p of fine ecclesiastical buildings, on an elevated
plateau to the left, just beside the road, or street, I should rather
say, for those buildings are the beginning of the town; they consist of
a cathedral and a convent, with very commodious schools, and a pretty
gothic chapel. On the other side of the way is the schoolhouse, in shade
of which the military were concealed on the day the Caharagh labourers
invaded Skibbereen. A short distance beyond the town, the wooded hill of
Knockomagh, rising to a considerable height, overhangs Lough Hyne, one
of the most beautiful spots in Ireland. Some miles to the westward lies
the pretty island of Sherkin, which with Tullough to the east, makes the
charming little bay of Baltimore completely landlocked. Out in front of
all, like a giant sentinel, stands the island of Cape Clear, breasting
with its defiant strength that vast ocean whose waves foam around it,
lashing its shores, and rushing up its crannied bluffs, still and for
ever to be flung back in shattered spray by those bold and rocky
headlands. The town of Skibbereen consists chiefly of one long main
street, divided into several, by different names. This street is like a
horse-shoe, or rather a boomerang, in shape. Coming to the curve and
turning up the second half of the boomerang, we are almost immediately
in Bridge-street, a name well known in the famine time; not for anything
very peculiar to itself, but because it leads directly to the suburb
known as Bridgetown, in which the poorest inhabitants resided, and where
the famine revelled--hideous, appalling, and triumphant. Bridgetown is
changed now. In 1846 it contained a large population, being not much
less than half a mile in length, with a row of thatched houses on each
side; when the Famine slaughtered the population, those houses were left
tenantless in great numbers, and there being none to reoccupy them, they
fell into ruins and were never rebuilt. Hence instead of a continuous
line of dwellings at either side, as of old, Bridgetown now presents
only detached blocks of three or four or half-a-dozen cabins here and
there. Coming towards the end of it, by a gradual ascent, I accosted a
man who was standing at the door of his humble dwelling: "I suppose you
are old enough," I said to him, "to remember the great Famine?" "Oh!
indeed I am, sir," he replied, with an expressive shake of his head.
"Were there more people in Bridgetown and Skibbereen at that time than
now?" "A