Uses of the Round Towers of Ireland, fyc. 249 



The conclusions drawn from these assertions have been ably answered by 

 Dr. Lanigan in his Ecclesiastical History, vol. iv. pp. 398, 399, and the accom- 

 panying drawing will show that the assertions of Dr. Ledwich are utterly erro- 

 neous. Whether the principal or central figure be, as he says, a bishop or a 

 priest, I cannot venture to determine, but I think it most probably represents 

 a bishop, and this, St. Kevin, the patron of the place. There can, however, be 

 little, if any doubt, that the figure on the right, which Ledwich calls a pilgrim 

 leaning on his staff, is also a bishop, or an abbot, holding his crozier, or pastoral 

 staff, and that the figure on the left, which he describes as a young man holding 

 a purse of money, is also an ecclesiastic, but of lower grade, the ai^cipe, 

 or porter and bell-ringer, holding in his hand, not a purse of money, but a 

 quadrangular bell, such as we see represented on many stone crosses in Ireland 

 of the ninth and tenth centuries : and these figures appear to me to be of 

 great value and interest as evidences of the early antiquity of the little building 

 to which this sculpture belonged, for both the bell and the staff exhibit forms, 

 which were unquestionably not in use in the twelfth century. The crozier is 

 of the form of the simple shepherd's crook, as found in all the existing croziers 

 of the primitive saints of the Irish Church, of which there are four speci- 

 mens in my own collection ; and that this form was no longer retained in the 

 twelfth century is sufficiently proved by the crozier also in my collection of 

 Cormac Mac Carthy, King of Munster and Archbishop of Cashel, who founded 

 the stone-roofed chapel at Cashel in the year 1129, and which exhibits the 

 usual enriched circular head, characteristic of the croziers of the eleventh and 

 twelfth centuries. 



In like manner, the quadrangular-shaped bell, which appears in the hand of the 

 other figure, exhibits that peculiar form which characterizes all the consecrated 

 bells, which have been preserved in Ireland as having belonged to the celebrated 

 saints of the primitive Irish Church ; and there is every reason to believe that 

 this quadrangular form gave place to the circular one now in use, previously to 

 the twelfth century. Indeed, we see a remarkable example of the transition to 

 the latter form in a bell, formerly in the collection of the Dean of St. Patrick's, 

 and now in the Museum of the Academy, which, as an inscription in the Irish 

 character carved upon it clearly shows, is undoubtedly of the close of the 

 ninth century. 



VOL. XX. 2 K 



