaherty’s Chorographical Description.⁵⁸ Moreover, Hardiman and subsequent writers treated Richard Head’s fictional pamphlet O’Brazile (1675) as fact. Nevertheless, Hardiman’s references to these manuscripts shaped discussions of Hy Brasil in influential travel accounts such as Caesar Otway’s A Tour in Connaught (1839) and Mr and Mrs Hall’s Ireland (1841–3), which reinforced the connection between Hy Brasil and Irish mythology.⁵⁹

The Gaelicised Hy Brasil was adopted by poets such as Gerald Griffin, Thomas Moore and the Young Irelander Denis Florence MacCarthy, whose work helped to cultivate the idea of a mythic Irish west in the nineteenth century. In MacCarthy’s ‘The Voyage of Saint Brendan’ (1848), ‘Hy Brasail’ is the ‘Eden of the western wave!’ and became the destination of the seafaring hero-saint,⁶⁰ and in the early twentieth century the folklorist and archaeologist William Gregory Wood-Martin described the island as ‘one of the elysiums of the primitive Irish’ in his book Traces of the Elder Faiths of Ireland (1901).⁶¹ For Charles Squire, in The Mythology of the British Islands (1905), Hy Brasil was the ‘paradise over-seas’, which he placed alongside Tír na nÓg as one of the Celtic otherworlds situated in an ‘unknowable island of the west’.⁶²

Travellers and travel writers inherited a composite idea of Hy Brasil, which combined cartographic descriptions of a tangible yet frustratingly elusive island with antiquarian, literary and folkloric portrayals of an otherworldly realm of Irish tradition. Travel literature grounded references to Hy Brasil in the western extremities of Ireland, especially the Aran Islands and Achill Island, and encouraged travellers to look westward for signs of the phantom island. In these passages, the tone was typically playful or ironic, and writers interrupted their sentences with remarks that activated the imaginative and sceptical faculties of the reader, who could suspend disbelief and enjoy a self-conscious indulgence in Hy Brasil. Murray’s and Black’s guidebooks, for example, described the viewpoint from Croaghaun on Achill Island stretching across the sea, beyond which the nearest land would be America, ‘unless we believe’ in the enchanted island Hy Brasil.⁶³ This technique was replicated by Stephen Gwynn, who described the view from the steam-yacht as it left Blacksod Bay and passed the Achill cliffs on its way to Clew Bay in The Charm of Ireland (1934). Everything was hazy, imprecise and ethereal, from the ‘faint shadow’ of Croagh Patrick and the ‘ghosts of mountains’ inland, to the sea of ‘rippled silver’ in the west, ‘dancing and sparkling in the sunshine’. From here, the eye ‘travelled outward and onward to Hybrasil, if you chose, or to Ireland overseas’.⁶⁴ No less effective was the light and perhaps ironic tone of W. B. Yeats, who in The Celtic Twilight (1893) explained matter-of-factly that a fisherman from Drumcliff saw Hy Brasil on the horizon, while the Irish novelist Frank Mathew employed a dry sense of humour when he remarked that several people in western Ireland had ‘convinced me that they were convinced’ that Hy Brasil was out there somewhere.⁶⁵

Conditions of haze, mist and clouds provided a sense of ambiguity that was exploited by a self-described ‘casual visitor’ to Rosses Point (Sligo) in 1908, who looked towards the setting sun and saw ‘a solitary, shadowy-crimson-ringed object’, which was ‘perhaps a cloud’ or ‘maybe hy-Brazil’.⁶⁶ The vague meeting place of sea, land and sky was conveyed by the soft blue tones of Paul Henry’s painting ‘Clare Island from Achill’ (1915), which a contemporary reviewer described as a ‘dream-like vision’, depicting the Knockmore cliffs rising out of the ‘halcyon sea’ as ‘glamorous as the fabled isle of Hy Brazil’.⁶⁷ Later in the period, Jack B. Yeats’s ‘A Race in Hy Brazil’ (1937) situated the viewer on the island itself, with vivid colours, bold expressive brush strokes and an alluring horizon that in its imprecision suggests the elusive and ethereal nature of Hy Brasil (see Figure 2.1).⁶⁸ However, in keeping with the generally light tone of travel writing, the casual visitor’s moment of apparent affect at Rosses Point was undercut by the rest of the article, which discussed more quotidian matters such as the quality of the accommodation, the golf links and the need for a pier.⁶⁹

Aside from the land and seascapes of western Ireland, there was a variety of other locations that invoked Hy Brasil. For the traveller ‘J. M.’, the Long Island (the Outer Hebrides) as seen from the Scottish mainland was ‘a veritable Hy Brasil’ that was ‘set gloriously afire’ by the sunset, and the American travel writer Harold Speakman was passing Lough Neagh on the road from Antrim to Dublin when he looked upon a scene of ‘blue, misty shores’ as ‘tender’ as the phantom isle.⁷⁰ Looking for Hy Brasil was an important part of the westward gaze, but this orientation was reversed for writers such as John Mitchel, who was located on the other side of the Atlantic after being convicted of libel and transported to Bermuda in 1848. Stephen Gwynn quoted extracts from Mitchel’s Jail Journal (1854) in a 1907 lecture, in which Mitchel described finding momentary escape from his imprisonment by looking north-eastwards and remembering Ireland, which had become ‘that green Hy Brasil of my dreams and memories’.⁷¹

Guidebooks embellished their descriptions of Hy Brasil with quotations from poems such as Gerald Griffin’s ‘The Isle of the Blest’ and Thomas Moore’s ‘Oh! Arranmore, Loved Arranmore’, celebrating the wondrous visions of earthly paradise while omitting the more sombre concluding messages of the poems. Murray’s Handbook for Ireland favoured the opening lines of Griffin’s poem:

On the ocean that hollows the rocks where ye dwell

A shadowy land has appeared, as they tell;

Men thought it a region of sunshine and rest,

And they call’d it O’Brazil, the isle of the blest.⁷²

The poem propagated the idea that Hy Brasil was a pagan Irish paradise, influencing later literary works such as Thomas D’Arcy McGee’s ‘The Voyage of Eman Oge’ and William Larminie’s ‘The Finding of Hy Brasil’, and Yeats included ‘The Isle of the Blest’ in his Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888).⁷³ Guidebooks included Griffin’s suggestive imagery of the elusive ‘shadowy land’ of sunshine, rest and ‘the blest’, but omitted the poem’s warning that a fanciful dreamland should not be sought after.⁷⁴ The warning is directed at the ‘Rash dreamer’ who bartered his ‘calm life of labour and peace’ for a futile ‘vision of fanciful bliss’:

The warning of reason was spoken in vain;

He never revisited Aran again!

Night fell on the deep, amidst tempest and spray,

And he died on the waters, away, far away!⁷⁵

Similarly, Black’s guidebooks offered excerpts from Thomas Moore’s poem ‘Oh! Arranmore, Loved Arranmore’ in the section on the Aran Islands, including the opening lines of the final verse:

That Eden, where the immortal brave

Dwell in a land serene, –

Whose bowers beyond the shining wave,

At sunset oft are seen.⁷⁶

The excerpts in Black’s guidebooks included the speaker’s search for the paradise of the ‘dreaming poets’, but the closing lines, which build on the central theme of regret, are omitted, and the reader is spared the futility expressed by the poem’s speaker, who could never recapture the ‘bliss’ of ‘those sweeter days’ of youth:

Ah! dream too full of sadd’ning truth!

