ZJ' IRELAND IRELAND HISTORIC AND PICTURESQUE BY CHARLES JOHNSTON ILLUSTRATED PHILADELPHIA HENRY T. COATES & CO. I 902 BOSTON COtUGE UBRAR* cHesTNi'Ti;--, i.'-s- LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. Photogravures made by A. W. Elson & Co. PAGE Peep Hole, Bt-arney Castlf, . . . Frontispiece. In the Dargle, Co. Wicklow, IG MucKROss Abbey, Killarney, 33 Brandy Island, Glengarriff, 52 Sugar Loaf Mountain, Glejjgarrifi-, . . . . G2 EivER Erne, Belleek, . 78 WnilE KOCKS, PORTRUSH, 9G Powerscourt Waterfall, Co. Wicklow, . . .112 Honeycomb, Giant's Causeway, 130 Gray Man's Path, Fair Head, 144 Colleen Bawn Caves, Ku.larnly, . . . . 1G4 Ruins on Scattery Island, 180 Valley of Glendalough and Ruins of the Seven Churche?, Ancient Cross, Glendalough, .... Round Tower, Antrim, ...... Giant's Head and Dunluce Castlf, Co. Antrim, (vii) 208 222 242 258 Vlll LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. KocK Cashel, Ruins op Old Cathedral, King CIor mac's Chapel and Round Tower, DUNLUCE Castle, Mellieont Abbey, Co. Louth, Holy Cross Abbey, Co. Tipperary DuNE(iAL Castle, Tullymore Park, Co. Down, Thomond Bridge, Limerick, . Salmon Fishery, Galway, O'Connell's Statue, Dublin, PAGE 266 284 298 304 324 340 350 366 372 VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE. IRELAND. VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE. Here is an image by which you may call up and remember the natural form and appearance of Ire- land : Think of the sea gradually rising around her coasts, until the waters, deepened everyAvhere by a hundred fathoms, close in upon the land. Of all Ireland there will now remain visible above the waves only two great armies of islands, facing each other obliquely across a channel of open sea. These two armies of islands will lie in ordered ranks, their lines stretching from northeast to southwest ; they Avill be equal in size, each two hundred miles along the front, and seventy miles from front to rear. And the open sea between, which divides the two armies, will measure seventy miles across. Not an island of these two armies, as they lie thus obliquely facing each other, will rise as high as three (3) 4 IKELAND. thousand feet ; only the captains among them will ex- ceed a thousand ; nor will there be great variety in their forms. All the islands, whether noz'th or south, will have gently rounded backs, clothed in pastures nearly to the crest, with garments of purple heather lying under the sky upon their ridges. Yet for all this roundness of outline there will be, towards the Atlantic end of either army, a growing sternness of aspect, a more sombre ruggedness in the outline of the hills, with cliffs and steep ravines setting their brows frowning against the deep. Hold in mind the image of these two obliquely ranged archipelagoes, their length thrice their breadth, seaming the blue of the sea, and garmented in dark green and purple under the sunshine ; and, thinking of them thus, picture to yourself a new rising of the land, a new withdrawal of the waters, the waves fall- ing and ever falling, till all the hills come forth again, and the salt tides roll and ripple away from the valleys, leaving their faces for the winds to dry ; let this go on till the land once more takes its familiar form, and you will easily call up the visible image of the whole. As you stand in the midst of the land, where first lay the channel of open sea, you will have, on your northern horizon, the beginning of a world of purple- VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE. 5 outlined lulls, outliers of the northern mountain re- gion, which covers the upper third of the island. On all sides about vou, from the eastern sea to the west- ern ocean, you will have the great central plain, dappled with lakes and ribbed with silver rivers, another third of the island. Then once more, to the south, you will have a region of hills, the last third of Ireland, in size just equal to the northern moun- tains or the central plain. The lines of the northern hills begin with the basalt buttresses of Antrim and the granite ribs of Down, and pass through northern Ulster and Connacht to the headlands of i\Iayo and Galway. Their rear is held by the Donegal ranges, keeping guard against the blackness of the northern seas. The plain opens from the verge of these hills ; the waters that gather on its pleasant pastures and fat fields, or among the green moss tracts of its lowlands, flow eastward by the Boyne or southwestward by the Shannon to the sea. Then with the granite mountains of Dublin and Wicklow begin the southern hills, stretching through south Leinster and Munster to the red sandstone ridges of Cork and Kerry, our last vantage-ground against the Atlantic. 6 IRELAND. Finally, encircling all, is the perpetual presence of the sea, with its foaming, thunderous life or its days of dreamy peace ; around the silver sands or furrowed cliffs that gird the island our white waves rush for- ever, murmuring the music of eternity. Such is this land of Eire, very old, yet full of perpetual youth ; a thousand times darkened by sorrow, yet with a heart of living gladness ; too often visited by evil and pale death, yet welling ever up in unconquerable life, — the youth and life and gladness that thrill through earth and air and sky, when the whole world grows beautiful in the front of Spring. For Avith us Spring is like the making of a new world in the dawn of time. Under the warm wind's caressing breath the grass comes forth upon the meadows and the hills, chasing dun Winter away. Every field is newly vestured in young corn or the olive greenness of wheat ; the smell of the earth is full of sweetness. White daisies and yellow dande- lions star all our pastures ; and on the green rugged- ness of every hillside, or along the shadowed banks of every river and every silver stream, amid velvet mosses and fringes of new-born ferns, in a million nooks and crannies throughout all the land, are strewn i VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE. 7 dark violets ; and wreaths of yellow primroses with crimped green leaves pour forth a remote and divine fragrance ; above them, the larches are dainty with new greenery and rosy tassels, and the young leaves of beech and oak quiver Avith fresh life. Still the benignance of Spring pours down upon us from the sky, till the darkening fields are hemmed in between barriers of white hawthorn, heavy with nec- tar, and twined with creamy honeysuckle, the finger- tips of every blossom coral-red. The living blue above throbs with the tremulous song of innumerable larks ; the measui'ed chant of cuckoos awakens the woods ; and through the thickets a whole world's gladness sings itself forth from the throat of thrush and blackbird. Through the whole land between the four seas benediction is evervwhere ; blue-bells and the rosy fingers of heath deck the mountain-tops, where the grouse are crooning to each other among the whins ; down the hillsides into every valley pour gladness and greenness and song ; there are flowers everywhere, even to the very verge of the whisper- ing sea. There, among the gray bent-spikes and brackens on the sandhills, primroses weave their yel- low wreaths ; and little pansies, golden and blue and purple, marshal their weird eyes against the spears 8 IRELAND. of dark blue hyacinths, till the rich tribute of wild thyme makes peace between them. The blue sky overhead, with its flocks of sunlit clouds, softly bends over the gentle bosom of the earth. A living spirit throbs everywhere, palpable, audible, full of sweetness and sadness immeasurable — sadness that is only a more secret joy. Then the day grows weary, making way for the magic of evening and the oncoming dark with its mystery. The tree-stems redden with the sunset ; there is a chill sigh in the wind ; the leaves turn before it, burnished against the purple sky. As the gloom rises up out of the earth, bands of dark red gather on the horizon, seaming the clear bronze of the sky, that passes upward into olive-color, merging in dark blue overhead. The sun swings down be- hind the hills, and purple darkness comes down out of the sky ; the red fades from the tree-stems, the cloud-colors die away ; the whole world glimmers with the fading whiteness of twilight. Silence gathers itself together out of the dark, deepened, not broken, by the hushing of the Avind among the beech-leaves, or the startled cluck of a blackbird, or a wood-pigeon's soft murmur, as it dreams in the silver fir. Under the brown wings of the dark, the night VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE. 9 throbs with mystic presences ; the hills glimmer Avith an inward life ; whispering voices hurry through the air. Another and magical land awakes in the dark, full of a living