"Expect it not. We found no bait
To tempt us in thy country.
We travel far, 'tis true, but not for nought;
And must be bribed to compass earth again
By other hopes and richer fruits than yours."
Without attempting to deduce from such evidence as is now attainable, more than it seems fairly to warrant, it is obvious that we have followed down the unwritten history of our island from that remote and imperfectly defined era in which we catch the first glimpses of its occupation by wanderers from the eastern home of our common race, to the period when definite history begins, and written records supply to some extent the information heretofore painfully sought amid the relics of older times. There still remains, however, some few pages more of these archæological annals to be deciphered before we attempt to sift the perplexing mixture of truth and fable which makes up our earlier written history.
FOOTNOTES:
[454] Ruskin's Seven Lamps of Architecture, p. 164.
[455] Vol. i. pp. 87-96.
[456] Roy's Military Antiquities, Plate VIII.
[457] A still more striking proof of such acquired skill is furnished by the existence of a similar moat and rampart in the north of Ireland, of which an account is given by Dr. Stuart in his Historical Memoirs of Armagh.
[458] Plate XLVII. It is also engraved in King's Munimenta Antiqua, Plates I. and II.; and in Pennant's Tour, vol. iii. Plate XVI.
[459] Roy, Plate XLVIII.
[460] "I remarked that at Dun Mac Sniochain the materials of the hill itself were not vitrifiable, but that a very fusible rock was present at a short distance, or scattered in fragments about the plain. The same is true here, (Dunadeer); and in both cases the forts are not erected out of the materials nearest at hand, which are infusible, but collected with considerable labour from a distance. It is hence evident that the builders of these works were aware of the qualities of these various rocks; and it is equally evident that they chose the fusible in preference to the infusible, although with a considerable increase of labour. The obvious conclusion is that they designed from the beginning to vitrify their walls."—Highlands and Western Isles of Scotland, vol. i. p. 292.