Those mansions o’er the main

Are like the hopes I built in youth, –

As sunny and as vain!⁷⁷

While there were some travel texts that conveyed the message of futility and regret associated with Hy Brasil, these themes are much more noticeable in political discourse.⁷⁸ This is particularly apparent in discussions of Irish emigration, which, according to the novelist Rosa Mulholland, caused exiles to ‘pine’ for an idealised home of ‘fairy-like hills and dales’ and ‘enchanted rivulets’. Emigrants, she continued, tell their children stories of a romanticised Ireland that exists ‘no more than does the Hy-Brasil’, and when they visit Ireland the dream is shattered by scenes of ‘broken cabins’, ‘unmended causeways’ and the squalor and vice of the cities.⁷⁹ The act of leaving Ireland was also described as a voyage to Hy Brasil, begun with ‘hearts so light and hopes so high’ and, as the Drogheda Independent put it in 1904, doomed to end in ‘hard work and a condition bordering on slavery’.⁸⁰ In fact, Hy Brasil was reached for in discussions of all the major political developments of the period. The Dublin Weekly Nation claimed that the landlords’ ‘grasp on the nation’ was disappearing just like Hy Brasil in the wake of the Plan of Campaign and Balfour’s Land Law (Ireland) Act 1887, and a letter printed in The People in 1889 accused critics of Gladstone’s Home Rule Bill of being unhappy with ‘anything short of turning Ireland into a new Hy Brazil’.⁸¹ The nationalist leader and agrarian campaigner William O’Brien drew laughter from the crowd during a rousing nationalist speech made at a United Irish League demonstration in 1899 when he suggested that the redistribution of land in Connacht was now a matter of ‘practical politics’ whereas a couple of years previously it was considered as ‘visionary’ as the phantom island, which ‘everyone wished for and nobody ever saw’.⁸² Later in the period, in 1917, the writer of an article in the East Galway Democrat preferred the parliamentary work of John Redmond to the abstentionism of De Valera and Sinn Féin, whose aim of an Irish republic was deemed ‘as illusory as the fabled island’.⁸³ David Lloyd George’s promise of ‘peace and plenty’ was also subject to comparison with the elusive Hy Brasil in the aftermath of the Great War, and during the Irish Civil War an article in the Dublin Evening Telegraph remarked that ‘the nearer we get to peace in Ireland the father away we get from it’. The article concluded with a parody of Gerald Griffin’s poem, in which the ‘shadowy hope’ is not an elusive island but ‘a promise of peace’, which is within sight ‘Till a land mine explosion destroys it one day’.⁸⁴

There was another, self-consciously rational, strand of engagement with Hy Brasil, which looked to geology, glacial theory, physics and the catastrophic submergence of oceanic islands as a means of rationalising and explaining sightings and cartographic representations of Hy Brasil. Rather than a tool for dismissal or disenchantment, rational and sceptical deduction instead revealed there were reasons to take the phantom island seriously. The re-enchanting effect of scientific inquiry is palpable in an entertaining lecture delivered to the Royal Geological Society of Ireland by Donegal County Surveyor William Harte in 1867. Harte admitted that the legend of Hy Brasil ‘partakes in a high degree of the fictitious as well as the marvellous’, and commented sardonically on the derivative nature of eyewitness accounts when he remarked that it was never possible to speak to ‘the man that saw the man’ who had seen the island. Nevertheless, Harte combined the fantastical with the rational, and was tantalised by the idea that the legend of Hy Brasil was ‘not a mere invention’, but a tradition ‘springing out of physical facts’. Harte proposed that, as the Ice Age ended, huge icebergs from the great northern ice drift met land glaciers along the western coast of Ireland, allowing human hunters to chase bear, reindeer and other Arctic fauna across the ice and out to sea. The story of a disappearing land, then, grew out of the hunter’s dismal experience of seeing these hunting grounds ‘sink from his view forever’, and Harte concluded ‘with I think some reason’ that there were ‘facts in the fairyland tradition’, and ‘perhaps we have a glacial origin for our legend’.⁸⁵

Rationalisation also took place between readers of Notes and Queries, a magazine established in 1849 to facilitate correspondence between members of the reading public. On 22 September 1883, a contributor called Mr Marshall submitted a query about Hy Brasil, drawing attention to seventeenth-century documents such as O’Flaherty’s Chorographical Description and suggesting that the ‘enchanted island’ had not yet ‘received notice’ in the magazine.⁸⁶ By December, Marshall’s query had three responses. The bookseller and antiquarian Thomas Kerslake provided two quotations from William Worcester mentioning ‘insula Brasyle’, and an answer from ‘N’ focused on Hardiman’s sources, including the Unpublished History and Richard Head’s O’Brazile (1675).⁸⁷ The surgeon and council member of the Royal Irish Academy William Frazer also replied, arguing that ‘an island must have existed at a very recent period where the Porcupine Bank is now known to be placed’.⁸⁸ The Porcupine Bank is a raised portion of the Atlantic seabed, named after its discovery by the HMS Porcupine in 1862 while searching for the best route for laying the first Atlantic telegraph cable. Restating the argument he made in a paper read to the Geological Society of Ireland in 1879, Frazer highlighted a map drawn in 1640 by the Geographer Royal of France, Sieur Tassin. Frazer believed the map to be accurate because it was made by a ‘skilful Geographer’ who relied on his own knowledge and on the testimony of trustworthy sailors who traversed the Atlantic Ocean. Furthermore, claimed Frazer, George Henry Kinahan had written about evidence of human habitation ‘below low water of Spring tides’ on the Aran Islands in his Manual of the Geology of Ireland (1878) which, along with evidence of submerged bogs along Ireland’s west coast, led Frazer to conclude that Brasil must have been above water at a time that ‘cannot have been very remote’.⁸⁹ In his response to Marshall, Frazer also provided extracts from a letter sent to him by the geologist Professor William King of Queen’s College Galway.⁹⁰ King drew attention to specimens of Littorina littorea (the common periwinkle) dredged from the surface of the Porcupine Bank. Given that this shellfish ‘lives between ordinary tide marks’ and requires exposure on rocky surfaces for its survival, King suggested that the Porcupine Bank was once ‘a shallow littoral beach’ adjacent to an island.⁹¹ The association between Hy Brasil and the Porcupine Bank was repeated by Wood-Martin in his Traces of the Elder Faiths of Ireland (1901), who quoted Thomas Henry Huxley’s essay ‘On the Methods and Results of Ethnology’ (1865), in which the eminent biologist speculated that ‘there must be half-a-dozen Atlantises beneath the waves of the various oceans of the world’.⁹²

Furthermore, contemporary reports of dramatic and destructive events lent further credence to the idea that there might be an underlying truth to legends of sunken lands and disappearing islands. In 1930, the Evening Herald reported on the ongoing emergence and submergence of volcanic islands in the Malay Archipelago following the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883. This process recalled the Portuguese island of Port Alexander, which sank off the west coast of Africa in 1925, leaving behind nothing but wreckage and ‘scores of bodies’. Following this report, the article outlined several legends of lost lands, including Hy Brasil, without further comment. The proximity of these stories to recent, tangible and catastrophic events made it more difficult to dismiss the idea of a vanished island called Hy Brasil.⁹³ Similarly, Frazer’s own experiences watching the erosion of cliffs on the Isle of Wight, and the destruction of the shoreline at Bray during the previous winter’s storms, convinced him it was certainly possible that the ‘strong breakers of the Atlantic’ combined with a general process of subsidence had destroyed much of Brasil island since the creation of Tassin’s map.⁹⁴ Less dramatic, but equally indicative of the ‘state of uncertainty’ about the oceans, was a discussion held at the June 1926 meeting of The Anchorites, a group established in 1919 for the discussion of matters relating to ships and shipping. At the meeting, Lieutenant-Commander R. T. Gould’s lecture on ‘Mystery Islands’ was read, and it claimed that even ‘in these days of over-civilisation’, a ‘small departure from the beaten track’ could transform the ‘ordinary sailor into a discoverer’. This was laid bare by the ‘discovery’ a few years earlier that the Belcher Islands in Hudson Bay were larger than previously thought. Much of Gould’s lecture was dedicated to the Pacific and South Atlantic regions, but he noted the similar position of Hy Brasil and the Porcupine Bank, and concluded tentatively that ‘an island searched for unsuccessfully for many years may after all be found to be a very concrete reality’.⁹⁵

