Three miles away from Mellifont stand the ruins of another abbey, centuries older and incomparably greater in its day—an abbey absolutely Irish, with rude, small buildings, but with a giant round-tower and two of the loveliest sculptured crosses in existence on this earth. Monasterboice it is called—Mainister Buithe, the abbey of Boetius—and the way thither lies along a pleasant road, through a wooded valley—which, fertile as it is, is not without its traces of desolation, for we passed more than one vast empty mill, falling to decay. Then, on the slope of a hillside away ahead, we saw the round tower, or what is left of it, for the top of it is broken off, struck by lightning, perhaps. But the fragment that remains is 110 feet high! And seeing it thus, across the valley, with the low little church nestling at its base, one is inclined to think that Father Dempsey was not altogether wrong when he said he cared nothing about the theories of antiquarians concerning the round towers, for he knew what they were—the forefingers of the early church pointing us all to God.
| THE ROUND TOWER, MONASTERBOICE | THE HIGH CROSS, MONASTERBOICE |
My companion and I were discussing these theories, when our jarvey saw the opportunity to spring a joke, which I have since discovered to be a time-honoured one.
"Your honours are all wrong," he said, "if you will excuse my sayin' so. It has been proved that the round towers was built by the government."
"Built by the government?" repeated my companion. "How can you prove that?"
"Easy enough, your honour. Seein' they're no manner of use and cost a lot of money, who else could have built them?"
And this, I take it, was his revenge for the Boyne battlefield.
We stopped presently beside a stile leading over the stone wall at the side of the road, and here there was waiting another old woman, to unlock the entrance to the tower. We clambered over the stile and made our way up through the grass-grown, unkempt graveyard, first to the tower—one of the mightiest of these monuments of ancient Erin, for it is seventeen yards around at the base, and tapers gradually toward the top, and the only entrance is a small doorway six feet above the ground; and it takes no great effort of imagination to fancy the monks clambering wildly up to it, clutching the treasures of the monastery to their bosoms, whenever word came that the raiding Danes were in the neighbourhood. Ladders have been fixed so that one can climb to the top, but we did not essay them.
No trace remains of the monastic buildings which clustered at the tower foot; for, unlike those at Mellifont and in England and on the continent, these were not wrought of stone, but were mere shacks, as in every truly Irish abbey, scarcely strong enough to screen from wind and weather the groups of scholars who gathered to study here. They lived a strait and austere life, and the only permanent structures they built were the churches. Here, as usual, they were small, the largest one being only forty feet in length; and the walls that remain prove how bare and mean they must have looked beside the carved and columned splendours of Mellifont.
But Monasterboice has one glory, or rather two, beside which those that remain at Mellifont are as nothing; and these are the huge Celtic crosses, the most perfect and beautiful in the land. One of them is tall and slender and the other is short and sturdy, and both are absolute masterpieces.