A Creel of Irish Stories
Jane Barlow
9781465599506
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
The little valley of Letterglas is a very green and very lonesome place almost always, for snow seldom lies on it, and the few people who come into it depart again even sooner and as tracelessly, so that its much grass spreads from month to month uncovered and untrodden. It runs westward—that is, towards the ocean—but never reaches the shore, because a great grassy curtain intervenes, curved round the end of it, and prolonged in the lower hill-ranges that bound it to north and south. They are just swarded embankments of most simple construction, with scarcely a fold to complicate the sweep of their smooth green slopes, and the outline of their ridge against the sky undulates as softly as young corn in a drowsy breeze. Only at one point—about midway on the right hand looking westward—it is suddenly broken by a sharp dip down and up again, making a gap like an inverted Gothic arch. And this is called by everybodythe Nick of Time. I once asked the reason of a gossoon who was guiding me over the opposite hills, but he replied: “Sure, what else would they be callin’ it?” Nor have I ever yet lighted upon a more satisfactory explanation. The effect of Letterglas’s solitude and verdure somehow seems to be heightened if one notices its single visible sign of human handiwork. This is a road-track, now all but quite grassed over, leading into the valley from its open end, where the Clonmoragh highway passes, and stopping aimlessly at the slope immediately below the Nick, having first flung two or three zig-zag loops up the hillside. A rust-eaten, handleless shovel, and the wreck of an overturned wheelbarrow, still mark the point where the work was abandoned on a misty morning in April, more than fifty springs ago; but the track itself is now merely a most faint difference of shade in the sward, which has crept back again indefatigably, even where the austere road-metal had been thrown clattering down. A day before that misty morning, if anybody had climbed up and had passed through the Nick of Time, in at which the new road was to go, he would have found himself on a long level of fine-bladed turf, stretching like a lofty causeway laid down atop of the hill-embankment Everything else up there looked so softly smooth and flecklessly green that the eye was at once caught by a big block of stone, which stood just opposite the gap, at a few yards’ distance. It was an oblong mass of blackish limestone, perhaps seven feet by four, with a shape curiously symmetrical for a piece of Nature’s rough-hewing; plumb-and-rule guided chisel could scarcely have made its lines truer. That, and its solitariness, uncompanioned as far as could be seen by so much as a single pebble, gave its aspect an incongruity which prompted the question how it had come there; for whose answer we must revert through unimaginable wastes of years to the time when our last huge ice-sheet was scoring and grinding all the country’s face on its slithering way to the western ocean. Then it was that this big boulder dropped fortuitously through a small rent in the isle-wide coverlid, and so being left behind did not share in the final weltering plunge a few miles farther on, where the stark folds slipped over the sea-cliffs like the counterpane off a restless sleeper’s bed. Ever since that catastrophe it had sat there looking rather like a rude unwieldy coffer or chest, a portion—as in fact it had been—of the impedimenta carried and lost by some Titanic traveller. The resemblance was increased by a clean-cut horizontal crack, no doubt sustained when the mass came sogging heavily to earth, which ran all round it, a few inches from the top, counterfeiting a lid.
