PLAN OF PASSAGE AND CHAMBER AT DOWTH, AND TRANSVERSE SECTION OF CHAMBER (SAME SCALE).
The "bee-hive" chamber which the Dowth mound also contains has no duplicate at New Grange, but it is quite possible that each of these mounds has yet something to disclose. Dowth also reminds the explorer and excavator, by the deep hollow made in the upper portion, in the course of a fruitless and abandoned search, some years ago, that to attack these mounds at random is to run the risk of much useless and disappointing labour. It moreover shows that any upward exit from the central chamber did not in this instance ascend perpendicularly as in the Denghoog at Sylt, or the Orcadian Maes-how. In trying to find the entrances to such "hollow hills," we moderns have no light to guide us as the Danes had in the ninth century. It will be remembered that there never was, "in concealment under ground in Erinn, nor in the various secret places belonging to Fians or to fairies, anything that was not discovered by these foreign, wonderful Denmarkians, through paganism and idol worship."
BEE-HIVE CHAMBER, DOWTH.
This is otherwise explained by Dr. Todd, "that, notwithstanding the potent spells employed by the Fians and fairies for the concealment of their hidden treasures, the Danes, by their pagan magic and the diabolical power of their idols, were enabled to find them out." What was the "magic" of those ninth-century Danes, or of the order generally known as Magi, we only imperfectly know. But what is tolerably evident is that if those ninth-century Danes did not themselves rear similar structures (and Irish and Hebridean tradition says they did), they had among them those to whom such mound-dwellings were not "hidden" places; whether the entrances were uniformly made at one side of the mound, or were otherwise indicated to the initiated. In the case of "Knowth" there is less dubiety; as what appears to be the entrance to its interior is known to Irish archæologists. But local difficulties have hitherto stood in the way, and the mound is said never to have been entered since the ninth century; which, however, may be doubted. Dr. Molyneux, at any rate, in the tract quoted in Appendix A, states that he had then in his possession a stone urn which "was twelve years since [i.e. in 1713] discovered in a mount at Knowth, a place in the county of Meath, within four miles of Drogheda." He does not actually say that this urn, and the "square stone box, about five foot long and four foot broad" which contained it, were situated in an interior chamber of the mound. But very probably this is what he meant.[243]