The original work is in the Bodleian Library. It is on parchment and in medium quarto, and contains fifty-seven leaves. Extracts from the Old Testament and a history of the ancient world down to the arrival of St. Patrick in Ireland in 432 form the earlier part. From this period it deals exclusively with the affairs of Ireland, terminating with 1319. It seems to have been the production of two monks, one carrying it to 1216, the other continuing it to 1320. It is one of the earliest of Irish histories, and considered by savants as taking high rank among them.
In 1100 the Abbey was plundered by Mildwin O’Donoghue of a great treasure of gold, silver, and rich goods of the adjacent country, which had been deposited there as secure sanctuary. Many of the clergy were slain by the MacCarthys, “But,” writes the monk, “God soon punished this act of sacrilege and impiety by bringing many of its authors to an untimely end.”
Well, there is peace now in fair Innisfallen. The visitor bears away its impress with the memory of one of the fairest spots on earth.
“Sweet Innisfallen, fare thee well,
May calm and sunshine still be thine;
How fair thou art let others tell,
To feel how fair yet still be mine.”
Glena, the “glen of good fortune,” is one of the most eagerly sought out beauty spots of Killarney. Glena Bay is the first part of the Lower Lake if it is entered from the Long Range, but by whatever way you reach it the picture which meets the eye is unsurpassed.
The mountains of Glena and Toomies are densely wooded to their base, the trees hanging over their sides and coming down in rich luxuriance to the water’s edge. A very forest of the finest arbutus, with berry and blossom together in autumn, with oak, ash, pine, birch and alder, white thorn, yew, and holly, it must be seen to realize the colour effect or the matchless tintings of gorse and heather, a great mosaic quivering in the sunshine. The varieties of this immense scenery of forest are impossible to describe, the woods extending about six miles in length, and from half a mile to a mile and a half in breadth, while the inequalities of the ground produce wondrous effects of light and shadow.
Glena is all soft loveliness, but rugged rock and crag, and the stern grandeur of Torc Mountain on the other side, strike again that minor chord never far from Killarney’s brightest scenes.
IN A TYPICAL COTTAGE.