SmytHe—On the Bell from Lough Lene. 165 
Inny, and thence to the Western Sea. Returning to Lough Lene, he 
says: ‘‘ We come again on as pleasant a water as any in Westmeath: 
at the east end issueth another considerable stream, falling into the 
river Deel, running to the Boyne, and so to the Hastern Sea. So we 
have one lake which by its two streams parteth the kingdom into two 
great semicircles.” 
Fore was a place of great devotion; it contains the remains of 
three saints’ churches, a monastery, and the church of an anchorite. 
St. Fechin was the patron saint of Fore. The translation of an Irish 
sonnet runs thus :— 
‘¢ To Fore West let us go, 
That valley lying low, 
And see the rill, 
That, thro’ the hill, 
To turn the mill, 
St. Fechin caused to flow.”’ 
It is said that when Tara was cursed by St. Rodanus, the King of 
Southern Hy Niall went to Lough Lene. In the Life of St. Aidan 
we read that he went, upon the entreaty of the parents, to intercede 
for their only son with the King of Meath upon an island in Lough 
Lene, which he had to reach by walking on the water, and that he 
gained his object. It is told of St. Fechin that he went to the castle 
of King Dermot, near Lene, to get him to receive a leper, whom he 
believed to be his Lord, who had come to his monastery. The king 
was the son of Aedh Slaine, who lived in an island called Muir Locha 
Leibhan, where the queen attended the leper’s ailments, and got from 
him a staff for a crozier. Lough Lene, close to St. Fechin’s Monas- 
tery of Fore, was then the place of a royal residence. MacCosse calls 
Melaghlin King of Lough Lene, as Irish kings were called Kings of 
Tara. The king probably occupied also the fort afterwards called 
Turgesius’, who no doubt subsequently expelled the Milesian king 
from it. The fort is a bold barbaric bulwark, an oval of about 
seventy by fifty yards. St. Fechin died a.p. 664; Torquil or Turgesius 
lived about two hundred years later. 
This bell may have belonged to St. Fechin in the middle of the 
seventh century, and was possibly transferred to the island called 
Nuns’ Island at a later period. How it reached the stones of the old 
castle’s foundations, where it was found, must be purely conjectural ; 
but it was probably removed from Nuns’ Island either for security, or 
as plunder, in the middle ages, by some one who did not survive to 
take it away. Guiraldus Cambrensis, writing about a.p. 1200, says 
that portable bells and staves of the saints were held in great reve- 
rence by the people and clergy of Ireland, insomuch that they had 
much greater regard for oaths sworn on these than on the Gospels. 
Anderson, in the fifth of his valuable Lectures on “‘ Scotland in Early 
Christian Times,” a work kindly brought under my notice by Sir 
S. Ferguson, tells of a bell found in a cemetery at Birsay, in Orkney, 
