Uses of the Round Towers of Ireland, fyc. 321 



and martyr, Damhnad Ochene, or " The Fugitive," whose memory was vene- 

 rated by the people of the extensive region of Oriel, as being their chief 

 patroness. This saint is supposed by Colgan and Dr. Lanigan to be the same 

 person as the martyr St. Dympna, who is venerated as patroness at G-hent in 

 Brabant, and of whom a Legend, or Life, has been published by Messingharn 

 and the Bollandists, who suppose she flourished about the close of the sixth 

 century. If, however, she were the same person as the Irish Damhnad, she must 

 have lived at an earlier period, as her genealogy shows. But with this question 

 I have no present concern, and I have only to remark that the form, size, and 

 ornaments of her crozier, in its present state, indicate an age not later than the 

 tenth century. The triquetra appears on coins of the Dano- Irish kings, Regnald 

 and Anlaff, who flourished in the tenth century ; and on a hitherto unpublished 

 Irish bracteate penny, which is probably ecclesiastical, in the collection of 

 my friend, Dr. Aquilla Smith. It is also a usual ornament upon the Irish stone 



crosses of that age ; and, from its frequent appearance on all our ecclesiastical 

 antiquities anterior to this period, would appear to have been used as a mystical 

 type of the Trinity. This figure is found on the doorway of the smaller church 

 at Rahen, and is also figured on one of the stones of the chancel arch of the 

 monastery at Glendalough, already given in p. 261, and which Dr. Ledwich 

 considered as a Runic knot. That it is not, however, an ornament derived 

 from the Danes, but one in use in Ireland long anterior to the irruptions of that 

 people, is fully proved by its frequent occurrence in the oldest of our manuscript 

 copies of the Gospels, even in those of the sixth and seventh centuries ; and its 

 mystical signification seems to be proved by the fact of its being represented 

 as an ornament on the breasts of three of the four figures of the Evangelists, 

 which illustrate the copy of the Gospels written by the scribe Dimma for St. 

 Cronan of Roscrea, about the close of the sixth century, and now preserved 

 in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin. Its antiquity in Ireland is therefore 

 unquestionable, and the period in which it was most used as an ornament on 

 sepulchral monuments, appears from the inscribed tombstones at Clonmacnoise 

 VOL. xx. 2 T 



