172 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 



when the potato plot where the surplus soil from the hole had been spread 

 came to be dug, the proprietor had a careful look-out kept to find the missing 

 portion of the tore, but without success. 



" Our want of success in finding more evidence hardly, I think, disproves 

 the theory, formed from the positions in which the various articles lay, that 

 they may have been the personal articles worn by one man at his death ; the 

 position in which they lay, and the nature of the articles themselves, seem, I 

 think, to preclude the idea of this being a bronze-founder's hoard." 



The find is of importance and interest not only on account of the 

 juxtaposition of objects of very different dates, but from the nature of the 

 objects themselves. 



The bronze tore (Plate XVIII, fig. 1) measures 6 inches inside diameter, 

 and is \ of an inch in thickness. 



It is of the usual twisted pattern ; it is broken in two near the centre ; and 

 about 3 1 inches of one end are missing. Another twisted fragment, 2 inches 

 in length, was also found, and was assumed to be portion of the large tore. 

 Mr. Reginald A. Smith, F.S.A., to whom drawings of the objects had been 

 submitted, and to whom we are indebted for some suggestions, thought this 

 fragment was probably portion of another tore ; and as the twisted pattern is 

 slightly different from that of the larger tore, we quite concur with this 

 view. (Plate XVIII, fig. 4.) 



The tore, like the other objects comprising this find, is covered with a fine 

 dark patina, relieved with patches of green where the metal has been oxidised. 

 This patina is a rather unusual one with Irish bronzes, which more generally 

 show a brownish colour, characteristic of objects found in bogs, and is in 

 itself an additional piece of evidence for the associated deposition of the 

 objects. 



Gold tores have been frequently discovered in Ireland, but up to the 

 present no tore of bronze has been recorded as having been found. There is 

 one bronze tore in the Academy's collection of exactly similar type to that we 

 are describing (text-fig. 1). It was formerly in Dr. Petrie's collection, but 

 unfortunately no details have been preserved as to its provenance, and its 

 Irish origin has been considered doubtful. The discovery of the present 

 example and fragment tends to establish the Irish provenance of the Petrie 

 tore. 



Montelius, in his chronology of the Bronze Age of Great Britain and 

 Ireland, places tores of this type in his third period of the Bronze Age, dated 

 from the seventeenth to the end of the fifteenth century B.C. This date may 

 be considered rather too early, and it might be safer to reduce it roughly by 

 500 years, and place the date for Ireland at from about 1200 to 1000 B.C. 



