The cattle had been slaughtered: the plantations had been cut down: the fences and houses were in ruins. Not a human being was to be found near the road, except a few naked and meagre wretches who had no food but the husks of oats, and who were seen picking those husks, like chickens, from amidst dust and cinders.683 Yet, even under such disadvantages, the natural fertility of the country, the rich green of the earth, the bays and rivers so admirably fitted for trade, could not but strike the King's observant eye. Perhaps he thought how different an aspect that unhappy region would have presented if it had been blessed with such a government and such a religion as had made his native Holland the wonder of the world; how endless a succession of pleasure houses, tulip gardens and dairy farms would have lined the road from Lisburn to Belfast; how many hundreds of barges would have been constantly passing up and down the Laggan; what a forest of masts would have bristled in the desolate port of Newry; and what vast warehouses and stately mansions would have covered the space occupied by the noisome alleys of Dundalk. "The country," he was heard to say, "is worth fighting for."The original intention of James seems to have been to try the chances of a pitched field on the border between Leinster and Ulster. But this design was abandoned, in consequence, apparently, of the representations of Lauzun, who, though very little disposed and very little qualified to conduct a campaign on the Fabian system, had the admonitions of Louvois still in his ears.684 James, though resolved not to give up Dublin without a battle, consented to retreat till he should reach some spot where he might have the vantage of ground. When therefore William's advanced guard reached Dundalk, nothing was to be seen of the Irish Army, except a great cloud of dust which was slowly rolling southwards towards Ardee. The English halted one night near the ground on which Schomberg's camp had been pitched in the preceding year; and many sad recollections were awakened by the sight of that dreary marsh, the sepulchre of thousands of brave men.685Still William continued to push forward, and still the Irish receded before him, till, on the morning of Monday the thirtieth of June, his army, marching in three columns, reached the summit of a rising ground near the southern frontier of the county of Louth. Beneath lay a valley, now so rich and so cheerful that the Englishman who gazes on it may imagine himself to be in one of the most highly favoured parts of his own highly favoured country. Fields of wheat, woodlands, meadows bright with daisies and clover, slope gently down to the edge of the Boyne. That bright and tranquil stream, the boundary of Louth and Meath, having flowed many miles between verdant banks crowned by modern palaces, and by the ruined keeps of old Norman barons of the pale, is here about to mingle with the sea. Five miles to the west of the place from which William looked down on the river, now stands, on a verdant bank, amidst noble woods, Slane Castle, the mansion of the Marquess of Conyngham. Two miles to the east, a cloud of smoke from factories and steam vessels overhangs the busy town and port of Drogheda. On the Meath side of the Boyne, the ground, still all corn, grass, flowers, and foliage, rises with a gentle swell to an eminence surmounted by a conspicuous tuft of ash trees which overshades the ruined church and desolate graveyard of Donore.686In the seventeenth century the landscape presented a very different aspect. The traces of art and industry were few.
Scarcely a vessel was on the river except those rude coracles of wickerwork covered with the skins of horses, in which the Celtic peasantry fished for trout and salmon. Drogheda, now peopled by twenty thousand industrious inhabitants, was a small knot of narrow, crooked and filthy lanes, encircled by a ditch and a mound. The houses were built of wood with high gables and projecting upper stories. Without the walls of the town, scarcely a dwelling was to be seen except at a place called Oldbridge. At Oldbridge the river was fordable; and on the south of the ford were a few mud cabins, and a single house built of more solid materials.
