under a carpet of
heather rough as the ocean winds.

Away to the south from Slievemore the horizon is broken by an army of
mountains, beginning with the Twelve Peaks of Connemara. Eastward of
these hills are spread the great Galway lakes; eastward of these a wide
expanse of plain. This is the famous Moytura of traditional history,
whose story we shall presently tell. Ages ago a decisive battle was
fought there; but ages before the battle, if we are not greatly misled,
the stone circles of the plain were already there. Tradition says that
these circles numbered seven in the beginning, but only two
remain unbroken.

Between Galway Bay and the wide estuary of the Shannon spread the
moorlands of Clare, bleak under Atlantic gales, with never a tree for
miles inward from the sea. Like a watch-tower above the moorlands stand.
Slieve Callan, the crown of the mountain abruptly shorn. Under the
shoulder of the great hill, with the rolling moorlands all about it,
stands a solitary cromlech; formed of huge flat stones, it was at first
a roomy chamber shut in on all four sides, and roofed by a single
enormous block; the ends have fallen, so that it is now an open tunnel
formed of three huge stones.

The coast runs southward from the Shannon to the strand of Tralee, the
frontier of the southern mountain world, where four ranges of red
sandstone thrust themselves forth towards the ocean, with long fiords
running inland between them. On a summit of the first of these red
ranges, Caherconree above Tralee strand, there is a stone circle,
massive, gigantic, dwelling in utter solitude.

We have recorded a few only out of many of these great stone monuments
strewn along our Atlantic coast, whether on moor or cliff or remote
mountain-top.

There are others as notable everywhere in the central plain, the
limestone world of lakes and rivers. On a green hill-crest overlooking
the network of inlets of Upper Erne there is a circle greater than any
we have recorded. The stones are very massive, some of them twice the
height of a tall man. To one who stands within the ring these huge
blocks of stone shut out the world; they loom large against the sky,
full of unspoken secrets like the Sphinx. Within this mighty ring the
circle of Stonehenge might be set, leaving a broad road all round it on
the grass.

From Fermanagh, where this huge circle is, we gain our best clue to the
age of all these monuments, everywhere so much like each other in t