A Six Weeks Tour of Ireland: MANUSCRIPT JOURNAL OF A YOUNG SCOTTISH LANDOWNER
Impressed by Belfast’s steam-powered cotton mills Stirling coolly notes that the ‘Greatest number of slaves imported from 1783 - 1793 in one year 39,170. One fourth of the ships belonging to Liverpool employed in the African trade’, most coming via Dublin. Just occasionally his twin enthusiasms for agriculture and natural beauty are united, as in ‘The beautiful bay of Carrickfergus [which] almost exceeds in fine views & fertility anything I have ever seen’.
Manuscript tours of Ireland are much scarcer than those of England and Scotland and this one combines the interests of a tourist with those of an economist’s fact-finding mission.
James Stirling 7th of Garden (1772-1856) was the grandson of his namesake, the great Scottish mathematician; in 1799 he had attended a year’s lectures at Edinburgh University under Professor Andrew Coventry, Britain’s earliest Professor of Agriculture, and would go on to make great strides in the management of his family lands. This journal, records one of several such systematic, almost research-led, trips that he made across the British Isles as a young man.
DESCRIPTION: Calfskin wraparound wallet-style binding (16x10.5cm), foliate blind border; short tear across flap foreedge. [pp] 160. Small octavo with vertical chainlines; single blank precedes Stirling’s Irish journey manuscript which begins on ‘June 18th. 1807’ and continues to Wednesday 29th July with his return to the family seat at Garden [pp] 97, c7000 words. A Scottish hunting diary, also 1807, begins a page later (Monday 10th August) [pp] 14, c1000 words with a further [pp] 32 Scottish journey from 1808, 2400 words. Stirling writes in a beautifully legible cursive hand.
NARRATIVE:
Stirling set off from Glasgow in Jun3 1807 via the Scottish lowlands to take the ‘packet’ from Stranrare to Donaghadee where there is much to approve: ‘The approach to Belfast is uncommonly fine quite the appearance of an elegant English town’ though he finds ‘Plantations often destroyed by the peasants for fire wood’. Stirling notes industrial improvements with ‘Five or six cotton mills here, all go by steam’ but regrets that the West indiamen trade has moved from Belfast to Dublin. Stirling visits Cave Hill, Randalstown, Ballymena and Gracehill Moravian village. He describes the great quantities of the linen bleaching by the River Bann en route to Ballymoney but there are still ‘Marks of the late rebellion, several houses in ruins’.
Stirling continues to the Giant’s Causeway by Dunluce Castle and Bushmills, noting that Limavady is ‘very populous and the houses miserable hovels of turf and mud’... ‘The view of Londonderry (with its immense wooden bridge) situated on the opposite steep hill together with the fine banks of the loch is very striking’. For the first time in Omagh, Stirling ‘observed some people speaking Irish’ whereas on Lord Northlands plantations ‘The Irish language little understood here’. In early July he finds Newry ‘surrounded here with beggars, most miserable objects - observed a very great change here for the worse in the condition of the lower orders’. And en route to Drogheda attends a fair ‘dancing to a fiddle a man presided with a large stick to hit those over the heads that were encroaching on the dancers’, arriving in Dublin (Mon 6th July) via ‘villages built principally of mud’. Even in Dublin he observes the after-effects of the uprising: ‘a Gate and palisade still remains since the rebellion’. Stirling is impressed by the city, by Trinity College by Jane Shore at the theatre as well as ‘the play Venice Preserved, Jafier [played by] Mr Holman, Pierre [by] Mr Pope, Belvidera [by] Mrs Powell’, taking in the Botanical Gardens and Dublin Museum ‘an immense collection of fossils’. Kildare, by contrast, is a desert - ‘the most horrible county in Ireland during the rebellion - most of the nobility gentlemen have deserted it’ and in Mountrath ‘the hay fields in general mainly one third weeds’ (foreshadowings of the famine?). In Nenagh in County Tipperary he finds ‘a large place with many good houses’ and ’land lets near this place at 8 guineas per acre’ whereas in Limerick ‘some peat mosses let so high as 15 guineas per acre’ and there’s always alcohol - ’distilleries pay a duty of 5/ gallon’.
En route to Bir, Stirling ‘went into the court house room, intolerably crowded, a barrister from Limerick does the bushings… a number of peace officers with long sticks 6 or 7 ft with which they struck the peoples heads to keep in order and to make them take off their hats - a more savage assembly I never saw’. Stirling takes the canal back to Dublin - ‘14 locks in 13 miles’ with many ‘seats’ along the way, notably Lord Ponsonby’s and Lord Glencurry’s. ‘About 600 boats from 50 - 60 tonnes ply on this canal’ and Stirling is ‘informed by a Galway gentleman that he sold 100 2 yr old bullocks for 314 each’. Even so, peace cannot be guaranteed: ‘An engagement the other day at Galway between the Longford M[ilitia] and the 5th Dragoons several killed - common opinion of the respectable Irish that their countrymen are not to be reformed’
Returning through Dublin Stirling attends a star-studded night at the theatre where he went to see ‘the Provoked Husband. Pope, Lord Townly, The Duke and Duchess of Richmond were there’; In Bray he attends the play Adegitha, continuing into the north of the island - ‘The landlord at Lisburn a singular character, made himself remarkable during the rebellion’ but ’The country beautiful and rich - quite an English scene’. Stirling returned to Scotland and the family estate at Garden on Saturday 25th July 1807.