The most popular explanation for the legend of Hy Brasil was that it was an optical illusion. The Irish antiquarian Thomas J. Westropp articulated this position in his 1912 lecture to the Royal Irish Academy, ‘Brasil and the Legendary Islands of the North Atlantic’. For Westropp, the tradition of an island called Hy Brasil was the product of a mirage or cloud bank combined with the setting sun and the ‘keenly intelligent’ and ‘poetical’ early inhabitants of Ireland, who ‘stood on the western coasts face to face with phenomena of mystery and might’ and saw what they thought was a floating island.⁹⁶ As a folklorist and archaeologist, Wood-Martin brought together tradition and scientific observation and stretched the explanatory limits of the optical illusion thesis. Indeed, according to Wood-Martin, the study of folklore was in ‘the ranks of science’ because although it granted latitude to the imagination it was also based ‘on ascertained facts’. What he proposed were not definite assertions but ‘deductions’ and ‘tentative’ theories that are ‘subject to modification’, with the aim of overcoming ‘obscurity’.⁹⁷ Having established his approach, Wood-Martin proposed that the phantom island Hy Brasil might be explained as a Fata Morgana – a mirage that can make objects below the horizon visible from the shore, or make objects on the horizon appear bigger, closer or even suspended in the air.⁹⁸ And it was not just Hy Brasil that could be explained in this way. For Wood-Martin, the mysterious fleet of ships seen by a young James Hardiman in 1798 was in fact an ‘aerial phenomenon’ (Hardiman’s term) caused by Admiral John Borlase Warren’s fleet, which was pursuing a French squadron off the Irish coast after it had failed to land troops in support of the Irish Rebellion. By the same reasoning, Wood-Martin suggested that records of ‘fantastical ships’ seen from Galway harbour in 1161 might have been a fleet of Viking war galleys, and visions of Hy Brasil might be explained as ‘optical illusions’ of the Porcupine Bank, which ‘may represent the site of the now phantom land’.⁹⁹

An abridged version of this explanation can be found in guidebooks and travel writing throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Black’s and Murray’s guidebooks explained succinctly that there is ‘some truth’ in sightings of Hy Brasil because ‘some sunken land may, in the rays of the setting sun, appear as an island’.¹⁰⁰ J. L. Cloud used this for dramatic effect when, during his visit to the Aran Islands, he glanced out to sea and saw ‘a bank of clouds’ that ‘looked like land’. Confused, because ‘in that direction the nearest land was America’, Cloud soon remembered that ‘from these cliffs the famous Hy Brazil was said to have been seen’.¹⁰¹ An article in the Derry Journal in 1885 claimed that the work of Scottish physicist David Brewster and other scientists of optics explained subjective visual phenomena by way of the refraction of light and therefore broke the enchantment of Hy Brasil.¹⁰² But after a widely reported sighting of an ‘Atlantic Mirage’ from the Connemara coast in 1908, the Galway Observer suggested that many people in the ‘crowd of witnesses’ no longer regarded Hy Brasil as an ‘imaginative story from the region of fables’.¹⁰³

Westropp experienced this type of optical illusion as a boy in 1872 when, as the sun was setting, ‘a dark island suddenly appeared far out to sea’. Since then, he had seen other ‘apparent islands’ from the coastline of Clare in 1887 and Mayo in 1910.¹⁰⁴ Bringing together his own experiences with his knowledge of cartography, geology and the periwinkle shells on the Porcupine Bank, Westropp concluded that further scientific investigation was required before the ‘upheaval and submergence’ of an island could be denied.¹⁰⁵ A sense of inconclusiveness remained. In 1938, the Belfast Telegraph surveyed the ‘rebirth of interest’ in disappearing islands over the preceding decades, and suggested that rather than settling the question of a lost continent in the Atlantic, the replacement of ‘mythological and romantic’ description with ‘scientific examination’ had instead produced ‘solid reasons’ for ‘believing in the ancient continent’. Recent lectures delivered by the traveller Count Byron de Prorok and Colonel A. Braghine’s new book were examples of how the ‘cold light of scientific examination’ had kept Hy Brasil alive, ‘awaiting substantiation or even disproof’.¹⁰⁶ In the end, Hy Brasil remained elusive, impossible to reach and yet difficult to fully explain away, and therein lay its power to evoke lively debate and to enchant travellers in the west.

Tír na nÓg

Tír na nÓg, the Land of Youth, is perhaps the best known of the otherworldly paradises in Irish mythology. There are several other names given to the mythological lands that exist beyond the mortal world, including Tír Tairngire (the Land of Promise), Mag Mell (the Plain of Happiness), Tír na mBeo (the Land of the Living), the Isles of the Blessed and, from the eighteenth century, the Gaelicised Hy Brasil.¹⁰⁷ Despite being an otherworldly island that occupies mythic time as well as mythic space, Tír na nÓg is typically situated to the west of Ireland or the Hebrides, towards the setting sun. It is the land of the forever young, where there is no decay or pain, and the setting of an island in the west is a pervasive feature of Celtic mythology, symbolising remoteness, paradise, joy and death.¹⁰⁸

Tír na nÓg, and the otherworld more generally, appears frequently in the stories of Irish tradition as the abode of the supernatural Tuatha Dé Danann. The tales of the Mythological Cycle describe how the Tuatha Dé Danann were defeated by the mortal Milesians (who represent the Gaels) and were forced to leave Ireland. Many retreated into the sídhe, underground realms of splendour located beneath barrows or hillocks, while others travelled across the sea to Tír na nÓg under the leadership of the sea god Manannán mac Lir.¹⁰⁹ As Charles Squire put it in The Mythology of the British Islands (1905), this was an ‘unknown, and, except for favoured mortals, unknowable island of the west’, and the mythical stories focus on the movement of supernatural characters and ‘favoured mortals’ between world and otherworld.¹¹⁰

Several of these tales are categorised as the Fianna, Fenian or Ossianic Cycle, which are set in the third century and describe the exploits of Fionn mac Cumhaill and his warriors, the Fianna. Fionn mac Cumhaill’s son, Oisín, is taken to Tír na nÓg by Niamh in the story ‘Oisín in Tír na nÓg’, and King Cormac mac Airt passes through a thick mist on his journey to the otherworld in ‘Cormac’s Adventure in the Land of Promise’. The otherworld also features prominently in the Eachtraí (adventure tales) such as ‘The Voyage of Bran’ and ‘The Adventure of Connla’, and in Immrama (sea voyages) such as ‘The Voyage of Máel Dúin’. The otherworldly sea voyage is combined with Christian tradition in ‘The Voyage of St Brendan’, in which the hero-saint journeys across the Atlantic to the Isle of the Blessed.¹¹¹ Island otherworlds in the west appear in other mythologies, too, but in the west of Ireland, situated on the fringe of Europe, this is an especially arresting and potent combination.¹¹²

The literary history of Tír na nÓg in the modern period can be traced back to the Irish language poem Laoi Oisín ar Thír na nÓg (the Lay of Oisín in the Land of Youth), which was published in 1750 by Micheál Coimín. From the late eighteenth century, Anglophone antiquarians and folklorists became increasingly interested in the Irish language and in translating the extant manuscripts of Irish mythology into English.¹¹³ However, perhaps the most influential body of work was produced by James Macpherson, whose Fragments of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands (1760), Fingal (1762) and Temora (1763) became known collectively as The Poems of Ossian. Claiming that these publications were translations of an ancient epic written by a Caledonian poet called Ossian (the anglicised form of Oisín), Macpherson’s work was in fact the combination of themes and contents drawn from Scottish Gaelic ballads and his own imagination. This sparked fierce debates about authenticity. The Poems of Ossian were criticised for appropriating Irish mythology and were labelled forgeries by contemporaries such as Samuel Johnson and the Irish surgeon and historian Sylvester O’Halloran, who discussed what he called Macpherson’s ‘disingenuity’ in his Introduction to the Study of the History and Antiquities of Ireland (1772).¹¹⁴ Nevertheless, Ossian’s epic counted Goethe, Napoleon, Blake and Byron among its defenders, and played an influential role in the emergence of modern nationalisms across Europe.¹¹⁵

