Uses of the Round Towers of Ireland, fyc. 393 



vision, and predicted, in the following verses, what impossibilities and strange 

 occurrences should take place before this revelation would be nullified : 



" Copbap caippje ap baipjje oonna, 

 Copbap conna ap gtapp Imne, 

 Copbap cloccije op cella, 

 Nipap ella aiplmjje." 



" Until rocks grow upon brown oaks, 

 Until boisterous waves be on green pools, 

 Until doictheachs be [placed] over churches, 

 This vision shall not prove delusive." 



But, though this ancient passage clearly indicates the general and prevailing 

 custom of the country, in the seventh century, as to the separateness of the 

 .belfries from the churches, it does not necessarily follow that no example of 

 their junction had existed in St. Moling's time, as it should, perhaps, be rather 

 inferred that a knowledge of the existence of some such example, considered as 

 a singularity, had suggested the improbability of such a general innovation ; or, 

 that the verses were fabricated at a period, when the tribute referred to was re- 

 imposed, and when the innovation had been, to some extent, adopted. 



But, however this may be, some of the specimens of Round Tower belfries, 

 placed iipon the churches in Ireland, indicate a very early antiquity; and 

 though, possibly, they may not be in every instance coeval with the churches 

 on which they are placed, they can hardly be of a date long subsequent to 

 them. At all events, examples of belfries upon the churches must have been 

 familiar to the Irish in the ninth century, as we find that, at least, one such, 

 and most probably a round one, as the Lombard steeples usually were, was 

 erected on the church of St. Columbanus, at Bobbio, when the abbot Agilulfus, 

 who flourished between the years 883 and 905, re-erected that church, as 

 appears from the following passage in the Miracula S. ColumbaniAbbatis, cap. 1. 



" Ipsam denique eandem Ecclesiam venerabilis Abbas Agilulfus ex lapidibus struxit, turrimque 

 super earn sedificauit, et campanas in ea fecit pendcre, sicut nunc cernitur." Fleming, Collec- 

 tanea Sacra, p. 245. Florilegium, p. 240. 



This is a question, however, which will be more particularly considered in 

 connexion with the remaining examples of such church towers in the Third Part 

 of this Inquiry. 



VOL. xx. 3 E 



