Having thus disposed of the word “Cloic-teach,” which Dr. Ledwich so relied upon, as determining the character of these antique remains, I take leave, evermore, to discard the misnomer, and draw attention to a name which I have never seen noticed as applied to any of those pyramidal edifices. That which I allude to is “Cathoir ghall,” which means the “Cathedral or temple of brightness” (“and delight”[60]); not, I must premise, from any external daubing with which modern Vandalism may have thought proper to incrust it,—as happened to that at Swords,—but in evident reference to the solar and lunar light—the sources of life and generation—therein contemplated, at once, and interchangeably venerated.
The particular Tower to which this epithet had been assigned—and which it obtained, by way of eminence, for its colossal superiority—is not now standing.[61] It rose about half a mile distant from the old castle of Bally Carbery, in the barony of Iveragh, and county of Kerry; a place where one would hope that the true designation of such phenomena would be preserved most pure, being aloof from the influence of exotic refinements, and, thus far, free from that maudlin scepticism and laboured doubt which a “little learning” too frequently superinduces.
“Dear, lovely bowers of innocence and ease,—
Seats of my youth, when ev’ry sport could please,—
How often have I loiter’d o’er thy green,
When humble happiness endear’d each scene!
How often have I paused on every charm,—
The shelter’d cot, the cultivated farm!
While all the village train, from labour free,
Led up their sports beneath the spreading tree.”[62]
No combination of letters could possibly approach closer, or convey to a discerning mind greater affinity of meaning to anything, than does the above name to the description given of them in the twelfth century by Giraldus Cambrensis, who calls them “turres ecclesiasticas, quæ, more patriæ, arctæ sunt et altæ, nec non et rotundæ.” This definition, vague as it may seem, affords ample illumination, when compared with the epithet which I have above adduced, to penetrate the darkness of this literary nebula. The word “turres” points out their constructional symmetry, and “ecclesiasticas” their appropriation to a religious use; and what can possibly be in stricter consonance with the tenor of this idea than “Cathaoir ghall,” or the Temple of Brightness, which I have instanced above as the vernacular appellation of one of those sanctuaries?
Should it be asked, why did not Cambrensis, at the time, enter more fully into the minutiæ of their detail? I shall unhesitatingly answer, it was because he knew nothing more about them. The Irish had at that moment most lamentably dwindled into a degenerate race. The noble spirit of their heroic ancestors, which had called forth those pyramids, for the twofold and mingled purpose of religion and science, had already evaporated; and all the historian could glean, in prosecuting his inquiries as to their era and cause, was that their antiquity was so remote, that some of them may be even seen immersed beneath the waters of Lough Neagh,[63] which had been occasioned many ages before by the overflowing of a fountain.[64]
Let us now turn to the annals of the “Four Masters,” which record the destruction of Armagh, A.D. 995, by a flash of lightning, and see under what name they include the Round Towers in the general catastrophe. Here is the passage at full length, as given by O’Connor—“Ardmaeha do lose do tene saighnein, ettir tighib, 7[65] Domhuliacc, 7 Cloic teacha, 7 Fiadh-Neimhedh”; that is, Armagh having been set on fire by lightning, its houses, its cathedrals, its belfries, and its Fiadh-Neimhedh, were all destroyed.
The Ulster Annals have registered the same event in the following words:—“Tene diait do gabail Airdmaeha conafarcaibh Dertach, na Damliacc, na h Erdam, na Fidh-Nemead ann cen loscadh”; that is, Lightning seized upon Armagh, to so violent a degree, as to leave neither mansion, nor cathedral, nor belfry, nor Fiadh-Nemeadh, undemolished.
Here we find Fiadh-Nemeadh to occur in both accounts, while the belfries are represented in one place as Cloic teacha, and in the other as Erdam, and in both are opposed to, and contradistinguished from, the Fiadh-Nemeadh. Our business now is to investigate what this latter word conveys; and though I do not mean, for a while, to develop its true interpretation,—of which I am the sole and exclusive depositary,—yet must I make it apparent, that by it—whatever way it must be rendered—all before me have understood, were emphatically designated our Sabian Towers. Thus Colgan in his Acts, p. 297, referring to these words of the Four Masters, says: “Anno 995, Ardmaeha cum Basilicis, Turribus, aliisque omnibus edificiis, incendio ex fulmine generato, tota vastatur.”
O’Connor also, wishing to wrest its import to his favourite theory of there having been gnomons, while ignorant of its proper force, indulges in a conjecture of the most lunatic ostentation, and translates Fiadh-Nemeadh by celestial indexes.
But though the word does not literally signify either “Towers”—as Colgan, for want of a better exposition, has set forth—or “celestial indexes”—as O’Connor, equally at a loss for its proper meaning, has ventured to promulgate, yet is it indisputable that it stood as the representative of those enigmatical edifices, as well as that both writers had the same structures in view as comprehended under the tenor of this mysterious denomination.[66]