Some travel writers waded into the Ossian debate, and Alexander Smith came out in firm support of Ossian’s authenticity. For Smith, Macpherson was never more than a ‘somewhat free translator’, and any visitor to the Quiraing landslip on Skye would leave believing ‘the misty and spectral Ossian to be authentic’.¹¹⁶ Mary Donaldson hinted at Macpherson’s considerable contribution to the ancient epic when she emphasised that it was ‘his Ossian’, but it was more common for the subject to be avoided.¹¹⁷ Miltoun and Mansfield, for instance, quoted O’Halloran’s summary of ‘Oisín in Tír na nÓg’ in full, but managed to steer clear of the Ossian debate by omitting O’Halloran’s distrustful remark, aimed at Macpherson, from the beginning of the passage.¹¹⁸ Burton E. Stevenson also withdrew from the debate in his Charm of Ireland (1914), noting evasively that ‘[f]act and fancy have been so mingled in the Ossianic legend that it is impossible to disentangle them, nor is it profitable to try’.¹¹⁹

In the nineteenth century, Irish mythology was gradually popularised in collections such as William Carleton’s Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry (1830) and Tales of Ireland (1834), and in 1859 Brian O’Looney’s translation of Coimín’s Lay of Oisín was published in the Transactions of the Ossianic Society.¹²⁰ This gathered pace later in the century, following the publication of Irish scholar Eugene O’Curry’s lectures on the manuscripts, chronicles and stories of Irish mythology in his influential Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish (1873). The work of O’Curry and other Celtic scholars such as Kuno Meyer, Standish Hayes O’Grady and Whitley Stokes shaped the many translations and adaptations of the stories published by writers of the Irish Literary Revival. The novelist (and cousin of Hayes O’Grady) Standish James O’Grady followed his The History of Ireland: The Heroic Period (1878–80) with the novels Finn and His Companions (1892) and The Coming of Cuculain (1894), and Eleanor Hull offered her own rendition of The Cuchullin Saga in Irish Literature in 1898. Douglas Hyde’s A Literary History of Ireland (1899) and his retellings of myths under the pseudonym An Craoibhín Aoibhinn influenced the folklorist Lady Augusta Gregory, who published English translations of the Irish sagas in Cuchulain of Muirthemne (1902) and Gods and Fighting Men (1904). Hyde and James O’Grady also influenced W. B. Yeats, whose Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889) was followed by many poems and plays that drew on Irish mythology. This wave of literary rediscovery also inspired writers beyond Ireland. T. Gwynn Jones’s dramatic Welsh language poem ‘Tir na n-Óg’ (1916) popularised the Irish Land of Youth in early twentieth-century Wales, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson published the poem ‘The Voyage of Maeldune’ in 1892, although when contemplating Tír na nÓg travel writers and folklorists often preferred to quote Tennyson’s description of Avalon in ‘Morte d’Arthur’, ‘Where falls not hail, nor rain, nor any snow’.¹²¹

Along with the literary developments described above, Irish mythology also had a broader presence in Irish culture. Around the turn of the twentieth century Tír na nÓg was the name of an annual fete in Roscommon,¹²² a debating club in Belfast connected to the Gaelic League,¹²³ a society offering Irish language classes in Dublin¹²⁴ and a hurling team that competed in the County Antrim Championship.¹²⁵ D. P. Moran famously argued that Irish nationhood depended on the rediscovery of its cultural heritage, and popular involvement in this project was organised by newly established societies, including the Gaelic Athletic Association from 1884 and the Gaelic League from 1893.¹²⁶ The broad project of reviving a distinctive national culture for Ireland led in many directions, one of which was as a foundation for political rebellion. The stories of Irish mythology and themes of fighting, heroism and self-sacrifice were injected with nationalist messages by poets such as Alice Milligan and Thomas Boyd, and at the very least names such as Tír na nÓg, Cú Chulainn and Oisín could provide a mystical, hazy, golden quality for thinly veiled messages of rebellion.¹²⁷ In 1906, an article in the Fermanagh Herald remembered the Manchester Martyrs of 1867, and used Tír na nÓg as a metaphor for the paradise of Ireland beyond ‘the bonds and chains of serfdom’, which could only be attained through ‘the noblest and most enduring acts of patriotism and self-sacrifice’.¹²⁸ Such adaptations of Irish mythology shaped the thinking of the Easter Rising leaders Patrick Pearse and Joseph Plunkett, and after publishing Celtic Wonder Tales (1910) the poet Ella Young supported the rising as a member of the paramilitary group Cumann na mBan. As Martin Williams put it, Irish mythology ‘gave an epic quality to the whole national struggle’, and this connection only became more explicit after 1916.¹²⁹

Travel writers were receptive to the vibrant literary context described above, and drew on it when offering their own renditions, commentaries and summaries of mythological stories. Typically, references to mythology were triggered by the landscapes and seascapes of the west. Gazing westwards from the edge of the land prompted passing references to what Francis Miltoun and Blanche McManus Mansfield described as ‘the “Enchanted Isles”’, situated north-west of Achill Island, in Romantic Ireland (1904).¹³⁰ Likewise, Mary Banim drew the reader’s line of sight over ‘the first islands of Connemara’, followed by the Aran Islands, ‘Hy Brazil, the Land of the Blest, and Tir-na-n-Oge, the Land of Youth; and then – America!’¹³¹

This chapter, however, focuses primarily on the particularly strong associations between mythological heroes such as Cú Chulainn, the otherworld Tír na nÓg and the western landscapes of Skye. Kenneth MacRae explained these connections in his Handbook and Guide to the ‘Misty Isle’ of Skye (1921). In line with the story ‘Tochmarc Emire’ (The Wooing of Emer),¹³² MacRae explained that the hero of the Ulster Cycle, Cú Chulainn, travelled to Dunscaith Castle –‘one of the most ancient castles in the Hebrides’ – to complete his training under the tutelage of Scáthach, or the Queen of Skye, the famous warrior and teacher. This task was set by Forgall Manach of Lusca as a means of preventing Cú Chulainn from marrying his daughter, Emer. Scáthach was ‘learned in all the arts of war and the chase’ and ‘knew the ocean route to Tir-nan-Oig, the paradise of the Celtic mythology’. According to MacRae, Cú Chulainn would stand on the castle battlements and ‘often gaze towards the setting sun to get a glimpse of “Irt” or “Iort”, the gateway to the Land of Eternal Youth’.¹³³ In contrast, Mary Donaldson’s visit to Dunscaith was shaped by Macpherson’s Ossian, in which Cú Chulainn leaves Skye and his wife, Bragela (who is based on Emer), for Ireland. In this version, it is Bragela, ‘leaning on her rock’, who looks westwards and listens in vain for Cú Chulainn and ‘the sound of thy distant harp’, who ‘will never return’.¹³⁴

The other popular association between Skye and Cú Chulainn was in the name of the Cuillin mountains, often spelled ‘Cuchullin’ in connection with the hero.¹³⁵ This was one theory for the etymology of Cuillin, but it was a contested one. Despite being struck by their ‘unearthly’ appearance in the sunshine, Mary Donaldson was clear that the Cuillin range ‘is not called after the Celtic hero’ and was a name, ‘like many another, invented by guide books’.¹³⁶ Donaldson’s dismissal of the association rested not just on linguistic evidence but on her own knowledge of the mythology, too. When Cú Chulainn was in Skye to complete his training, he was required to cross a ‘bridge of cliffs’ that were ‘as narrow as the hair of one’s head, as slippery as the eel of the river, and as steep and high as the mast of a ship’. The legendary Cú Chulainn achieved this feat, of course, but Donaldson was not so easily convinced that such a challenge could have been completed in Skye:

When evidence of the existence of such a bridge of cliffs in Skye (or, for the matter of that, anywhere else) is forthcoming, then we may believe it was called after the super-Blondin who so successfully negotiated it!¹³⁷

Donaldson’s tone is typical of the playful, humorous and lively forms of engagement with mythology that characterised travel writing across the period. Similarly, while dismissing the association between Tír na nÓg and two rocky islets, Fladda-chùain and Holm Island, MacCulloch remarked that this was merely an example of Irish legends being ‘adapted to Highland localities’, and added wryly that ‘[m]uch fairy glamour would be needed’ to see these islets as ‘the Land of Immortal Youth!’¹³⁸ In both instances, Donaldson and MacCulloch retained a sense of detachment from the mythological associations, indulging in them temporarily and enjoying their imaginative and localised connections with Skye while conveying amusement at apparent signs of inauthenticity.

