Described by Stephen Gwynn Pictured by Alexander Williams BLACKIE AND SON LIMITED LONDON GLASGOW AND BOMBAY 1911 Beautiful Ireland Uniform with this Series Beautiful England...

Leinster is the richest of Irish provinces, the heart of Ireland, and for beauty it can challenge any of its sisters, save in one respect only: it lacks the beauty of wildness. What it has to show of most beautiful lies within twenty miles of the capital. There is no city north of the Alps which has so lovely surroundings as Dublin—or so varied in their loveliness. Sea and mountain, plain and river, all come into that range of exquisite choice. But everywhere in it the beautiful frame of nature

Of Dublin itself, what shall be said? A much-travelled Belgian priest told me recently that only in Naples had he seen such widespread marks of destitution, and in Naples they have little to suffer from cold. A young Irish nationalist, London-bred, describing the emotion with which he made his first visit to the country he had worked so hard for, said that his week in Dublin left one leading impression on his mind—the saddest people he had ever seen; nowhere had he heard so little laughter. He h

Beauty of this kind stretches away from Dublin north and west over the broad fertile plain of Fingal, the territory of the “White Strangers”, the fair-haired Norsemen. You can find such beauty, with scenic accessories, in the famous Phœnix Park—so called by corruption of the Gaelic name given to a well there, Fionn Uisge , the Bright Water. The wide expanse of the park has lovely glades, deer-haunted like the one which Mr. Williams has pictured; it has backgrounds of mountain, the Dublin hills l

I come now to deal with what lies south of Dublin—the Wicklow Hills with all their apanages. And here one is conscious of two divisions. First of all, the obvious cleavage between the sunny seaward-facing slopes, thickly inhabited, and the mountains themselves or those glens that lie behind the first ridges. Secondly, the division, not less notable, between what is Wicklow pure and simple and what really belongs to Dublin, just as Brighton and Richmond belong to London. This is not a mere questi

The very antithesis of Wicklow, with its mountains, its small plunging rivers, and its breed of little light-footed sheep, is the plain country of Meath, watered by the deep stream of the Boyne, and grazed over by the finest and biggest cattle. No other place in Ireland is so rich in monuments of all the ages; nor is there anything in Ireland better worth seeing than the valley of the Boyne itself, from Navan to the sea. If I had time and a motor car, I should begin by driving to Trim, and stopp