And one of the grandest of these ancient holy piles, Newtown Abbey, now lies a crumbling heap on the banks of the Boyne. What it once was may, however, still be conceived, of from the exquisite beauty of some of the remaining capitals, vaulting, and shafts, and from the many fragments of its noble windows which are strewn about the neighboring cemetery. This, alas! like many another of the magnificent ruins of Ireland, has been used as a quarry; not by the unlettered peasant, who is rarely found wanting in a devotional feeling that leads him to regard antiquities, and especially those of an ecclesiastical origin, with a sentiment of profound veneration; but by contractors for the erection of new buildings, and sometimes even by men of station and education, who seem to have forgotten that age and neglect cannot deprive structures once consecrated to God, and applied to the service of religion, of any portion of their sacred character.
Bective Abbey, not far from Newtown, is another wonderful wreck, which seems to combine ecclesiastical
with military and domestic architecture in the most singular manner. It presents indeed a striking evidence of the half-monk, half-soldier character of its founders. Battlemented towers, cloister-arches, and rooms with great fire-places; the flues carried up through the thickness of the walls, and continued through tapering chimney-shafts, seem to have made the Abbey of Bective a kind of monastic castle, and previous to the use of artillery it must have been a place of great strength.
Perhaps one of the most beautiful edifices ever erected in Ireland was the church of Killeshin, near Carlow, once decorated with richly sculptured capitals representing human heads, the hair intertwined with serpents. This magnificent building was more hardly treated by the destructiveness of an individual who, about forty years since, resided in the neighborhood, than by the storms and frosts and thunderbolts of ages. The detestable vandal wantonly defaced the exquisite capitals, and almost entirely obliterated an Irish inscription which extended round the abacus!
On the romantic shores of the beautiful Lake of Killarney stands the venerable ruins of Muckross Abbey. No vestige of its former grandeur remains; “its antic pillars massy proof” are all ground into dust, and a magnificent yew-tree that has grown in the very centre of the wreck spreads its mighty, sombre branches like a funereal pall over the fallen temple. And in the lake on the “holy island” of Innisfallen, on a gentle verdant slope, surrounded by thick groves, are still to be seen the few crumbling stones that mark where stood the abbey once so renowned throughout Christendom for its learning and piety.
But it would be a vain task to attempt to enumerate all the beautiful
memorials of Ireland’s splendor whose ivy-grown ruins still adorn the land they once made so famous.
“Her temples grew as grows the grass”—
and popular tradition tells us that numbers have been hidden from mortal eye, ever since the pious monks who prayed within them were barbarously driven forth or slain.
“In yonder dim and pathless wood
Strange sounds are heard at twilight hour,
And peals of solemn music swell
As from some minster’s lofty tower.
From age to age those sounds are heard,
Borne on the breeze at twilight hour—
From age to age no foot hath found
A pathway to the minster’s tower!”