Travel writers also used the familiar conventions of storytelling to signpost an immersive yet conscious form of indulgence in mythological tales. Before recounting the stories of Ossian, Cú Chulainn and Diarmuid told to him by his companion Mr M’Ian, Alexander Smith’s preamble bore all the hallmarks of the storyteller. ‘Dwellers in cities’ usually laughed when they heard ghost stories, explained Smith, but ‘the blood should run chill’ in Skye, which is ‘steeped in a ghostly atmosphere’. Skye is a ‘weird and uncanny’ place, ‘haunted of legends’, where men are ‘gifted with the second sight’, and as Smith and Mr M’Ian sat down on the ruined stairs of Dunscaith Castle overlooking Loch Eishort, ‘a great white vapour’ flowed down from the Cuillin peaks. The scene well and truly set, Smith concluded: ‘The old gentleman was the narrator, and the legend goes as follows’.¹³⁹ Robert Lynd produced a more detached mood in Rambles in Ireland (1912) by providing his own rendition of the dialogue between Oisín and St Patrick, after Oisín returned from Tír na nÓg to find Ireland Christianised. The meeting represented an encounter, a ‘running duel’, between the ‘golden youth of Paganism’ and the ‘grave and terrible sanctity’ of Christianity, and Lynd’s dialogue is injected with humour, in which Oisín’s ‘pagan common sense’ produces witty retorts before he ultimately submits to baptism. ‘Obviously’, observed Lynd, ‘it was Oisín of the battles and not Patrick of the prayers who was surrounded with a divine light in the hearts of the tale-maker who invented this’.¹⁴⁰

Another commonly used device was the qualifying remark, which followed or interrupted a story like a punchline. During his story of the miraculous Fairy Flag, J. J. Bell related how the MacLeod chief of Dunvegan married a fairy and then reassured his readers that ‘[s]uch a union need hardly astonish us’ because this ‘took place’ in the days when water horses were common and ‘men frequently held converse with mermaids’.¹⁴¹ In Ireland, J. M. Synge directed his qualifying remark at a Kerry storyteller, an old man who pointed out places of interest on their way to see the races. The storyteller indicated places connected to stories of Diarmuid, and then gestured to ‘a neck of sand where, he said, Oisín was called away to the Tir-na-nOg’. After telling a further story about two men who got caught out at sea, one of whom miraculously saw Tír na nÓg under the water, Synge undercut the man’s narratives at the beginning of the following paragraph, with the dry remark: ‘Then he began telling me stories of mermaids – a common subject in this neighbourhood’.¹⁴² H. V. Morton’s storyteller was more complicit in generating a humorous tone at Lough Leane, in Killarney. The boatman told the story of the O’Donoghue who, ‘in ancient times’, dived into the lake and ‘entered that Land of eternal Youth which, as every one knows, lies beneath Killarney’. The stock character of the yarn-spinning host soon emerged, as the boatman continued:

‘And when the boatmen reach the age of sixty,’ explains the boatman with his eyes on the American girls, ‘we push thim in the lake, and, bedad, they come back to us at the age of eighteen! Mike, here, came back last week …’.¹⁴³

The use of humour was not confined to travel writing, and in 1913 the fictional MP for Tír na nÓg appeared in a satirical article in The Irish Citizen on the subject of the franchise. At a debate in the Parliament of Amazonia, Mrs Kendickson and Miss Evenson, the members for Tír na nÓg and Hy Brasil respectively, argued in favour of extending the franchise to ‘male property-owners over twenty-one years of age’ and to husbands of women already entitled to vote. The Prime Minister Mrs Balquith, however, spoke against the idea.¹⁴⁴

Also on the playful side of the spectrum, David MacBrayne commercialised the associations between the Hebrides and Tír na nÓg by including ‘The Isles of Youth’ in the title of their steamer guidebook for 1938, describing the ‘craving for some island far out on the rim’ where ‘dreams come true’. The key ingredient here was the fact that Tír na nÓg was a place of mythic time, which caused the melancholic conclusion to the story ‘Oisín in Tír na nÓg’. Having spent what he thought was a short and happy time with Niamh in the Land of Youth, Oisín returned to Ireland to find that 300 years had passed, and the Fenian warriors, along with his father Fionn mac Cumhaill, were long dead. In a selective reading of the story, the steamer guidebook repeated the suggestion of the eternal, timeless land of happiness in the opening passage, in which the Scottish playwright Donald R. MacLaren wrote that ‘the measures of clocks and calendars will not trammel you’, because ‘these are the ISLES OF YOUTH’.¹⁴⁵ In the same way that the poems of Griffin and Moore were quoted selectively for their romantic descriptions of Hy Brasil, MacBrayne’s guidebooks offered to the traveller the images of timelessness, eternal youth, happiness and bliss, without referencing Oisín’s tragic return home to find his friends and family long gone. In this passage, the Hebrides have become the Isles of Youth themselves, accessible on the screw steamer Fingal, where the visitor will feel refreshed and renewed in a manner reminiscent of the stories of Tír na nÓg, where there is no ageing or decay.

Finally, there were also spiritual and philosophical responses to Irish mythology, and to Tír na nÓg specifically. In 1896, the Welsh-Cornish literary scholar and author Arthur Symons accompanied W. B. Yeats on a visit to the Aran Islands. As they reached the edge of Inis Mór and looked across the Atlantic from ‘this last shivering remnant of Europe’, Symons commented ‘it was with no feeling of surprise’ they learned from their guide that ‘no later than two years ago an old woman of those parts had seen, somewhere on this side of the horizon, the blessed island of Tir-nan-Ogue’. At this point, Symons experienced a spiritual awakening at the edge. Looking over the cliffs, the sea became ‘the magic mirror that glittered there like a crystal … hesitating on the veiled threshold of visions’. Having seen Aran and Sligo in such conditions, Symons no longer doubted that ‘the Irish peasant still sees fairies about his path, and that the boundaries of what we call the real, and of what is for us the unseen, are vague to him’. This was the effect of the landscape, which ‘has in it more of the twilight’ where land, sea, and sky ‘mingle more absolutely than on any other coast’.¹⁴⁶ Symons’s powerful passage ends with the declaration:

I have never believed less in the reality of the visible world, in the importance of all we are most serious about. One seems to wash off the dust of cities, the dust of beliefs, the dust of incredulities.¹⁴⁷

The intensity of Symons’s contemplation is in keeping with the some of the ideas about Celtic literature expressed by Yeats in an essay written the following year. For Yeats, Celtic literature brought a ‘vivifying spirit’ to European culture because it was ‘flooded with the passions and beliefs of ancient times’. The so-called ‘natural magic’ of the Celt was, for Yeats:

the ancient religion of the world, the ancient worship of nature and that troubled ecstasy before her, that certainty of all beautiful places being haunted, which it brought into men’s minds.¹⁴⁸

Overlooking ‘that mysterious region of the sea’, Symons did not mock the old woman for her tale of having seen Tír na nÓg on the horizon. Neither did he undercut Irish mythology, otherworldly visions and local folklore with ironic or humorous remarks. Instead, Symons allowed himself to be arrested by the powerfully affecting landscapes of the edge, fully giving himself up to, to return to Landy and Saler’s phrase, a ‘quasi-mystical union’ with something larger than himself.

