Then she said aloud to Cousin Bee, “It would be a fine place for the fairies to dance under the pink and white trees in the rath beyond the garden. Did the old chiefs have their picnics there?”
“Whist, jewel, the Irish chiefs had other things to do,” said her cousin. “They had to be fighting with other chiefs, and killing the wild beasts; and sometimes they went off hunting foxes and deer through the green forests, but I’m thinking they had no time for picnics.”
Mary Ellen was standing by Kathleen’s side, her sightless eyes looking beyond the green hedge toward the beautiful mound of trees that scented the air with thousands of blossoms.
“What did the chiefs do with the forts?” she asked.
“They lived in them,” answered Bee. “First they built a great circular wall of earth or stone to keep out wild beasts and robbers; and then inside the wall they built their house. Sometimes there were two or three walls, one outside the other. The forts were called raths, and if a king lived in them his house was called a dun.”
“That rath looks like a grove of trees now,” said Kathleen.
“The trees have grown up on the walls, and the houses are all gone hundreds of years ago,” Bee replied.
“What did the houses look like?” asked Mary Ellen.
“The darlin’! she wants to know how it all looked just as if she had the sight,” said Bee, putting her arm around the child.
“Well,” she went on, “the houses were shaped like bee-hives. They were built of poles all woven in and out with twigs, like wicker baskets, so the books say. Many a town in Ireland to-day is built where a chief’s rath or a king’s dun once stood, and it gets its name by that token. There’s Dundalk and Dunglow and Dunmore, Rathmelton, Rathdrum and Rathcormack. There are duns and raths all over the country.”