e practice of building
what are called head-dykes was of very remote
antiquity. The head-dyke was drawn across the head of
a farm, when nature had marked the boundary betwixt
the green pastures and that portion of hill which was
covered totally or partially with heath. Above this
fence the young cattle, the horses, the sheep and
goats were kept in the summer months. The milch cows
were fed below, except during the time the farmer's
family removed to the distant grazings called
sheilings. Beyond the head-dyke little attention was
paid to boundaries. These enclosures exhibit the most
evident traces of extreme old age."[238]

[Illustration: REPRESENTATION OF AN IRISH CHIEFTAIN SEATED AT DINNER, 1581
FROM DERRICKE'S "IMAGE OF IRELAND"]

In Ireland the same conditions obtained so late as the sixteenth
century; the native Irish retained their wandering habits, tilling a
piece of fertile land in the spring, then retiring with their herds to
the booleys or dairy habitations, generally in the mountain districts
in the summer, and moving about where the herbage afforded sustenance
to their cattle.[239] An eighteenth-century traveller in Ireland
was assured that the quarter called Connaught was "inhabited by a kind
of savages," and there is record of the capture of a hairy dwarf near
Longford, who appears hardly to belong to civilisation.[240] Similar
conditions obtained in the northern counties of England, and in other
parts.[241] Special circumstances kept the borderland outside the
influences of ordinary civilised thought and control, and these
circumstances have been recorded by an eighteenth-century observer,
from whom I will quote one or two facts as to the mode of life of
these people: "That they might be more invisible during their outrodes
and consequently less liable to the effects of their enemies'
vigilance, the colour of their cloathes resembled that of the scenes
of their employment or of their season of action, that is, of a brown
heath and cloudy evening. Thus examples of what might condemn their
conduct were never offered to them, and immemorial custom seemed as it
were to sanctify their wildness. Every border-man, almost without
exception, was brought up in a state which we would call unhappy, and
every circumstance of his life tended to confirm his partiality for an
uncertain bed and unprovided diet."[242]

The evidence which this acute