WEST WALL.
A. Church. Walls shown in the accompanying elevations. The wall forming the church-yard, although fallen in, is well defined.
EAST WALL.
CAP-STONE OF WEST DOORWAY
B. Probably a house, walls fallen.
SOUTH WALL.
C. Probably a house, walls perfect to 9 feet elevation. Window, 2 feet by 1. Door, 5 feet by 3. The remains of the surrounding wall are readily traced to the cliff, which is 35 feet high. The inclosure was probably a garden.
NORTH WALL.
Outside the church wall, but not far removed from it, there was a building evidently of much pretension. It was divided into three compartments, and was sixty-four by thirty-two feet. There was another still farther to the westward, others to the east, and one on the natural terrace above the church. Altogether the cluster of buildings which composed the church estate—where dwelt the officers who governed the country round about, and administered in this distant place, at what was then thought to be “the farthest limit of the habitable globe,” the ordinances of the pope at Rome—were nine in number: a church, a tomb, an almonry, five dwellings, and one round structure; the walls of which latter building had, like those of the church-yard, completely fallen, but the outline of the foundation was preserved. The walls had been four feet thick, and the diameter of the building in the clear was forty-eight feet. It had but one door-way, which opened towards the church.
To call this circular building a tower, in the sense of its application to the famous round towers of Ireland, would be a great stretch of the imagination. There is, however, a strange coincidence in the circumstance of proximity to a church. Near all the church edifices that have been discovered in Greenland a structure similar to this one at Krakortok has been found. None of them are, however, so large: its walls could not have been more than seven or eight feet high. Its uses are unknown. Possibly it may have been a work of military defense, perhaps a baptistery; there is nothing, however, except its shape, to indicate that it was not a cow-house.