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In a thickly populated country this would not constitute a near neighbourhood, but we made excursions to Derreen, either in a boat or in Mr. Froude's yacht, several times in the course of the summer. It is in the neighbourhood of the Kenmare River and Bantry Bay that Mr. Froude laid the scene of 'The Two Chiefs of Dunboy.
He liked the life at Dromquina so much that in 1873, after his return from India, he took the Bishop of Limerick's house, Parknasilla, in Sneem Harbour, just opposite Derreen. That year, if I remember right, he took some shooting, to which we had to drive a considerable distance. In one year or the other I went out shooting with him two or three times.
The scene is laid in the neighbourhood of his favourite Derreen, and the period is the middle of the eighteenth century. The real hero is an English Protestant, Colonel Goring.
The 'river' is an arm of the sea, something like forty miles long, and at Dromquina, I suppose, not above half a mile wide. He had heard of the place by reason of his friend, Mr. Froude, living at that time at Lord Lansdowne's house, Derreen, in Killmakalogue Harbour, about fifteen miles lower down on the opposite shore.
From 1868 to 1870 he rented from Lord Lansdowne a place called Derreen, thirty-six miles from Killarney, and seventeen from Kenmare, where he spent the best part of the summer and autumn.
On they all went towards the camp sing joyously: Nurdoo, nurbber me derreen derreenbah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah. Garmbay booan yunnahdeh beahwah ah, ah, ah, ah, ah. Gubbondee, dee, ee, ee, ee. Neah nein gulbeejah, ah, ah, ah, ah."
Thus the mountains have a greenness altogether peculiar, stretches of grass as rich as water-meadows reaching between the crags and precipices to the very summits. The rock, chiefly old red sandstone, is purple. The heather, of which there are enormous masses, is in many places waist deep." Yachting and fishing, fishing and yachting, were the staple amusements at Derreen.
The blunders he had detected were trifling, and Froude summed up the labours of his antagonists fairly enough in a letter to Skelton from his beloved Derreen.* "I acknowledge to five real mistakes in the whole book- twelve volumes about twenty trifling slips, equivalent to i's not dotted and t's not crossed; and that is all that the utmost malignity has discovered.
To the end of his life he felt his loss; and when he was offered, fifteen years later, the chance of going back to his beloved Derreen, he shrank from the associations it would have recalled. He took a house for his family in Wales, which he described in the following letter to Lady Derby: "CROGAN HOUSE, Corwen, June 3rd, 1874.
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