restlessness ; sleepless as the ever- moving sea. Everywhere through the night-shrouded woods, the shadowy trees seem to interrupt their secret whispers till you are gone past. There is no sense of loneliness anywhere, but rather a host of teeming lives on every hand, palpable though hid- den, remote from us though touching our lives, call- ing to us through the gloom with wordless voices, inviting us to enter and share with them the mystical life of this miraculous earth, great mother of us all, The dark is full of Avatching eyes. Summer with us is but a brighter Spring, as our Winter only prolongs the sadness of Autumn. So our year has but two moods, a gay one and a sad one. Yet each tinges the other — the mists of Autumn veiling the gleam of Spring — Spring smiling through the grief of Autumn. When the sad mood comes, stripping the trees of their leaves, and the fields of their greenness, white mists veil the hills and brood among the fading valleys. A shiver runs through the air, and the cold branches are starred with tears. A poignant grief is over the land, an almost desola- 10 IKELAND. tion, — full of unspoken sorrow, tongue-tied with un- uttered complaint. All the world is lost and forlorn, Avithout hope or respite. Everything is given up to the dirges of the moaning seas, the white shrouds of weeping mist. Wander forth upon the uplands and among the lonely hills and rock-seamed sides of the mountains, and you will find the same sadness every- where : a grieving world under a grieving sky. Quiet desolation hides among the hills, tears tremble on every brown grass-blade, white mists of melancholy shut out the lower world. Whoever has not felt the poignant sadness of the leafless days has never known the real Ireland ; the sadness that is present, though veiled, in the green bravery of Spring, and under the songs of Summer. Nor have they ever known the real Ireland Avho have not divined beneath that poignant sadness a heart of joy, deep and perpetual, made only keener by that sad outward show. Here in our visible life is a whisper and hint of our life invisible ; of the secret that runs through and interprets so much of our history. For very much of our nation's life has been like the sadness of those autumn days, — a tale of torn leaves, of broken branches, of tears everywhere. Tragedy upon VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE. 11 tragedy has filled our land with woe and sorrow, and, as men count success, we have failed of it, and received only misery and deprivation. He has never known the true Ireland who does not feel that woe. Yet, more, he knows not the real Ireland Avho cannot feel within that woe the heart of power and joy, — the strong life outlasting darkest night, — the soul that throbs incessantly under all the calamities of the visible world, throughout the long tragedy of our history. This is our secret : the life that is in sorrow as in joy ; the power that is not more in success than in failure — the one soul whose moods these are, who uses equally life and death. For the tale of our life is mainly tragedy. And we may outline now the manner in which that tale will be told. We shall have, first, a long, dim dawn, — mysterious peoples of the hidden j)ast coming together to our land from the outlying darkness. A first period, which has left abundant and imperishable tx'aces everywhere among our hills and valleys, writ- ing a large history in massive stone, yet a history w^hich, even now, is dim as the dawn it belongs to. What can be called forth from that Archaic Dark- ness, in the backward and abysm of Time, we shall 12 IRELAND. try to evoke ; drawing the outlines of a people who, ■with large energies in our visible Avorld, toiled yet more for the world invisible ; a })eoj)le nniform through the Avhole land and beyond it, along many neighboring shores ; a people everywhere building ; looking back into a long past ; looking forward through the mists of the future. A people com- memorating the past in a form that should oixtlast the future. A people midertaking great enterprises for mysterious ends ; Avhose works are everywhere among us, to this day, imperishable in giant stone ; yet a people whose purposes are mysterious to us, whose very name and tongue are quite unknown. Their works still live all around us in Ireland, spread evenly through the four provinces, a world of the vanished past enduring among us into the present ; and, so mightily did these old builders work, and with such large simplicity, that what they built Avill surely outlast every handiwork of our own day, and endure through numberless to-morrows, bridging the morning and evening twilight of our race. After this Archaic Dawn we shall find a mingling of four races in Ireland, coming together from widely separated homes, unless one of the four be the descendant of the archaic race, as well it may VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE. 13 be. From the surging together of these four races Ave shall see, in ahiiost prehistoric times, the growth of a well-knit polity ; tirm principalities founded, strong battles fought, a lasting foundation of law. In this Second Epoch, everything that in the first was dim and vague grows firm in outline and defined. Names, places, persons, — we know them all as if they were of to-day. This is the age which flowered in the heroic days of Emain of Maca, Emain 'neath the beech-trees, the citadel of northeastern Ireland. Here we shall find the court of Fergus mac Roeg, a man too valiant, too passionate, too generous to rule alto- gether wisely ; his star darkened by the gloomy genius of Concobar his stepson, the evil lover of ill- fated Deirdre. Cuculain, too, the war-loving son of Sualtam, shall rise again, — in whom one part of our national genius finds its perfect flower. We shall hear the thunder of his chariot, at the Battle of the Headland of the Kings, when Meave the winsome and crafty queen of Connacht comes against him, holding in silken chains of her tresses the valiant spirit of Fergus. The whole life of that heroic .epoch, still writ large upon the face of the land, shall come forth clear and definite ; we shall stand by the threshold of Cuculain's dwelling, and move 14 . IRELAND. among the banquet-balls of Emain of Maca. We sball look upon the hills and valleys that Meave and Deirdre looked on, and hear the clash of spear and shield at the Ford of the river, — and this even though we must go back two thousand years. To this will follow a Third Epoch, where another side of Ireland's genius will write itself in epic all across the land, Avith songs for every hillside, and stories for every vale and grove. Here our more passionate and poetic force will break forth in the lives of Find, son of Cumal, the lord of warriors ; in his son Ossin, most famous bard of the western lands, and Ossin's son Oscar, before whose might even the fiends and sprites cowered back dismayed. As the epoch of Cuculain shows us our valor finding its apotheosis, so shall we find in Find and Ossin and Oscar the perfect flower of our genius for story and song ; for romantic life and fine insight into nature ; for keen wit and gentler humor. The love of nature, the passion for visible beauty, and chiefly the visible beauty of our land, will here show itself clearly, — a sense of nature not merely sensuous, but thrilling with hidden and mystic life. We shall find such perfection in this more emotional and poetic side of VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE. 15 Irish character as will leave little for coming ages to add. In these two early epochs we shall see the per- fecting of the natural man ; the moulding of rounded, gracious and harmonious lives, inspired with valor and the love of beauty and song. Did our human destiny stop there, with the perfect life of individual men and women, we might well say that these two epochs of Ireland contain it all ; that our whole race could go no further. For no man lived more valiant than Cuculain, more generous than Fergus, more full of the fire of song than Os- sin, son of Find. Nor amongst women were any sadder than Deirdre and Grania ; craftier than Meave, more winsome than Nessa the mother of Con- cobar. Perfected flowers of human life all of them, — if that be all of human life. So, were this all, Ave might Avell consent that with the death of Oscar our roll of history might close ; there is nothing to add that the natural man could add. But where the perfecting of the natural man ends, our truer human life begins — the life of our ever- living soul. The natural man seeks victory ; he seeks wealth and possessions and happiness ; the love of women, and the loyalty of followers. But the natural man trembles in the face of defeat, of sorrow, 16 IRELAND. of subjection ; the