Because Simon Stylites lived in a domicile, sized "scarce two cubits," on a pillar sixty feet high, and because other anchorites lived on pillars and in cells, Dean Richardson suggested that the Irish Round Towers were for hermits; and was supported by Walter Harris, Dr. Milner, Dr. King, etc. The cloch angcoire, or hermit's stone, quoted in aid of this fancy, turns out to be a narrow cell; and so much for the hermits!
The confusion of
TOURS AND TOWERS
is a stupid pun or a vulgar pronunciation in English; but in Irish gave rise to the antiquarian theory of Dr. Smith, who, in his History of Cork, concludes that the Round Towers were penitential prisons, because the Irish word for a penitential round or journey is turas!
THE PHALLIC THEORY
never had any support but poor Henry O'Brien's enthusiastic ignorance and the caricaturing pen of his illustrator.
We have now done with the theories of these towers, which Mr. Petrie has shown, past doubt, to be either positively false or quite unproved. His own opinion is that they were used—1, as belfries; 2, as keeps, or houses of shelter for the clergy and their treasures; and 3, as watch-towers and beacons; and into his evidence for this opinion we shall go at a future day, thanking him at present for having displaced a heap of incongruous, though agreeable, fancies, and given us the learned, the most exact, and the most important work ever published on the antiquities of the Ancient Irish Nation.
THE IRISH BRIGADE.
When valour becomes a reproach, when patriotism is thought a prejudice, and when a soldier's sword is a sign of shame, the Irish Brigade will be forgotten or despised.