The next chapter continues the present discussion by considering how the sunken lands Cantre’r Gwaelod and Lyonesse elicited a similar range of responses.

Notes

1. 1. M. Saler, ‘Modernity and Enchantment: A Historiographic Review’, The American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (2006), 692–716.

2. 2. Weber, ‘Science as a Vocation’, 155.

3. 3. Weber, ‘Science as a Vocation’, 138–9.

4. 4. J. Landy and M. Saler, ‘Introduction: The Varieties of Modern Enchantment’, in The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age, ed. J. Landy and M. Saler (Stanford, CA, 2009), 1–14, at 2.

5. 5. Landy and Saler, ‘Varieties of Modern Enchantment’, 1–14.

6. 6. M. Saler, ‘ “Clap if You Believe in Sherlock Holmes”: Mass Culture and the Re-enchantment of Modernity, c.1890-c.1940’, The Historical Journal 46, no. 3 (2003), 599–622, quotations at 606–7.

7. 7. Landy and Saler, ‘Varieties of Modern Enchantment’, 1–2.

8. 8. A similar range of responses, from ‘playful entertainment’ and ‘mischievousness’ to ‘philosophical and artistic contemplation’ and ‘creative inspiration’, are identified by Julia Mannherz in Modern Occultism in Late Imperial Russia (Ithaca, NY, 2012), 3–4.

9. 9. E. Lewis and P. Lewis, The Land of Wales (London, 1937), 1–2.

10. 10. There were also instances when travellers moved from west to east. The American tourists Lucy Langdon Williams and Emma V. McLoughlin sailed to Ireland, after which they travelled eastwards across the coast of North Wales; see L. L. Williams and E. V. McLoughlin, A Too Short Vacation (Philadelphia, 1892), 52. Also see J. U. Higinbotham, Three Weeks in the British Isles (Chicago, 1911), 312.

11. 11. Somerville and Ross, Through Connemara (1893), 1–4.

12. 12. N. Robinson, ‘A Dash through Connemara’, Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly 11, no. 3 (March 1881), 279–86, at 279; A. G. Bradley, Highways and Byways in North Wales (London, 1898), 1–2.

13. 13. J. Ritchie, The Cruise of the Elena (London, 1877), 3–4; Smith, A Summer in Skye (1885), 7.

14. 14. Roddy, ‘Literature of Shropshire’.

15. 15. A. G. Bradley, In Praise of North Wales (Boston, 1926), 1.

16. 16. H. V. Morton, In Search of Wales, 9th edn (London, 1936 [1932]), 9.

17. 17. Morton, In Search of Wales, 16–17.

18. 18. Roddy, ‘Literature of Shropshire’.

19. 19. ‘The Welsh Marches’ was printed, along with sixteen other radio programmes, in S. P. B. Mais, This Unknown Island (London, 1922), 180.

20. 20. Mais, This Unknown Island, 184.

21. 21. Mais, This Unknown Island, between pages 188 and 189.

22. 22. Johnson, Western Isles of Scotland, 1–2, 54, 72, 107; George Birkbeck Hill retraced Johnson’s route in Footsteps of Dr Johnson (Scotland) (London, 1890).

23. 23. H. V. Morton, In Search of Scotland, 4th edn (London, 1929 [1929]), 194.

24. 24. S. Gordon, Highways and Byways in the West Highlands (London, 1935), 60. Later in the book, Gordon describes the ‘ghostly’ Cuillin ‘on the far western horizon’ from Loch Duich – see page 66.

25. 25. M. E. M. Donaldson, Wanderings in the Western Highlands and Islands, 2nd edn (Paisley, 1923 [1920]), 105–6.

26. 26. M. Floyd, The Face of Ireland (London, 1937), 60.

27. 27. K. Bates, From Gretna Green to Land’s End: A Literary Journey in England (London, 1908), 350.

28. 28. Bates, From Gretna Green to Land’s End, 350.

29. 29. M. V. Hughes, About England (London, 1927), 21.

30. 30. H. Ellis, ‘The Men of Cornwall’, The New Century Review 1, no. 4 (April 1897) 328–35, at 328; C. G. Harper, The Cornish Coast (North) (London, 1910), 1. Also see S. Heath, The Cornish Riviera (London, 1911), 6.

31. 31. T. Cusack, Riverscapes and National Identities (Syracuse, NY, 2010), 158–89, especially 158–73.

32. 32. Gray [Speight], View of Ireland (1885), 19.

33. 33. H. V. Morton, In Search of Ireland, 7th edn (London, 1932 [1930]), 173.

34. 34. Quiller-Couch, ‘Introduction to Cornish Section’ (1921), 101.

35. 35. Bradley, Highways and Byways in North Wales (1898), 387–8.

36. 36. For a detailed discussion of mist, see G. Roddy, ‘Mist in “the West”’: Literatures of Travel and Landscape in the Western British-Irish Isles, c.1880–1940’, in Literary Tourism and the British Isles: History, Imagination, and the Politics of Place, ed. L. Fletcher (Lanham, MD, 2019), 37–67.

37. 37. D. Craik, An Unsentimental Journey through Cornwall (London, 1883), 113–15. Also see C. L. Hind, Days in Cornwall (London, 1907), 350.

38. 38. Hudson, Land’s End (1908), 58–9.

39. 39. Heath, Cornish Riviera (1911), 40–42.

40. 40. S. Gwynn, A Holiday in Connemara (New York, 1909), 192–5.

41. 41. J. A. MacCulloch, The Misty Isle of Skye (Edinburgh, 1905), 56.

42. 42. M. Arnold, The Study of Celtic Literature (London, 1900 [1867]), 1–3. For Renan, see E. Renan, ‘The Poetry of the Celtic Races’, in The Poetry of the Celtic Races and Other Essays by Ernest Renan, trans. W. G. Hutchinson (London, 1896), 1–60, at 1–2. The essay was originally published as ‘La poésie des races celtiques’, Revue des Deux Mondes 24, no. 5 (1854), 473–506.

43. 43. D. Hyde, A Literary History of Ireland (London, 1899), 293. This is also discussed in M. Williams, ‘Ancient Mythology and Revolutionary Ideology in Ireland, 1878–1916’, The Historical Journal 26, no. 2 (1983), 307–28, at 308.

44. 44. H. Ellis, ‘The Celtic Spirit in Literature’, in A Study of British Genius, 2nd edn (London, 1927 [1904]), 217–19. Fiona MacLeod was the pseudonym of the Scottish writer William Sharp. Ellis was better known for his work as a sexologist.

45. 45. C. F. Behrman, Victorian Myths of the Sea (Athens, OH, 1977).

46. 46. Readman, Storied Ground, 25–51, quotation at 25; P. Readman, ‘ “The Cliffs Are Not Cliffs”: The Cliffs of Dover and National Identities in Britain, c.1750-c.1950’, History 99, no. 335 (2014), 241–69, at 247–9, 255–6.

47. 47. For examples of travel books replicating this view, see GWR, Cornish Riviera (1905), 60; A. Salmon, Cornwall (New York, 1925), facing 149; Bates, Gretna Green to Land’s End (1908), facing 376; S. Baring-Gould, Cambridge County Geographies: Cornwall (Cambridge, 1910), 41; The Land’s End Country (n.d. [1930]), front cover and facing page 4; Penzance: The Gateway to the Land’s End District (Penzance, 1921), front cover.

48. 48. S. Roseman and N. Herrero, ‘Introduction’, in The Tourism Imaginary and Pilgrimages to the Edges of the World, ed. N. Herrero and S. Roseman (Bristol, 2015), 2–3.

49. 49. B. Freitag, Hy Brasil: The Metamorphosis of an Island (Amsterdam, 2013), 3–6.

50. 50. J. Purdy, Memoir, Descriptive and Explanatory, to Accompany the New Chart of the Atlantic Ocean (London, 1835), 359; A. G. Findlay, Memoir, Descriptive and Explanatory, of the Northern Atlantic Ocean (London, 1861), 665.