natural man cannot raise the black veil of death. Therefore for the whole world and for our land there was needed another epoch, a far more difficult lesson, — one so remote from what had been of old, that even now w6 only begin to understand it. To the Ireland that had seen the valor of Cuculain, that had watched the wars of Fergus, — to the Ireland that listened to the deeds of Find and the songs of Os- sin, — came the Evangel of Galilee, the darkest yet brightest message ever brought to the children of earth. If we rightly read that Evangel, it brought the doom of the natural man, and his supersession by the man immortal ; it brought the death of our per- sonal perfecting and pride, and the rising from the dead of the common soul, whereby a man sees an- other self in his neighbor •, sees all alike in the one Divine. Of this one Divine, wherein we all live and live forever, pain is no less the minister than pleasui'e ; nay, pain is more its minister, since pleasure has already given its message to the natural man. Of that one Divine, sorrow and desolation are the mes- sengers, alike with joy and gladness ; even more than joy and gladness, for the natural man has tasted VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE. 17 these. Of that one Divine, black and mysterious death is the servant, not less than bright life ; and life Ave had learned of old in the sunshine. There came, therefore, to Ireland, as to a land cherished for enduring purposes, first the gentler side, and then the sterner, of the Galilean message. First, the epoch almost idyllic which followed after the mission of Patrick ; the epoch of learning and teaching the simpler phrases of the Word. Churches and schools rose everywhere, taking the place of fort and embattled camp. Chants went up at morning and at evening, witli the incense of prayer, and heaven seemed descended upon earth. Our land, which had stood so high in the ranks of valor and romance, now rose not less eminent for piety and fervid zeal, sending forth messengers and ministers of the glad news to the heathen lands of northern and central Europe, and planting refuges of religion Avith- in their savage bounds. Beauty came forth in stone and missal, answering to the beautv of life it was inspired by ; and here, if anywhere upon earth through a score of centuries, was realized the ideal of that prayer for the kingdom, as in heaven, so on earth. Here, again, we have most ample memorials scattered all abroad throughout the land ; we can 18 IRELAND. call up the whole epoch, and make it stand visible before us, visiting every shrine and sacred place of that saintly time, seeing, with inner eyes, the foot- steps of those who followed that path, first traced out by the shores of Gennesaret. Once more, if the kingdom come upon earth were all of the message, we might halt here •, for here for- giveness and gentle charity performed their perfect work, and learning was present Avith wise counsel to guide willing feet in the Avay. Yet this is not all | nor, if we rightly understand that darkest yet bright- est message, are we or is mankind destined for such an earthly paradise ; our kingdom is not of this world. Here was another happiness, another success ; yet not in that happiness nor in that success was hid the secret ; it lay far deeper. Therefore we find that morning Avith its sunshine rudely clouded OA'er, its promise swept away in the black darkness of storms. Something more than holy livang remained to be learned ; there remained the mystery of failure and death — that death AA^hich is the doorway to our real life. Therefore upon our shores broke Avavo after AA\ave of invasion, storm after storm of crudest oppression and degradation. In the A^ery dust AA^as our race ground down, destitute, afflicted, tormented, accord- VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE. 19 ing to prophecy and promise. Nor was that the end. Every bitterness that the heart of man can conceive, that the heart of man can inflict, that the heart of man can endure, was poured into our cup, and we drained it to the dregs. Of that saddest yet most potent time we shall record enough to show not only Avhat befell through our age of darkness, but also, so far as may be, what miraculous intent underlay it, what promise the darkness covered, of our future light ; what golden rays of dawn were hidden in our gloom. Finally, from all our fiery trials Ave shall see the genius of our land emerge, tried indeed by fire, yet having gained fire's purity ; we shall see that genius beginning, as yet with halting speech, to utter its most marvelous secret of the soul of man. We shall try at least to gain clear sight of our great destiny, and thereby of the like destiny of universal man. For we cannot doubt that what we have passed through, all men and all nations either have passed through already, or are to pass through in the time to come. There is but one divine law, one everlasting purpose and destiny for us all. And if we see other nations now entering that time of triumph which passed for us so long ago, that perfecting of the natural man. 20 IRELAND. with his valor and his song, we shall with fear and reverence remember that before them also lie the dark centuries of fiery trial ; the long night of alHic- tion, the vigils of humiliation and suffering. The one Divine has not yet laid aside the cup that holds the bitter draught, — the drinking of which comes ever before the final gift of the waters of life. What we passed through, they shall pass through also ; what we suffered, they too shall suffer. Well will it be with them if, like us, they survive the fierce trial, and rise from the fire immortal, born again through sacrifice. Therefore I see in Ireland a miraculous and divine history, a life and destiny invisible, lying hid within her visible life. Like that throbbing presence of the night which whispers along the hills, this diviner whisper, this more miraculous and occult power, lurks in our apparent life. From the very gray of her morning, the children of Ireland were preoccupied with the invisible world ; it was so in the darkest hours of our oppression and desolation ; driven from this Avorld, we took refuge in that ; it was not the kingdom of heaven upon earth, but the children of earth seeking a refuge in heaven. So the same note rings and echoes through all our history 5 we VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE. 21 live in the invisible Avorld. If I rightly understand our mission and our destiny, it is this : To restore to other men the sense of that invisible ; that world of our immortalitv ; as of old our race went forth carrv- ing the Galilean Evangel. We shall lirst learn, and then teach, that not with wealth can the soul of man be satisfied ; that our enduring interest is not here but there, in the unseen, the hidden, the immortal, for whose purposes exist all the visible beauties of the world. If this be our mission and our purpose, well may our fair mysterious land deserve her name : Inis Fail, the Isle of Destiny. THE GREAT STONE MONUMENTS. II. THE GREAT STONE MONUMENTS. Westward from Sligo — Town of the River of Shells — a tongue of land runs toward the sea between two long bays. Where the two bays join their waters, a mountain rises precipitous, its gray lime- stone rocks soaring sheer upwards, rugged and for- midable. Within the shadow of the mountain is hidden a wonderful glen — a long tunnel between cliffs, densely arched over with trees and fringed with ferns ; even at midday full of a green gloom. It is a fitting gateway to the beauty and mystery of the mountain. Slowly climbing by stony Avays, the path reaches the summit, a rock table crowned with a pyramid of loose boulders, heaped up in olden days as a memo- rial of golden-haired Maeve. From the dead queen's pyramid a view of surpassing grandeur and beauty opens over sea and land, mingled valley and hill. The Atlantic stretches in illimitable blue, curved round the rim of the sky, a darker mirror of the blue above. It is full of throbbing silence and peace. (25) 2G IRELAND. Across blue fields of ocean, and facing the noonday brightness of the sun, rise the tremendous cliffs of Slieve League, gleaming with splendid colors through the shimmering air, broad bands of amber and orange barred Avith deeper red ; the blue waves beneath them and the green of the uplands above. The vast amber wall rises out of the ocean, and passes eastward in a golden band till it merges in the Donegal hiirhlands with their immeasurable blue. Sweeping round a wide bay, the land di-aws nearer again, the far-away blue darkening to purple, and then to green and brown. The sky is cut by the out- lines of the Leitrim and Sligo hills, a row of rounded peaks against the blue, growing paler and more translucent in the southern distance. Under the sun, there is a white glinting of lakes away across the plain, where brown and purple are blended with green in broad spaces of mingling color. To the west the ground rises again into hills crowded behind each other, sombre masses, for ages called the Mountains of Storms. Far beyond them, vague as blue cloud- wreaths in the blue, are the hills that guard our western ocean. From their sunset-verges the land draws near again, in the long range of the Mayo cliffs, — fierce walls of rock that bar the fiercer ocean THE GREAT STONE MONUMENTS. 