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We have evidence of their having been built like the edifices of other kingdoms of the times in which they were built; and why should they not? for there came no colony into Erin but from the eastern world, as from Spain, etc.; and it would be strange if such a deficiency of intellect should mark the parties who came into Ireland, as that they should not have the sense to form their residences and dwellings after the manner of the countries from which they went forth, or through which they travelled. [See Introduction to Dudley Mac Firbis's great
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Book of Genealogies, translated in
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O'Curry's Lectures, pp. 222, etc.] It is quite certain that the early colonizers of Ireland, to whom Mac Firbis thus alludes, were a portion of that great Celtic wave of population which passed from East to West over Europe, leaving the same earthern mounds and cyclopean stone structures behind as monuments wherever they went; but it is equally certain, that if these ancient colonies visited Assyria, and Egypt, and Greece in their peregrinations, as Mac Firbis believed they did, they did not carry with them Assyrian, or Egyptian, or Grecian masonry or architecture into Ireland. The raths and cashels which they constructed were exceedingly simple in their character, and in very few indeed of the former is there the slightest grace of stonework to be discovered. Caves were very often formed under the raths; and Mac Firbis states that under the rath of Bally O Dowda, in Tireragh, he himself had seen
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and that its walls were still of the height of
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Nor were the contents of the ancient Irish dwellings less simple than the buildings themselves; for we find by the Brehon Laws that
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the first-mentioned articles indicating clearly the usages of hospitality, which always formed the predominating institution of the Irish. The same book of Brehon Laws refers to
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Danish forts, which were so numerous in the country; and such was the fashion of attributing all our antiquities to a people who had impressed the memory of the nation with such terrible and indelible traditions of themselves, that even Archdeacon Lynch, the author of
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Cambrensis Eversus, supposes the Danes to have been the builders of the round towers. Dr. Molyneux, who wrote toward the close of the same century, treats us to a whole book about