51. 51. Freitag, Hy Brasil, 153–7.

52. 52. W. Beauford, ‘No. XI, The Ancient Topography of Ireland’, in C. Vallancy, Collectanea de Rebus Hibernicis, vol. 3, part 1, no. XI (Dublin, 1786), 249–426. For a full explanation, see Freitag, Hy Brasil, 215–16.

53. 53. Beauford, ‘Ancient Topography of Ireland’ (1786), 282.

54. 54. Freitag, Hy Brasil, 219–20; W. Seward, Topographica Hibernica (1797); J. T. O’Flaherty, ‘A Sketch of the History and Antiquities of the Southern Islands of Aran, Lying off the West Coast of Ireland’, read 26 January 1824, Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy 14 (1825), 79–140.

55. 55. D. O’Donoghue, Brendaniana: St Brendan the Voyager (Dublin, 1893), 304n.

56. 56. Freitag, Hy Brasil, 61–2; J. Hardiman, Irish Minstrelsy, vol. 1 (London, 1831), 368.

57. 57. Freitag, Hy Brasil, 64; A Chorographical Description of West or H-Iar Connaught: Written A.D. 1684, by Roderic O’Flaherty, ed. J. Hardiman (Dublin, 1846), 68–9.

58. 58. Freitag, Hy Brasil, 61, 64.

59. 59. C. Otway, A Tour in Connaught: Comprising Sketches of Clonmacnoise, Joyce Country, and Achill (Dublin, 1839), 387–90, 439–41; Mr and Mrs S. C. Hall, Ireland: Its Scenery, Character, &c. (3 vols) vol. 3 (London, 1843), 436–7.

60. 60. The poem was first published in Dublin University Magazine in 1848, and then in D. F. MacCarthy, Ballads, Poems, and Lyrics, Original and Translated (Dublin, 1850), 71–108, quotation at 77. MacCarthy’s source was Hardiman (see pages 363–4).

61. 61. W. G. Wood-Martin, Traces of the Elder Faiths of Ireland (2 vols), vol. 1 (London, 1901), 219.

62. 62. C. Squire, The Mythology of the British Islands (London, 1905), 74.

63. 63. Murray’s Ireland (1878), 209. Also see Black’s Picturesque Tourist of Ireland, 15th edn (Edinburgh, 1877), 301.

64. 64. S. Gwynn, The Charm of Ireland (London, 1934), 124–5.

65. 65. W. B. Yeats, The Celtic Twilight (London, 1893), 144; F. Mathew, Ireland (London, 1905), 164. For discussion of Yeats’s dry, light, and ironic tone, see E. Hirsch, ‘Coming out into the Light: W. B. Yeats’s “The Celtic Twilight” (1893, 1902)’, Journal of the Folklore Institute 18, no. 1 (1981), 1–22.

66. 66. ‘ “By the Sad Sea Waves”. The Rosses Point. Notes by a Casual Visitor’, The Sligo Champion, 4 July 1908, 8.

67. 67. ‘Connaught in Colour. Mr and Mrs Henry’s Exhibition’, Northern Whig, 15 March 1915, 9.

68. 68. J. B. Yeats, A Race in Hy Brazil (painting, 1937).

69. 69. ‘ By the Sad Sea Waves’, 1908, 8.

70. 70. J. M., ‘East and West’, St James’s Gazette, 2 April 1901, 5; H. Speakman, Here’s Ireland (New York, 1931 [1925]), 264.

71. 71. ‘John Mitchel, of Newry. Mr Stephen Gwynn, MP, Lectures in Town Hall’, Frontier Sentinel, 9 February 1907, 8.

72. 72. Murray’s Ireland (1878), 187–8; Cooke, Murray’s Ireland (1902), 237; Cooke, Murray’s Ireland (1906), 246.

73. 73. Freitag, Hy Brasil, 212.

74. 74. Freitag, Hy Brasil, 225–7.

75. 75. W. B. Yeats, Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (London, 1888), 212.

76. 76. Black’s Picturesque Tourist of Ireland (1877), 271; Black’s Tourist Guide to Ireland, 19th edn (Edinburgh, 1885), 224. These lines were also included in M. D. Frazar, Practical Guide to Great Britain and Ireland, vol. 2, Ireland and Scotland (Boston, MA, 1909), 65.

77. 77. T. Moore, The Poetical Works of Thomas Moore (London, 1841), vol. 4, 95–6.

78. 78. Mathew, Ireland (1905), 164–5.

79. 79. R. Mulholland, ‘The Irish Exile’s Home-sickness’, Supplement to the Wexford People, 5 November 1892, 5.

80. 80. ‘The Greatest National Danger’, Drogheda Independent, 26 March 1904, 4. Hy Brasil was also used as a metaphor to describe overseas opportunities that did in fact exist, as in the letter from John Studdart to the Sligo Board of Guardians persuading ‘distressed people in Ireland’ to emigrate to Minnesota, ‘another Hy Brazil’: ‘Sligo Board of Guardians’, The Sligo Champion, 17 January 1880, 3.

81. 81. ‘Right Gloriously’, Dublin Weekly Nation, 28 January 1888, 8–9; ‘M.P., letter to the editor’, The People, 12 October 1889, 5.

82. 82. ‘The United Irish League. Demonstration at Claremorris. Speeches by the ven. arch-deacon Kilkenny, P.P., Mr Michael Davitt, MP, Mr William O’Brien, and Mr Conor O’Kelly’, Freeman’s Journal, 8 May 1899, 5–6.

83. 83. ‘Practical Work and Pursuit of Illusions’, East Galway Democrat, 15 December 1917. Similar comments were made in ‘Items of the Week’, Irish Weekly and Ulster Examiner, 3 July 1920, 1.

84. 84. ‘The Problem of Prices’, The Derry Journal, 7 July 1919, 2; ‘Gossip of the Day. Sketches by “Cormac”’, Dublin Evening Telegraph, 20 March 1923, 3.

85. 85. W. Harte, ‘On the Post-Tertiary Geology (Recent and Post-Pliocene Phenomena) of the County of Donegal, and Part of the County of Derry, and its Connexion with that of Scotland’, Journal of the Royal Geological Society of Ireland 2 (1871), 30–67, at 65–6.

86. 86. ‘O’Brazile’, Notes and Queries, 22 September 1883, 6th ser., viii, 224.

87. 87. ‘O’Brazile or Hy Brazile’, Notes and Queries, 15 December 1883, 6th ser., viii, 474–5.

88. 88. ‘O’Brazile or Hy Brazile’, 475.

89. 89. W. Frazer, ‘On Hy Brasil, a Traditional Island off the West Coast of Ireland, Plotted in a MS. Map, Written by Sieur Tassin, Geographer Royal to Louis XIII’, Journal of the Royal Geological Society of Ireland 15, pt. 3 (New Series), 1879–80 (Edinburgh, 1880), 128–31, at 128–30.

90. 90. William King was better known for correctly identifying that the bones found in the Neanderthal valley belonged to a distinct species of human.

91. 91. ‘O’Brazile or Hy Brazile’, 1883, 475.

92. 92. Wood-Martin, Traces of the Elder Faiths (1901), 212–13.

93. 93. ‘A Lost Island’, The Evening Herald, 12 September 1930, 8.

94. 94. Frazer, ‘On Hy Brasil’ (1880), 130–31.

95. 95. ‘Mystery Islands. How Navigators Are Misled’, Liverpool Journal of Commerce, 3 June 1926, 9.

96. 96. T. J. Westropp, ‘Brasil and the Legendary Islands of the North Atlantic: Their History and Fable. A Contribution to the “Atlantis” Problem’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy: Archaeology, Culture, History, Literature 30 (1912), 223–60, at 223–4.

97. 97. Wood-Martin, Traces of the Elder Faiths (1901), ix–x.

98. 98. Fata Morgana is a mirage caused by a temperature inversion resulting in atmospheric refraction, where light bends as it passes through air of varying temperature (and thus varying density).