27 from a wild world of storm-swept uplands. The cliffs gradually lessen, and their colors grow clearer, till they sink at last toward the sand-banks of Bally- sadare, divided from us only by a channel of shal- low sea. Tne whole colored circle of sea and land, of moor and mountain, is full of the silence of intense and mighty power. The ocean is tremulous with the breath of life. The mountains, in their stately beauty, rise like immortals in the clear azure. The signs of our present works are dwarfed to insignificance. Everywhere within that wide Avorld of hill and plain, and hardly less ancient than the hills them- selves, are strewn memorials of another world that has vanished, sole survivors of a long-hidden past. A woi'dless history is written there, in giant circles of stone and cromlechs of piled blocks, so old that in a land of most venerable tradition their very legend has vanished away. Close under us lies Carrowmore, with its labyrinth of cromlechs and stone circles, a very city of dead years. There is something awe-inspiring in the mere massiveness of these piled and ordered stones, the visible boundaries of invisible thoughts ; that awe is deepened by the feeling of the tremendous power 28 IRELAND. lavislicd in bringing them here, setting them up in their ordered groups, and piUng the crowns of the cromlechs on other only less gigantic stones ; awe gives place to overwhelming mystery when we can find no kinship to our own thoughts and aims in their stately grouping. We are in presence of archaic purposes recorded in a massive labyrinth, purposes dai'kly hidden from us in the unknown. There are circles of huge boulders ranged at equal distances, firmly set upright in the earth. They loom vast, like beads of a giant necklace on the velvet grass. There are cromlechs set alone — a single huge boulder borne aloft in the air on three others of hardly less weight. There are cromlechs set in the midst of titanic circles of stone, with lesser boulders guarding the cromlechs closer at hand. There are circles beside circles rising in their grayness, with the grass and heather carpeting their aisles. There they rest in silence, with the mountain as their com- panion, and, beyond the mountain, the ever-murmur- ing sea. Thus they have kept their watch through long dark ages. When sunrise reddens them, their shadows stretch westward in bars of darkness over the burnished grass. From morning to midday the THE GREAT STONE MONUMENTS. 29 shadows shrink, ever hiding from the sun ; an army of wraiths, sprite-Hke able to grow gigantic or draw together into mere blots of darkness. When day de- clines, the shadows come forth again, joining ghostly hands from stone to stone, from circle to circle, under the sunset sky, and merging at last into the universal realm of night. Thus they weave their web, inex- orable as tireless Time. There are more than threescore of these circles at Carrowmore, under Knocknarea. Yet Carrowmore is only one among many memorials of dead years within our horizon. At Abbey-quarter, Avithin the town-limits of Sligo itself, there is another great ring of boulders, the past and the present mingling to- gether. On the northern coast, across the Bay of Sligo, where the headland of Streedagh juts forth into the sea, there is another giant necklace of gray blocks ranged upon the moor. Farther along the shore, where Bundoran marks the boundary of Done- gal, a cromlech and a stone circle rise among the sand-banks. All have the same rugged and enduring massiveness, all are wrapped in the same mystery. Eastward from Sligo, Lough Gill lies like a mirror framed in hills, wreathed with dark green woods. On a hill-top north of the lake, in the Deer-park, is a 30 IRELAND. monument of quite other character — a great oLlong marked by pillared stones, like an open temple. At three points huge stones are laid across from pillar to pillar. The whole enclosure was doubtless so barred in days of old, a temple of open arches crown- ing the summit of the hill. The great ruin by the lake keeps its secret well. Another ring of giant stones rests on a hillside across the lake, under the Cairn hill, with its pyramid crown. All these are within easy vicAV from our first vantage-point on Knocknarea, yet they are but the outposts of an army which spreads everywhere throughout the land. They are as common in wild and inaccessible places as on the open plain. Some rise in lonely islands off the coast ; othei's on the summits of mountains ; yet others in the midst of tilled fields. They bear no relation at all to the land as it is to-day. The very dispersion of these great stone monuments, scattered equally among places familiar or Avild, speaks of a remote past — a past when all places were alike wild, or all alike familiar. Where the gale-swept moors of Achill Island rise up toward the slope of Slievemore Mountain, there are stone circles and cromlechs like the circles of Carrowmore. The wild storms of the Atlantic rush THE GREAT STONE MONUMENTS. 31 past them, and the breakers roar under their cKfFs. The moorland round the towering mountain is stained with ochre and iron under a carpet of heather rough as the ocean winds. Away to the south from Slievemore the horizon is broken by an army of mountains, beginning with the Twelve Peaks of Connemara. Eastward of these hills are spread the great Galway lakes ; eastward of these a wide expanse of plain. This is the famous Moytura of traditional history, whose story we shall presently tell. Ages ago a decisive battle was fought there ; but ages before the battle, if Ave are not greatly mis- led, the stone circles of the plain were already there. Tradition says that these circles numbered seven iu the beginning, but only two remain unbroken. Between Galway Bay and the wide estuary of the Shannon spread the moorlands of Clare, bleak under Atlantic gales, with never a tree for miles in- ward from the sea. Like a watch-tower above the moorlands stand Slieve Callan, tlie crown of the mountain abruptly shorn. Under the shoulder of the great hill, with the rolling moorlands all about it, stands a solitary cromlech ; formed of huge flat stones, it was at first a roomy chamber shut in on all four sides, and roofed by a single enormous block ; the ends 32 IRELAND. have fallen, so that it is now an open tunnel formed of three huge stones. The coast runs southward from the Shannon to the strand of Tralee, the frontier of the southern mountain world, where four ranges of red sandstone thrust themselves forth towards the ocean, with long fiords running inland between them. On a siinimit of the first of these red ranges, Caherconree above Tralee strand, there is a stone circle, massive, gigantic, dwelling in utter solitude. We have recorded a few only out of many of these great stone monuments strewn along our Atlantic coast, whether on moor or cliff" or remote mountain- top. There are others as notable everywhere in the central plain, the limestone world of lakes and rivers. On a green hill-crest overlooking the network of in- lets of Upper Erne there is a circle greater than any we have recorded. The stones are very massive, some of them twice the height of a tall man. To one who stands within the ring these huge blocks of stone shut out the world ; they loom large against the sky, full of unspoken secrets like the Sphinx. Within this mighty ring the circle of Stonehenge might be set, leaving a broad road all round it on the grass. THE GREAT STONE MONUMENTS. 