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Mr. PETRIE'S Inquiry into the Origin and 



as communicated to me many years since, was the first church erected in the 

 lower part of the valley or city of Glendalough by St. Kevin, and that in which 

 he was afterwards interred, so that its erection may be fairly referred to the 

 middle of the sixth century. This doorway is six feet in height, two feet six 

 inches in width at the top, and three feet at the bottom ; and the stones of 

 which it is formed, which, including the lintel, are only seven in number, are 

 all of the thickness of the wall, which is three feet. These stones are all of 

 granite, and admirably well chiselled ; and the lintel, which is five feet six inches 

 long, and one foot three inches high, is carved with a double moulding in the 

 architrave, and is also ornamented on its soffit with a cross, saltier-wise, of which 



I annex a representation, with a se- 

 cond example of this primitive cus- 

 tom of placing the cross on the soffit 

 of the lintel, which occurs in the door- 

 way of the cotemporaneous church of 

 Killiney in the county of Dublin, but 

 differing from the other in being carved 

 in relief, and of the usual form. 

 It may interest some of my readers to be informed, that Sir Walter Scott, 

 on his visit, in 1825, to " the inestimably singular scene of Irish antiquities," 

 as he designates the seven churches at Glendalough ( Quarterly Review, vol. 

 xli. p. 148), sat for a considerable time before this ancient doorway, and ex- 

 pressed his admiration of, and wonder at its ancient character, in terms which, 

 to the friends who accompanied him, and who were less enthusiastic antiquaries, 

 seemed unaccountable. 



That the tradition of the place, respecting the antiquity of the Lady's Church, 

 is not an erroneous one, would appear from a passage which I shall presently 

 adduce from the Life of St. Kevin, published by the Bollandists in the Acta 

 Sanctorum at the 3rd of June, and which was evidently compiled by one inti- 

 mately acquainted with the localities of Glendalough, and, in the opinion of the 

 editors, previously to the twelfth century, when this city, as stated in the letter 

 of the archbishop of Tuam and his suffragans, written about the year 1214, 

 had been so waste and desolate for nearly forty years previously, that instead of 

 a church it had become a den of thieves and a nest of robbers. 



