“When James and William staked a Crown,
And cannons they did rattle,”
discovered a well-preserved “single tree” canoe, which was for many years after exhibited as a curiosity in Liverpool, but finally presented to the Royal Irish Academy. The length of this canoe is eighteen feet nine inches, it averages two feet ten inches in width, is twenty inches high in the side, and has three circular and artificial apertures in the bottom, as shown in the illustration[71] ([plate IV. fig. 2.]) Three canoes were found at Toome Bar; the one figured ([plate IV. fig. 3]), is hollowed out of a single piece of oak, the length, fifteen feet, with projecting beaks at prow and stern; it is twenty inches wide, fourteen inches deep, and is flat-bottomed; it lay “from six to eight feet below the surface, in a bed of sand and Lough Neagh clay.”
Plate IV.
Fig. 1. Single-piece Canoe from Cahore, Co. Wexford.
Fig. 2. Single-piece Canoe from the Boyne.
Fig. 3. Single-piece Canoe from Toome Bar.
Fig. 4. Supposed Single-piece portable Canoe from near Enniskillen.