33 From Fermanagh, where this huge circle is, we gain our best clue to the age of all these monuments, everywhere so much like each other in their massive form and dimensions, everywhere so like in their utter mystery. Round the lakes of Erne there are wide expanses of peat, dug as fuel for centuries, and in many places as much as twelve feet deep, on a bed of clay, the waste of old glaciers. Though formed with incredible slowness, this whole mass of peat has grown since some of the great stone monuments were built ; if we can tell the time thus taken for its growth we know at least the nearer limit of the time that divides us from their builders. Like a tree, the peat has its time of growth and its time of rest. Spring covers it with green, winter sees it brown and dead. Thus thin layers are spread over it, a layer for a year, and it steadily gains in thickness with the passing of the years. The deeper levels are buried and pressed down, slowly grow- ing firm and rigid, but still keeping the marks of the layers that make them up. It is like a dry ocean gradually submerging the land. Gathering round the great stone circles as they stand on the clay, this black sea has risen slowly but surely, till at last it has covered them with its dark waves, and 34 IRELAND. they rest in the quiet depths, with a green foam of spi'ing freshness far above their heads. At Killee and Breagho, near Enniskillen, the peat has once more been cut away, restoring some of these great stones to the light. If Ave count the hiyers and measure the thickness of the peat, Ave can tell how many years are represented by its groAvth. We can, therefore, tell that the great stone circle, Avhich the first growth of peat found already there, must be at least as old, and may be indefinitely older. By careful count it is found that one foot of black peat is made up of eight hundred layers ; eight hundred summers and eight hundred Avinters went to the building of it. One foot of black peat, therefore, will measure the time from before the founding of Rome or the First Olympiad to the beginning of our era. Another foot Avill bring us to the croAvning of Charlemagne. Yet another, to the death of Shakes- peare and CerA'antes. Since then, only a fcAv inches have been added. Here is a chronometer Avorthy of our great cromlechs and stone circles. Some of these, as Ave saAv, rest on the clay, Avith a sea of peat tAvelve feet deep around and above them. Every foot of the peat stands for eight cen- turies. Since the peat began to form, eight or ten THE GREAT STONE MONUMENTS. 35 thousand years have passed, and when that vast period began, the great monuments of stone Avere ah-eady there. How long they had stood in their silence before our chronometer began to run we can- not even guess. At Cavancarragh, on the shoulder of Toppid Mountain, some four miles from Enniskillen, there is one of these circles ; a ring of huge stone boulders with equal spaces between stone and stone. A four- fold avenue of great blocks stretches away from it along the shoulder of the hill, ending quite abruptly at the edge of a ravine, the steep channel of a tor- rent. It looks as if the river, gradually undermining the hillside, had cut the avenue in halves, so that the ravine seems later in date than the stones. But that we cannot be quite sure of. This, however, we do certainly know : that since the avenue of boulders and the circle of huge red stones were ranged in order, a covering of peat in some parts twelve feet thick has grown around and above them, hiding them at last altogether from the day. In places the peat has been cut away again, leaving the stones once more open to the light, standing, as they always stood, on the surface of the clay. Here again we get the same measurement. At 36 IRELAND. eight hundred annual layers to the foot, and Avith twelve feet of peat, we have nine thousand six hun- dred years, — not for the age of the stone circles, but for that part of their age which we are able to measure. For we know not how long they were there before the peat began to grow. It may have been a few years ; it may have been a period as great or even greater than the ten thousand years we are able to measure. The peat gradually displaced an early forest of giant oaks. Their stems are still there, standing rooted in the older clay. Where they once stood no trees now grow. The whole face of the land has changed. Some great change of climate must lie behind this vanishing of vast forests, this gradual growth of peat-covered moors. A dry climate must have changed to one much damper ; heat must have changed to cold, warm winds to chilly storms. In the southern promontories, among red sandstone hills, still linger survivors of that more genial clime — groves of arbutus that speak of Greece or Sicily ; ferns, as at Killarney, found elsewhere only in the south, in Portugal, or the Canary Islands. On the southwestern horizon from Toppid Moun- tain, when the sky is clear after rain, you can trace THE GREAT STONE MONUMENTS. 37 the outline of the Curlew hills, our southern limit of view from Knocknarea. Up to the foot of the hills spreads a level country of pastures dappled Avitli lakes, broken into a thousand fantastic inlets by the wasting of the limestone rock. The daisies are the stars in that green sky. Just beyond the young stream of the Shannon, where it links Lough Garra to Lough Key, there is a lonely cromlech, whose tre- mendous crown was once upheld by five massive pil- lars. There is a kindred wildness and mystery in the cromlech and the lonely hills. Southward again of this, where the town of Lough Rea takes its name from the Gray Lake, stands a high hill crowned by a cromlech, with an encircling earth- work. It marks a green ring of sacred ground alone upon the hill-top, shut off from all the world, and with the mysterious monument of piled stones in its centre ; here, as always, one huge block upheld in the air by only lesser blocks. The Gray Lake itself, under this strange sentry on the hill, was in long- passed ages a little Venice ; houses built on piles lined its shores, set far enough out into the lake for safety, ever ready to ward off attack from the land. This miniature Venice of Lough Rea is the type of a Avhole epoch of turbulent tribal war, when homes 38 IRELAND. were everywhere clustered within the defence of the waters, Avith stores hiid up to last the rigors of a siege. The contrast between the insecurity and peril of the old lake dwellings and the present safety of the town, open on all sides, unguarded and free from fear, is very marked. But not less complete is the contrast between the ancient hamlet, thus hidden for security amid the waters, and the great cromlech, looming black against the sky on the hill's summit, exposed to the wildness of the winds, utterly un- guarded, yet resting there in lonely serenity. A little farther south. Lough Gur lies like a white mirror among the rolling pasture-lands of Limerick, set amongst low hills. On the lake's shore is another metropolis of the dead, worthy to compare with Car- rovvmore on the Sligo headland. Some of the circles here are not formed of single stones set at some dis- tance from each other, but of a continuous wall of great blocks crowded edge to edge. They are like round temples open to the sky, and within one of these unbroken rings is a lesser ring like an inner shrine. All round the lake there are like memorials — if we can call memorials these mighty groups of stone, which only remind us how much we have for- THE GREAT STONE MONUMENTS. 39 gotten. There are huge circles of blocks either set close together or Avith an equal space dividing boulder from boulder ; some of the giant circles are grouped togetlier in twos and threes, others are isolated ; one has its centre marked by a single enormous block, Avhile another like block stands farther off in lonely vastness. Here also stands a chambered cromlech of four huge flat blocks roofed over like the cromlech under Slieve Callan across the Shannon mouth. The southern horizon from Lough Gur is broken by the hills of red sandstone rising around Glan- •\vorth. Beside the stream, a tributary of the Black- water, a huge red cromlech rises over the greenness of the meadows like a belated mammoth in its un- couth might. To the southwest, under the red hills that guard Killarney on the south, the SuUane River flows towards the Lee. On its bank is another cromlech of red sandstone blocks, twin-brother to the Grlanworth pile. Beyond it the road passes to- wards the sunset through mountain-shadowed glens, coming out at last where Kenmare River opens into a splendid fiord towards the Atlantic Ocean. At Kenmare, in a vale of perfect beauty green with groves of arbutus and fringed Avith thickets of fuchsia, stands a great stone circle, the last we shall 40 IRELAND. record to the south. Like all the rest, it speaks of tremendous power, of unworldly and mysterious ends. The very antiquity of these huge stone circles sug- gests an affinity with the revolving years. And here, perhaps, we may lind a clue to their building. They may have been destined to record great Time itself, great Time that circles forever through the circling years. There is first the year to be recorded, Avith its revolving days 5 white winter gleaming into spring ; summer reddening and fading to autumn. Returning winter tells that the year has gone full circle ; the sun among the stars gives the definite measure of the days. A ring of thirty-six great boulders, set ten paces apart, would give the measure of the year in days ; and of circles like this there are more than one. In this endless ring of days the moon is the meas- urer, marking the hours and Aveeks upon the blue belt of night studded with golden stars. Moving stealthily among the stars, the moon presently changes her place by a distance equal to her own breadth ; we call the time this takes an hour. From her rising to her setting, she gains her own breadth twelve times ; therefore, the night and the day are divided THE GREAT STONE MONUMENTS. 