This tower is commonly called M‘Carthy’s Tower; and the church is frequently called M‘Carthy’s Church, from a mistaken notion that it was built by Finneen M‘Carthy of Desmond in the beginning of the thirteenth century. M‘Carthy certainly gave some land to the community of Clonmacnoise to secure their prayers, and what he valued even more, a burial-place in its holy soil for his own royal race. Tempull Finnian was assigned to him for the purpose; and it was doubtless repaired by M‘Carthy; but it was built long before any of his name was known at Clonmacnoise.
(3.) The O’Conors, Kings of Connaught, also gave a grant of many townlands to secure a mortuary chapel at Clonmacnoise. It was known as Tempull Conor, and was founded by Cathal, King of Connaught, who died A.D. 1010; he was son of that Conor (Conchobhar) who gave his name to their royal race.
(4.) Another kingly family of Connaught—the O’Kellys of Hy-Many—built themselves a sepulchral chapel within the sacred enclosure, which they paid for with many a broad acre. It was founded by Conor O’Kelly of Moenmoy, in the year A.D. 1167, as the Four Masters inform us. He was a great chief, famed for his royal bounty, and ruled over Hy-Many for forty years.
(5.) King Diarmaid, who helped St. Ciaran to fix the first stake enclosing the sacred boundary of Clonmacnoise, belonged to the southern Hy-Niall race. It is no wonder, therefore, that his royal descendants had their chapel there. It was called Tempull Righ—the King’s Church—and sometimes Tempull Ua Maelshechlainn, from the family name, which the southern Hy-Niall afterwards assumed. It stands south-east of the cathedral, and measures 40 feet in length by 17 feet in breadth.
(6.) The beautiful round tower at the north-western corner of the cemetery is commonly called O’Rorke’s Tower, because, as the Registry of Clonmacnoise tells us, it was built by Fergal O’Rorke, King of Connaught, towards the middle of the tenth century. This prince, for his soul’s sake, and as the price of his family sepulchre, undertook to keep all the churches in repair during his own life; and he also built the causeway still in part existing from the Yew Tree to the Lough. The portion of the tower built by O’Rorke’s men in the tenth century is of fine-jointed ashlar masonry; but the upper portion, executed two centuries later in A.D. 1135, is of ruder and very inferior workmanship.[219] At that date lightning struck the tower, overthrowing its roof and twenty feet of wall. The coarser masonry represents the restoration then effected by Turlogh O’Conor and O’Malone, Abbot of Clonmacnoise. This tower is now sixty-two feet high, and fifty-six feet in circumference. There were other chapels and sepulchral oratories at Clonmacnoise, which have now completely disappeared, and to which it is unnecessary for us to make further reference. The nunnery whose foundations have only recently been brought to light, was about 1,000 paces to the east of the monastery.
On the western border beyond the cemetery are the ruins of a very striking Norman Keep, commonly called De Lacy’s Castle. It was built, however, in A.D. 1214, not by De Lacy, who was then dead, but by John de Gray,[220] Bishop of Norwich, an able and vigorous justiciary, who built this strong keep to protect the monastery and defend the passes of the Shannon against the turbulent Connaught men. Like all the Norman work of that period in Ireland, it is as solid and massive as if it were built of solid rock, not by man but by nature.
The churchyard has many inscribed tombstones, which are fully described by Petrie and by Miss Stokes in her interesting work on Christian Inscriptions. These were the tombstones placed over the graves of the abbots of Clonmacnoise, for the humble brothers of the monastery were interred beneath ‘noteless burial stones.’ The most striking feature exhibited in these monuments is their wonderful variety of design and the delicacy of execution.
One of the most interesting of the tombstones is that placed over “Suibine, son of Mailae Humai,” who, in the Chronicon Scotorum, is described as an anchorite and choice scribe, and whose death is marked at the year A.D. 890 or 891. He is beyond doubt the person who, as we shall see hereafter, is described by Florence of Worcester as the “most learned Doctor of the Scots”—Doctor Scotorum peritissimus—truly a high eulogy of Suibine, whose name is inscribed on this stone, and whose dust lies beneath it.
There is another stone on which is incised a cross of very peculiar form with the simple legend Blaimac, who, as we learn from the same Chronicon Scotorum, was princeps, or ruling Abbot of Clonmacnoise, and died in A.D. 896.
There were no less than one hundred and forty of these inscribed stones at Clonmacnoise, when it was first visited by Petrie in early life. Many of them have since disappeared, but a few new ones have been discovered during more recent excavations, so that the place is still a perfect treasury of the monuments of our ancient art. There is an ancient Gaedhlic poem in the Burgundian Library at Brussels which gives an account of the kings and warriors who are buried in “the city of Ciaran, the prayerful, the pious and the wise.”[221] A somewhat similar poem, written by Conaing Buidhe O’Mulconry, is in Trinity College, and has been translated by the late Mr. Hennessy.[222] The second stanza tells how Turlough O’Conor and his ill-starred son, Roderick, the last King of Ireland, sleep on either side of the high altar in Temple Mor, which the Four Masters identify with Temple-Ciaran. The independence of Erin sleeps with them in their tomb.