127 



buildings constructed of earth and hurdles ;* they are commonly 

 considered Danish structures, but the error is sufficiently established 

 by the existence of the works at Tara, and by the name being given 

 to such structures as Rath Keltair, or as it is called in the ancient 

 lives of Saint Patrick, " munimentum Keltarii," Rath-both, (now 

 Raphoe,) &c., before the Danes had made any regular settlement in 

 the island, while several are to be met with in parts where that people 

 never are recorded to have penetrated. Some, too, bear more evidence 

 than the "nominis umbra" of their antiquity, for one called "the 

 Giant's Ring," near Drumboe, has on its top a stone altar, while a 

 circular temple of stones crowns the summit of another near Lough 

 Ree, in the County of Roscommon, -f" the respective monuments of that 

 heathen religion, which had wholly ceased long before the ninth cen- 

 tury. Nor is this conclusion at all weakened by the occurrence of those 

 earlier predatory excursions of the Danes, which have been recorded 

 here, as decidedly none of the northern pirates, previous to the ninth 

 century, effected such an establishment in Ireland, as would have 

 induced or allowed them to make erections of the above nature, 

 though they might subsequently have raised some, or seized those of 

 the Irish to their own use. And King, in his Munimenta Antiqua,;]: 

 concurs in these works having been erected before the settlement of 

 the Danes. 



These raths are almost always round or oval ; (some few square 

 ones occur, as at Cahirmore, near Ross, another in the neighbourhood 

 ot Castle Freke, &c.) "They are of various sizes, some so small as not 

 to measure more than ten or fifteen yards in their diameter, and not so 

 much in height ; while others are so vastly spacious as to take up eigh- 



* King's Munimenta Antiqua, v. 1. p. 78. f See Gough's Camden, vol. 3. p. 596. 

 t Vol. I. p. 77. 