41 eacli into twelve hours. Meanwhile she grows from crescent to full disk, to wane again to a sickle of light, and presently to lose herself in darkness at new moon. From full moon to full moon, or from one new moon to another, the nearest even measure is thirty days ; a circle of thirty stones would record this, as the larger circle of thirty-six recorded the solar year. In three years there are thrice twelve full moons, Avith one added ; a ring of thirty-seven stones representing this would show the simplest re- lation between sun and moon. The moon, as we saw, stealthily glides among the fixed stars, gaining her own Avidth every hour. Passing thus along the mid belt of the sphere, she makes the complete circuit in twenty-seven days, returning to the same point among the stars, or, if it should so happen, to the same star, within that time. Because the earth has meanwhile moved forward, the moon needs three days more to overtake it and gain the same relative position towards earth and sun, thus growing full again, not after twenty-seven, but after thirty days. Circles of twenty-seven and thirty days would stand for these lunar epochs, and would, for those who understood them, further bear testi- mony to the earth's movement in its own great path 42 IRELAND. around the sun. Thus would rings of varying num- bers mark the measures of time ; and not these only, but the great sweep of orbs engendering them, the triumphal march of the spheres through pathless ether. The life of our own world would thus be shown bound up with the lives of others in ceaseless, ever-widening circles, that lead us to the Infinite, the Eternal. All the cromlechs and circles we have thus far recorded are in the western half of our land ; there are as many, as worthy of note, in the eastern half. But as before we can only pick out a few. One of these crowns the volcanic peak of Brandon Hill, in Kilkenny, dividing the valleys of the Barrow and Nore. From the mountain-top you can trace the silver lines of the rivers coming together to the south, and flow- ing onward to the widening inlet of Wexford harbor, where they mingle with the waters of the River 8uir. On the summit of Brandon Hill stands a great stone circle, a ring of huge basalt blocks dominating the rich valleys and the surrounding plain. In Glen Druid of the Dublin hills is a cromlech whose granite crown weighs seventy tons. Not far off is the Mount Venus cromlech, the covering block of which is even more titanic ; it is a single stone THE GREAT STONE MONUMENTS. 43 eighty tons in weight. Near Killternan viUage, a short distance off, is yet another cronilecli whose top- most boulder exceeds both of these, weighing not less than ninety tons. Yet vast as all these are, they are outstripped by the cromlech of Howth, whose iipper block is twenty feet square and eight feet thick, a single enormous boulder one hundred tons in weight. This huge stone was borne in the air upon twelve massive pillars of quartz, seven feet above the ground, so that a man of average height standing on the ground and reaching upward could just touch the under surface of the block with his finger-tips. Even a tall man standing on the shoulders of another as tall would quite fail to touch the upper edge of the stone. If we give this marvelous monument the same age as the Fermanagh circles, as we well may, this raising of a single boulder of one hundred tons, and balancing it in the air on the crest of mas- sive pillars may give us some insight into the engi- neering skill of the men of ten thousand years ago. Across the central plain from Howth Head the iirst break is the range of Loughcrew hills. Here are great stone circles in numbers, not standing alone like so many others, but encompassing still stranger monuments ; chambered pyramids of boulders, to 44 IKELAND. which we shall later return. They are lesser models of the three great pyramids of Brugh on the Boyne, where the river sweeps southward in a long curve, half-encircling a headland of holy ground. From near Howth to the Boyne and uortli of it, the coast is low and flat ; sandhills matted with bent- grass and starred with red thyme and tiny pansies, yellow and purple and blue. Low tide carries the sea almost to the horizon, across a vast wilderness of dripping sand where the gulls chatter as they wade among the pools. Where the shore rises again towards the Carlingford j\Iountains, another cromlech stands under the shadow of granite hills. A long fiord with wooded walls divides the Carling- ford range from the mountains of Mourne. The great dark range thrusts itself forth against the sea in somber beauty, overhanging the wide strand of Dun- drum Bay. The lesser bay, across Avhose bar the sea moans under the storm-winds, is dominated by the hill of Rudraige, named in honor of a hero of old days ; but under the shadow of the hill stands a more ancient monument, that was gray with age be- fore the race of' Rudraige was born. On five pillars of massive stone is upreared a sixth, of huge and formidable bulk, and carrying even to us in our day THE GREAT STONE MONUMENTS. 45 a sense of mystery and might. The potent atmos- phere of a hidden past still breathes from it, whisper- ing of vanished years, vanished races, vanished secrets of the prime. There are two circles of enormous stones on the tongue of land between Dundrum Bay and Strang- ford, both very perfect and marked each in its own way from among the rest. The first, at Legamaddy, has every huge boulder still in place. There is a lesser ring of stones within the first circle, with many outliers, of enormous size, dotted among the fields. It looks as if a herd of huge animals of the early world had come together in a circle for the night, the young being kept for safety within their ring, Avhile others, grazing longer or wandering farther from the rest, were approaching the main herd. But nightfall coming upon them with dire magic turned them all to stone ; and there they remain, sentient, yet motionless, awaiting the day of their release. By fancies like this we may convey the feeling of mys- tery breathing from them. On the hill-top of Slieve-na-griddle is another circle of the same enormous boulders. A cromlech is piled in the midst of it, and an avenue of stones leads up to the circle. Its form is that of many cir- 46 IRELAND. cles Avith enclosed cromlechs at Carrowmorc, though in these the avenue is missine;. Tlie thouji'ht that uncleHies them is the same, though they are separated by the -whole width of the land ; a single cult with a single ideal prompted the erection of both. At Drumbo, on the east bank of the Lagan before it reaches Belfast Lough, there is a massive crondech surrounded by a wide ring of earth piled up high enough to cut off the sacred space Avithin from all view of the outer world. Like the earthwork round the cromlech of Lough Rea, it marks the boundary of a great nature temple, open to the sky but shut off from mankind. Even now its very atmosphere breathes reverence. At Finvoy, in northern Antrim, among the mead- ows of the Bann, there is a cromlech within a great stone circle like that on 81ieve-na-griddle in Down, and like many of the Carrowmore rings. The Black Lion cromlech in Cavan is encircled with a like ring of boulders, and another cromlech not far oft' rivals some of the largest in the immense size of its crown- ing block. Three cromlechs in the same limestone plain add something to the mystery that overhangs all the rest. The tirst, at Lennan in Monaghan, is marked with a THE GREAT STONE MONUMENTS. 