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Updated: May 24, 2025
For the wonder of Ireland is, that it is the West Pole of things; there is no place else nearer the Unseen; its next-door neighbor-land westward is this Great Plain, whither sail the Happy Dead in their night-dark coracles, to return, of course, in due season; and all the peoplings of Ireland were from this Great Plain.
It was, he noticed, something like one of the coracles of which he had made mention in the preface to "Underground England." There was something good in that. The Romans made long journeys In the coracle. If the worst came to the worst, they might float. Even in the anguish of his mind, he couldn't help wondering when Captain Mulberry would finish coming in.
Amidst scenes that have little changed since the Iceni hid in the marshland-bordering woods, and crept out in their coracles on the rush-fringed meres, he is at home with Nature, and becomes her friend, her lover. She holds back no secret from him if he wills that he should learn it; she charms him with her many moods.
It was a funny sight to see these coracles, which they named after their own round bodies. The men went down to the riverside or the sea shore, and with their stone hatchets, they chopped down trees. They cut the reeds and osiers, peeled the willow branches, and wove great baskets shaped like bowls. In this work, the women helped the men.
Thurstane, thinking that he might have rivers to cross in his explorations, had brought one of these coracles. At present it was a bundle, weighing one hundred and fifty pounds, and forming the load of a single mule. Meyer got it out, bent it on to its frame, and found it in good condition. "Very good," said Thurstane. "Roll it up again and store it safely. We may want it to-morrow."
But in distant or secluded wilds it lingers still the same craft to-day that it was when the Celtic coracles were paddled on the Thames before the Romans ever heard of England the horse, the ship, the moving home of those few remaining nomads whose life is dying with its own.
Here they made preparation for their melancholy journey, setting out on the great stream in every species of craft, from rafts and coracles to steam barges. Here was begun an episode of that world-wide craze, which has run through all time, and almost every country, in which were enacted deeds of daring and suffering which add a new chapter to the history of human fearlessness and folly.
Each party must earn its sustenance by fishing and fowling; and in making up your parties, there should be two or three men in each accustomed to this work. Each party must provide itself with coracles; I will send up a boat load of hides. Beyond that you must search for cattle and swine in the woods, when by sending spies on shore you find there are no parties of Romans about.
Hurriedly turning the well-thumbed leaves, she read aloud the passage which had provoked remark: "'The Ancient Britons were little better than Barbarians. They painted their bodies with Woad, and, seated in their light coracles of skin stretched upon slender wooden frames, must have presented a wild and savage appearance." "A coracle! That's a boat! Can't we make a coracle, Mr. Dawes?"
"Verily, lord," said his men to Matholch, "forbid now the ships and the ferry-boats, and the coracles, that they go not into Wales, and such as come over from Wales hither, imprison them, that they go not back for this thing to be known there." And he did so; and it was thus for no less than three years.
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