Or in a church my refuge take,
Still God would guard His own with care;
And even in battle safe they fare.
No man can slay me till the day
When God shall take my life away.”
There is said to be an ancient Life of St. Patrick which contains a notice of one of those dwellings; and in a translation into English of an ancient Irish ms., the “Pursuit of Diarmuid and Grainne”—two characters belonging to the earliest, indeed generally supposed mythic, period of Irish history—Fionn and Diarmuid are represented as addressing each other, and the one calls to mind that Miodhach the son of Colgan, “had a Bruighean upon land, and a Bruighean upon the wave” (i. e. an island). The word Bruighean means a palace. The island upon which this structure stood was, according to the text, situated upon the Shannon, and was approached by a “ford.”
Thus can be clearly traced a continuous historical occupancy of these structures until all written record of them ceases, and their origin is lost in the mists of antiquity: enough proof has been advanced to show that crannogs existed, as may be fairly surmised, from the first colonization of Erin. In the most diverse climates “water towns” seem to have sprung up independently, by virtue of the natural laws which govern man’s action in a semi-civilized state—
“Facies non omnibus una
Nec diversa tamen, qualis decet esse sororum.”
The continuance in Ireland of this very primitive form of habitation was doubtless prolonged in consequence of the restless internecine feuds and generally unsettled state of the country. However, the “silver streak” around the island homes of Ireland’s early inhabitants was not always a secure barrier; during severe winters, when the water was sufficiently frozen, it no longer presented an obstacle, but on the contrary was of considerable assistance to marauders. In the native chronicles most notices of crannogs are connected with scenes of strife, the island of the weaker party being usually given to the flames. A disturbed state of society up to a very late period was also characteristic of the sister kingdom of Scotland, and the antiquarian and poetical genius of Sir Walter Scott brings the feuds of the past before the eyes of the modern reader. The scene wherein the Lowlanders or Saxons fruitlessly essay to reach the island on Loch Katrine, where the Highlanders or Celts had placed their women, children, and goods for safety, had most probably its foundation in some real occurrence. In his History of the Rise of the Dutch Republic, Motley traces the gradual development of what is now the kingdom of Holland, from a race of ichthyophagi who dwelt upon mounds which they raised like beavers above the almost fluid soil, but whether there ever was in Erin a period purely lacustrine, or to what extent villages on terra firma may have co-existed, is a problem that will most probably never be solved. From careful examination, however, of the “finds” in lake dwellings, the conclusion may be drawn that civilization in Ireland, from the earliest dawn, has been on the whole steadily progressive, for