47 curious cryptic design, suggesting a clue, yet yield- ing none. There is a like script on the cromlech at Castlederg in Tyrone, if indeed the markings were ever the record of some thought to be remembered, and not mere ornament. The chambered cromlech of Lisbellaw in Fermanagh has like markings 5 they are too similar to be quite independent, yet almost too simple to contain a recorded thought. Me come once more to Donegal. On the hill-top of Beltaney, near Raphoe, there is a very massive circle formed of sixty-seven huge blocks. Here again the Stonehenge ring might be set up within the Irish circle, leaving an avenue eight paces wide all round it. The sacred lire was formerly kindled here to mark the birth of Spring. The name of the old festival of Beltane still lingers on the hill. At Culdaff in north Donegal, at the end of the Inishowen peninsula, stands another great stone circle, with which we must close our survey of these titanic mon- uments. We have mentioned a few only among many ; yet enough to show their presence everywhere through- out the land, in the valleys or on mountain summits, in the midst of pastures or on lonely and rugged isles. One group, as we have seen, cannot be younger than 48 IRELAND. ten thousand years, and may be far older. The others may be well coeval. Their magnitude, their ordered ranks, their universal presence, are a start- ling revelation of the material powers of the men of that remote age ; they are a testimony, not less won- derful, of the moral force which dedicated so much power to ideal ends. Finally, they are a monument to remind us how little we yet know of the real history of our race. THE CROMLECH BUILDERS. in. THE CROMLECH BUILDERS. In every district of Ireland, therefore, there re- main these tremendous and solemn survivors of a mighty past. The cromlechs, with their enormous masses upheld in the air, rising among the fertile fields or daisy-dotted pastures ; the great circles of standing stones, starred everywhere, in the valleys or upon the uplands, along the rough sides of heather- covered hills. They have everywhere the same as- pect of august mystery, the same brooding presence, like sentinels of another world. It is impossible not to feel their overshadowing majesty. Everywhere they follow the same designs in large simplicity ; in- spired by the same purpose, and with the same tire- less might overcoming the tremendous obstacles of their erection ; they are devoted everywhere not to material and earthly ends, but to the ideal purposes of the invisible and everlasting, linked with the hidden life of those who pass away from us through the gates of death. Can we find any clue to the builders of these grand (51) 52 IRELAND. and enduring memorials, the conditions of their build- ing, the age of our land to which they belong 1 If we wisely use the abundant knowledge of the past already in our possession, there is good reason to be- lieve we can, establishing much with entire certainty and divining more. The standing stones and cromlechs, as we know, are everywhere spread over Ireland, so that it is probable that throughout the whole country one is never out of sight of one of these solemn monuments. Their uniform and universal presence shows, there- fore, a uniform race dwelling everywhere within the four seas, a universal stability and order, allowing such great and enduring works to be undertaken and completed. We must believe, too, that the builders of these giant stone monuments were dominant throughout the land, possessing entire power over the labor of thousands everywhere ; and even then the raising of these titanic masses is almost miracu- lous. But the history of the standing stones and crom- lechs is not a page of Irish history only, nor can we limit to our own isle the presence of their builders, the conditions of dominion and order under which alone they could have been raised. We shall gain THE CROMLECH BUILDERS. 53 our first trustworthy clue by tracing the limits of the larger territory, beyond our island, where these same o-rav memorials are found. The limits of the region in which alone we find these piles and circles of enormous stones are clearly and sharply defined, though this region itself is of im- mense and imposing extent. It is divided naturally into two provinces, both starting from a point some- where in the neighborhood of Gibraltar or Mount Atlas, and spreading thence over a territory of hun- dreds of miles. The southern cromlech province, beginning at the Strait of Gibraltai', extends eastward along the Afri- can coast past Algiers to the headland of Tunis, Avhere Carthage stood, at a date far later than the age of cromlechs. Were it not for the flaming southern sun, the scorched sands, the palms, the shimmering torrid air, we might believe these Algerian megaliths be- longed to our own land, so perfect is the resemblance, so uniform the design, so identical the inspiration. The same huge boulders, oblong or egg-shaped, for- midable, impressive, are raised aloft on massive sup- porting stones ; there are the same circles of stones hardly less gigantic, with the same mysterious faces, the same silent solemnity. Following this line, Ave 54 IRELAND. find them again in Minorca, Sardinia and Malta ; everywhere under warm Lhie skies, in lands of olives and trailing vines, with the peacock -blue of the Mediterranean Avaves twinkling beneath them. North- ward from Minorca, but still in our southern crom- lech province, we find them in southeastern Spain, in the region of New Carthage, but far older than the oldest trace of that ancient city. In lesser numbers they follow the Spanish coast vip towards the Ebro, through vinelands and lands of figs, everywhere under summer skies. This province, therefore, our southern cromlech province, covers most of the western Med- iterranean ; it does not cover, nor even approach, Italy or Greece or Egypt, the historic Mediterranean lands. We must look for its origin in the oppo- site direction — towards Gibraltar, the Pillars of Her- cules. From the same point, the Pillars of Hercules, be- gins our second or northern cromlech region, even larger and more extensive than the first, though hardly richer in titanic memorials. From Gibraltar, the cromlech region passes northward, covering Por- tugal and western Spain ; indeed, it probably merges in the other province to the eastward, the two in- cluding all Spain between them. From northern THE CROMLECH BUILDERS. 55 Spain, turning the flank of the giant Pyrenees at Fontarrabia, the cromlech region goes northward and ever northward, along the Atlantic coast of France, spreading eastward also through the central prov- inces, covering the mountains of the Cote d'Or and the Cevennes, but nowhere entering north Italy or Ger- many, which limit France to the east. There is a tremendous culmination of the huge stone monuments on the capes and headlands of Brittany, where France thrusts herself forward against the Atlantic, cen- tring in Carnac, the metropolis of a bygone world. Nowhere are there greater riches of titanic stone, in circles, in cromlechs, in ranged avenues like huge frozen armies or ordered hosts of sleeping elephants. From Brittany we pass to Ireland, Avhose wealth, in- herited from dead ages, we have already inventoried, and Britain, where the same monuments reappear. More numerous to the south and west, they yet spread all over Britain, including remote northern Scotland and the Western Isles. Finally, there is a streamer stretching still northeastward, to Norway and some of the Baltic Islands. We are, therefore, confronted with the visible and enduring evidence of a mighty people, spreading in two main directions from the Pillars of Hercules — 56 IRELAND. eastward through Gibraltar vStrait to sunny Algeria, to southern Spain and the Mediterranean isles *, and northward, along the stormy shores of the Atlantic, from within sight of Africa almost to the Arctic Circle, across Spain, Portugal, France, Ireland, Britain, and the lands of the Baltic and the North Sea. Through- out this vast territory there must have been a com- mon people, a common purpose and inspiration, a common striving towards the hidden w^orld ; there must have been long ages of order, of power, of peace, during which men's hearts could conceive and their hands execute memorials so vast, so evidently meant to endure to a far distant future, so clearly des- tined to ideal ends. There must have been a great spiritual purpose, a living belief in the invisible world, and a large practical poAver over natural forces, before these huge monuments could be erected. Some of the stones upheld in the air in the Irish cromlechs Aveigh eighty or ninety or a hundred tons. If we estimate that a well-built man can lift two hundred pounds, it would demand the simultaneous work of a thousand men to erect them ; and it is at least diflficidt to see how the effort of a thousand men could be applied. We are led, therefore, by evidence of the solidest THE CROMLECH BUILDERS. 