99. 99. Wood-Martin, Traces of the Elder Faiths (1901), 212–13, 215–16, 218. Also see Chorographical Description of West or H-Iar Connaught, by Roderic O’Flaherty (1846), 31–2.

100. 100. Quotation from Black’s Ireland (1877), 271. Similar comments made in Cooke, Murray’s Ireland (1902), 235–6, 265; and Cooke, Murray’s Ireland (1906), 246, 275. Also see Black’s Ireland (1885), 223–4.

101. 101. J. L. Cloud, ‘The Arran Islands’, Harper’s Monthly Magazine (1880–1), 506–14, at 508.

102. 102. ‘The Legends and Superstitions of Northern Ulster’, The Derry Journal, 9 February 1885, 7.

103. 103. ‘A Phantom City. Letter to the Editor’, The Spectator, no. 4181, 15 August 1908, 231.

104. 104. Westropp, ‘Brasil and Legendary Islands’, 257.

105. 105. Westropp, ‘Brasil and Legendary Islands’, 246–7, 257–8.

106. 106. ‘Lost Atlantis’, Belfast Telegraph, 28 December 1938, 8. In this article Hy Brasil is understood as the Celtic name for Atlantis.

107. 107. Squire, Mythology of the British Islands (1905), 133–4. These names are often used interchangeably; see Black’s Ireland (1877), 301 for use of Hy Brasil, ‘Enchanted Island’, Tír na nÓg, and ‘the country of youth’ in this manner. Hy Brasil was another name for Tír na nÓg in Mr and Mrs S. C. Hall, Ireland, its Scenery, Character, &c. (3 vols), vol. 1 (London, 1841), 394.

108. 108. Avalon is the British equivalent: Squire, Mythology of the British Islands (1905), 133–4.

109. 109. Squire, Mythology of the British Islands, 135–6.

110. 110. Squire, Mythology of the British Islands, 133–4.

111. 111. For a discussion of the symbolic significance of the island in the west, see Foster, ‘Certain Set Apart’, especially 262–3.

112. 112. Foster, ‘Certain Set Apart’, 263. Wood-Martin commented on the connections between classical and Irish mythology in Traces of the Elder Faiths (1901), 219.

113. 113. Many books, manuscripts, and entire libraries were destroyed between the onset of Viking raids in the late eighth century and the Battle of Clontarf (1014), so the principal manuscript sources of Irish mythology date from the eleventh century. They include Lebor na hUidre (The Book of the Dun Cow, c.1100), Lebor Laignech (The Book of Leinster, twelfth century), Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson B 502 (early to mid-twelfth century), as well as the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century manuscripts The Yellow Book of Lecan, The Great Book of Lecan and The Book of Ballymote.

114. 114. S. O’Halloran, Introduction to the Study of the History and Antiquities of Ireland (London, 1772), 309–33, 337–64.

115. 115. C. Kidd and J. Coleman, ‘Mythical Scotland’, in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History, ed. T. Devine and J. Wormald (Oxford, 2012), 62–78, at 67–70; P. B. Ellis, A Dictionary of Celtic Mythology (London, 1987), 159–60. Also see C. O’Halloran, ‘Irish Re-Creations of the Gaelic Past: The Challenge of Macpherson’s Ossian’, Past and Present 124 (1989), 69–95.

116. 116. Smith, Summer in Skye (1885), 219, 232.

117. 117. Donaldson, Wanderings (1923), 108–9.

118. 118. F. Miltoun and B. M. Mansfield, Romantic Ireland, vol. 2 (Boston, MA, 1904), 165–6; for O’Halloran’s comment, which clarified that the story was related by ‘Ossine Mac Fion (but not Ossian)’, see O’Halloran, Antiquities of Ireland (1772), 362–3.

119. 119. B. E. Stevenson, The Charm of Ireland (New York, 1914), 494–5.

120. 120. Ellis, Dictionary of Celtic Mythology, 13.

121. 121. For example, MacCulloch Misty Isle of Skye (1905), 44–5; Squire, Mythology of the British Islands (1905), 133. Tennyson borrowed this line, which is used to describe the Elysian Fields in The Odyssey.

122. 122. ‘Tir na n-Og’, Freeman’s Journal, 4 September 1897, 7.

123. 123. ‘The Irish Language Movement (From Information Supplied by the Gaelic League)’, Irish Independent, 31 October 1900, 2.

124. 124. ‘Tir Na N-Og’, Carlow Nationalist, 20 July 1901, 12.

125. 125. ‘Hurling. County Antrim Championship. Tir Na N-og v. Old Pioneers’, Irish News and Belfast Morning News, 25 November 1901, 6.

126. 126. Williams, ‘Ancient Mythology and Revolutionary Ideology’, 314.

127. 127. Williams, ‘Ancient Mythology and Revolutionary Ideology’, 313–19.

128. 128. ‘The Manchester Martyrs. A Dreadful Sacrifice. Died for Ireland’, Fermanagh Herald, 24 November 1906, 6.

129. 129. Williams, ‘Ancient Mythology and Revolutionary Ideology’, 323.

130. 130. Demonstrating how worldly and otherworldly islands overlapped, they counted Inishglora and Inishkea among their enchanted isles. Miltoun and Mansfield, Romantic Ireland, vol. 2 (1904), 165–6.

131. 131. ‘Through Ireland by Mary Banim’, Dublin Evening Telegraph, 31 August 1889, 8.

132. 132. The story, told in the manuscripts The Book of the Dun Cow and The Book of Leinster, was translated by Kuno Meyer in ‘The Wooing of Emer’, Archaeological Review 1, no. 1–4 (London, 1888), 68–75, 150–5, 231–5, 298–307, and Meyer’s version was retold in abridged form in E. Hull, The Cuchullin Saga in Irish Literature (London, 1898), 55–84.

133. 133. MacRae, Guide to Skye (1921), 66.

134. 134. Donaldson, Wanderings (1923), 108–9.

135. 135. Alexander Smith enticed his readers to Skye where they might see ‘the Cuchullin hills’ and listen to ‘a legend as old as Ossian’ in Summer in Skye (1885), 7. This spelling is also used in David MacBrayne, Summer Tours in Scotland (Glasgow, 1889), 65, 69.

136. 136. Donaldson, Wanderings (1923), 105. Donaldson suggests the name derives from the Gaelic word ‘cuilionn’ (cuileann), which means holly and refers to the shape of the jagged ridge.

137. 137. Donaldson, Wanderings (1923), 105.

138. 138. MacCulloch, Misty Isle of Skye (1905), 44–5, 45 n1.

139. 139. Smith, Summer in Skye (1885), 158–60.

140. 140. Lynd, Rambles in Ireland (1912), 307–8. This takes place when Lynd is in Dublin, which is also where the encounter between Oisín and St Patrick takes place.

141. 141. J. J. Bell, Scotland’s Rainbow West (London, 1933), 313–15.

142. 142. J. M. Synge, In Wicklow, West Kerry and Connemara (Dublin, 1911), 130–32.

143. 143. Morton, In Search of Ireland (1932), 137.

144. 144. ‘Parliamentary Debate’, The Irish Citizen, 9 August 1913, 92–3.

145. 145. MacBrayne, Royal Route (1938), see title page and 2–3. This was characteristic of MacLaren’s writing, who in his radio play ‘The Isles of Youth’ (broadcast in 1936) described Iona as a place where ‘Time will seem to pause. In your heart you will hear the murmur of the ages’: ‘Clan Notes. From the Seanachaidh’, Daily Record and Mail, 27 May 1936, 12.

146. 146. A. Symons, Cities and Sea Coasts and Islands (London, 1918), 313–14.

147. 147. Symons, Cities and Sea Coasts and Islands, 314.

148. 148. W. B. Yeats, ‘The Celtic Element in Literature’ (1897), in W. B. Yeats, Ideas of Good and Evil (New York, 1903), 270–95, at 275, 290.