From Roundstone to Carna in Connemara is not far; probably nearer by boat. At any rate, that's how Stephen Gwynn went in the very early years of this century, five miles in a yawl, others doing the rowing. "We landed at a slip beside a few cottages at Letterard, but no road reached this spot. I pushed my cycle across country as best I could, while the boys carried my luggage - one young fellow marching gaily with a port manteau on his back that must have weighted nearly 100 lb.
They reached Carna: "The little fishing hotel is very pleasant, secluded in a garden" and, of course, Gwynn was all for taking his rod although it was late afternoon and late September, so he caught nothing. But he learned a useful linguistic and social lesson. I was despatched in charge of a wild looking young man of about thirty, who failed to understand my first words to him in English. I spoke Irish then, and if I did, I was sorry for it - though at first - it was a pleasure to see any creature so relieved.
"He told me in a perfect torrent of speech, about the awful hours that he endured, taking out ladies and gentlemen whose talk he only understood imperfectly; how he passed the day with his wits going "tri cheile" through other as we say - and answering `Tis indeed' or `Tis not indeed', at a venture. By the time I had answered three hours in his company, my wits were the same way; and he was so companionable and so eager to talk, and indeed interested me so much with his stories of fishing and fowling and poaching of all kinds, that I had not the heart to insist on returning to an easier tongue for me.
"Yet, after all, one had one's reward; for here was this mountainy man treating me not as an employer but as a friend and comrade - chiefly, I think, because my disability in the tongue which we used more than offset his disabilities in education. That is in truth why a little knowledge of Irish is the best of introductions; the stranger, who comes always as someone a little formidable to country folk conscious of their own limited experience, meets them at once on a ground where, in nine cases out of ten they are more than his masters in knowledge.
"So, at all events, I have accounted to myself for something that seems to me special and distinctive in the relations that establish themselves whenever I meet Irish speaking peasants who are good enough to like me. There is an offset to that real inequality arising from unequal chances of education - an inequality which Irish peasants feel the more keenly because they are so intelligent."
The terminology is out of date. We don't have peasants now, but Gwynn makes a valid and generous point. The book A Holiday in Connemara, 1909.