57 material reality to see this great empire on the At- lantic and along the Avestern Mediterranean ; this Atlantean land of the cromlech-builders, as we may call it, for want of a better name. As the thought and purpose of its inhabitants are uniform through- out its whole vast extent, w^e are led to see in them a single homogeneous race, working without rivals, without obstacles, without contests, for they seem everywhere to have been free to choose w'hat sites they would for their gigantic structures. And we are irresistibly led to believe that these conditions must have endured throughout a vast extent of time, for no nation which does not look back to a distant past will plan for a distant future. The spiritual sweep and view of the cromlech-builders are, there- fore, as great as the extent of their territory. This mysterious people must have had a life as wonderful as that of Greece or Rome or Egypt, whose terri- tories Ave find them everywhere approaching, but nowhere invading. What we now know of the past history of our race is so vast, so incredibly enormous, that we have ample space for such a territory, so Avidespread, so enduring, as Ave have seen demanded by the position of the cromlechs and standing stones ; more than 58 IRELAND. that, so overwhelming are the distances in the dark backward and abysm of time, to which we must now carry the dawn of human history, that the time needed for the building of the cromlechs may seem quite recent and insignificant, in view of the mightier past, stretching back through geologic ages. The nineteenth century may well be called the age of resurrection, when long-forgotten epochs of man were born again into our knowledge. We can carry back that knowledge now to the early Miocene period, to which belong the human relics found by the Abbe Bourgeois on the uplands of Thenay, in central France ; and no one believes that the early Miocene age can be as recent as a million years ago. A vast space separates the Thenay relics from the later traces of man found in Pliocene sands with the bones of the archaic meridional elephant, — at a date when the German ocean was a forest, full of southern trees and huge beasts now long since departed from the earth. A period hardly less vast must separate tliese from the close of the glacial age, Avhen man roamed the plains of Europe, and sketched the herds of mammoths as they cropped the leaves. That huge beast, too, has long since departed into the abyss ; but man the artist, who recorded the massive outline, THE CROMLECH BUILDERS. 59 the huge bossed forehead, the formidable bulk of the shaggy arctic elephant, engraved in firm lines on a fragment of its tusk, — man still remains. Man was present when rhinoceros and elephant were as com- mon in Britain as they are to-day in Southern India or Borneo ; when the hippopotamus was as much at home in the waters of the Thames as in the Nile and Niger 5 when huge bears like the grizzlj of the Rockies, cave-lions and sabre-toothed tigers lurked in Devon caverns or chased the bison over the hills of Kent. Yet this epoch of huge and ferocious monsters, following upon the Age of Ice, is a recent chapter of the great epic of man ; there lies far more behind it, beyond the Age of Ice to the immensely distant Pliocene ; beyond this as far as the early Miocene ; beyond this, again, how much further we know not, toAvards the beginningless beginning, the infinite. We are, therefore, face to face with an ordered series of almost boundless ages, geologic epochs of human history succeeding each other in majestic pro- cession, as the face of our island was now tropical, now arctic ; as the seas swelled up and covered the hills, or the bottom of the deep drove back the ocean and became dry land, an unbroken continent. The 60 IRELAND. wild dreams of romance never approached the splen- did outlines of this certain history. There are dim outlines of man throughout all these ages, but only at a comparatively recent date have we traditions and evidence pointing to still surviving races. At a period of only a few thousand years ago, we begin to catch glimpses of a northern race whom the old Greeks and Romans called Hyperboreans or Far-Northerners ; a race wild and little skilled in the arts of life 5 a race of small stature, slight, dusky, with piercing eyes, low brows, and of forbidding face. This race was scattered over lands far north of the Mediterranean, dwelling in caves and dens of the earth, and lingering on unchanged from the days of mammoth and cave-bear. We have slight but defi- nite knowledge of this very ancient race — enough to show us that its peculiar type lingers to this day in a few remote islands on the Galway and Kerry coast, mingled with many later races. This type we find described in old Gaelic records as the Firbolgs, a race weak and furtive, dusky and keen-eyed, subjected by later races of greater force. Yet from this race, as if to show the inherent and equal power of the soul, came holy saints and mighty warriors ; to the old race of the Firbolgs belong Saint Mansuy, THE CROMLECH BUILDERS. 61 apostle of Belgium, and Roderick O'Conor, the last king of united Ireland. In gloomy mountain glens and lonely ocean islands still it lingers, unvanquished, tenacious, obscurely working out its secret destiny. This slight and low-browed race, of dark or sallow visage, and with black crisp hair, this Hyperborean people, is the oldest we can gain a clear view of in our island's history ; but we know nothing of its extension or powers which would warrant us in be- lieving that this Avas the race which built the crom- lechs. Greek and Roman tradition, in this only cor- roborating the actual traces we ourselves possess of these old races, tells us of another people many thou- sand years ago overrunning and dominating the Fir- bolgs ; a race of taller stature, of handsome features, though also dark, but with softer black hair, not crisp and tufted like the hair of the dwarfish earlier race. Of this second conquering race, tall and handsome, we have abundant traces, gathered from many lands where they dwelt ; bodies preserved by art or nature, in caverns or sepulchres of stone ; ornaments, pot- tery, works decorative and useful, and covering sev- eral thousand years in succession. But better than this, we have present, through nearly every land where we know of them in the past, a living rem- 62 IRELAND. nant of this ancient race, like it in every particular of stature, form, complexion and visage, identical in character and tempei', tendency and type of mind. In Ireland we find this tall, dark race over all the west of the island, but most numerous in Kerry, Clare, Galway and Mayo ; in those regions Avhere, we know, the older population was least disturbed. In remote villages among the mountains, reached by bridle-paths between heath-covered hills; in the settle- ments of fisliernien, under some cliff or in the shel- tered nook of one of our great western bays ; or among the lonely, little visited Atlantic islands, this dark, handsome race, with its black hair, dark-brown eyes, sallow skin and high forehead, still holds its own, as a second layer above the remnant of the far more ancient Firbolg Hyperboreans. We find the same race also among the Donegal highlands, here and there in the central plain or in the south, and nowhere entirely missing among the varied races towards the eastern sea. But it is by no means in Ireland only that this tall, dark, western race is found. It is numerously repre- sented in the nearest extension of the continent, among the headlands and bays and isles of Brittany — a land so like our own western seaboard, with its THE CROMLECH BUILDERS. 63 wild Atlantic storms. Following the ocean south- ward, Ave iind the same race extending to the Loire, the Garonne, the Pyrenees ; stretching some- what inland also, but clinging everywhere to the Atlantic, as we also saw it cling in Ireland. In ear- lier centuries, long before our era opened, we find this same race spread far to the east, — as far, almost, as the German and Italian frontier, — so that at one time it held almost complete possession of France. South of the Pyrenees we find it once more ; dominant in Portugal, less strongly represented in Spain, yet still supplying a considerable part of the population of the whole peninsula, as it does in Ireland at the pres- ent day. But it does not stop with Spain, or even Europe. We find the same race again in the Guanches of the Canary islands, off the African coast ; and, stranger still, we find mummies of this race, of great antiquity, in the cave-tombs of Tenerifi'e. Further, we have ample evidence of its presence, until dis- placed by Moorish invaders, all along northern Africa as far as Tunis ; and we come across it again amongst the living races in the Mediterranean isles, in Sar- dinia, Sicily and »Southern Italy. Finally, the Tua- regs of the Central Sahara belong to the same type. Everywhere the same tall, dark race, handsome, 64 IRELAND. imaginative ; with a quite definite form of Lead, of brow, of eyes ; a Avell-marked character of visage, complexion, and texture of hair. Thus far the southern extension of this, our sec- ond Irisli race ; Ave may look for a moment