Uses of the Round Towers of Ireland, fyc. 199 



left of the altar at Kildare. They were not only highly finished with gold and 

 silver ornaments, with gems and precious stones, suspended gold and silver 

 crowns, but the wall of the chancel was painted with portraits. These latter, 

 says Basnage, the editor of Canisius, smell strongly of later ages. The archi- 

 tecture of the church is the work of fancy, and could not exist earlier than the 

 twelfth century, for the Irish, as I have already shown, had no stone edifice in 

 the sixth." Antiquities of Ireland, second edition, pp. 352, 353. 



These objections however, which betray a great want of antiquarian re- 

 search, are, as I shall show, of very little weight; and Dr. Lanigan, who 

 considered the work of Cogitosus as anterior, at least, to the ninth century, 

 had no need, in arguing in support of its antiquity, to have supposed that 

 the church of Kildare was altogether a wooden structure, a supposition which 

 the text will by no means authorize, and which the evidences I have already 

 adduced, relative to the antiquity of stone churches in Ireland, will show to be 

 an assumption wholly improbable. It will also be seen from the same evidences, 

 that the plan and general form of this church, which consisted of a nave 

 and chancel, Avas exactly that commonly adopted in the abbey and cathedral 

 churches in Ireland, and that the deviation from the usual custom in having 

 two lateral doorways, instead of a single western one, is pointed out as a pecu- 

 liarity necessary from the circumstance of the church having been designed 

 for the use of two religious communities of different sexes, who had distinct 

 and separate places assigned them, according to the almost universal practice 

 of ancient times. See Bingham's Origines, &c. Book viii. c. 5, sect. 0. The 

 necessity for this separation of the sexes also led to the division of the nave, by 

 a wooden partition, into two equal portions, which were entered by the lateral 

 doorways already mentioned ; and it led again to the piercing of the wall, or 

 partition, which separated the nave from the chancel, with a doorway on each 

 side of the chancel arch, in order to admit the entrance, into the chancel, of the 

 bishop with his chapter on the right or south side, and of the abbess with her 

 nuns on the left or north side. Another peculiar feature, noticed in the de- 

 scription of this church, is its having a number of windows, whereas, as I have 

 already shown, the Irish churches were remarkable for the fewness of such 

 apertures ; but, in the notice of such a peculiarity, there is as little to excite a 

 suspicion of the truth of the general description, as in the others I have already 



