Uses of the Round Towers of Ireland, fyc. 349 



at p. 132, is, however, exactly the prescribed measurement, and not ten feet in 

 breadth externally, as there inadvertently stated. 



In the general plan of this class of buildings there was an equal uniformity. 

 They had a single doorway, always placed in the centre of the west wall, and 

 were lighted by a single window placed in the centre of the east wall, and a 

 stone altar usually, perhaps always, placed beneath this window. That such 

 oratories, as well as the larger churches, were usually consecrated by a bishop, 

 appears certain from a very ancient vellum MS. in the Library of the Royal 

 Irish Academy, giving the form in which a church, or duirtheach, was to 

 be consecrated, and which, judging from the language, appears to be of very 

 considerable antiquity; and many examples of such dedications occur in the 

 lives of the Irish saints who flourished in Lombardy, Switzerland, and other 

 parts of the Continent, in the seventh and eighth centuries, as published by 

 Messingham, Colgan, Surius, and the Bollandists. From these lives we may 

 also infer that the oratories erected abroad by these Irish ecclesiastics were 

 similar in size and material to those in their native country, as in the following 

 example, from the Life of Columbanus, describing the oratory erected by him 

 at Bobbio : 



" Vbi etiam Ecclesiam in honorem almas Dei genetricis, semperque Virginis Marias, ex lignis 

 construxit ad magnitudinem sanctissimi corporis sui." Miracula S. Columbani Abbatis. Flori- 

 legium, p. 240. 



I should also remark, that, in those lives, such oratories are often designated 

 by the term oraculum, a word which was also sometimes applied to oratories in 

 Ireland, under the corrupted form of Aireagal, and anglicised Errigal, as in 

 Aireagal Dachiarog, now Errigal Keeroge, in the County of Tyrone, and 

 Aireagal Adhamhnain, now Errigal, in Derry. 



But, as I have already said, the duirtheachs were not always of these very 

 circumscribed proportions, for it appears from several entries in the Irish 

 Annals that they were, at least occasionally, of much greater size. Thus, in the 

 Annals of Ulster, at the year 849, there is a record of the burning of two hun- 

 dred and sixty persons in the duirtheach of Trevet, a number which certainly 

 could not be contained within a duirtheach of the ordinary proportions, and 

 which would seem to require, not only a room of greater size, but that upper 

 chamber which is found in some of the buildings which appear to belong to 



