188 Froceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 



cliffs, near the old signal to-^er of Sybil Poiat, almost hangs over the 

 sea from a height of 688 feet. Although not so perpendicular, yet 

 the increased height of those near Brandon Head, some of them 

 risin^g to over 1200 feet as steeply as their jagged and shattered 

 state will alloTv, makes them perhaps still grander objects. Many 

 of these cliffs consist of a mere heap of ruins, caused by great 

 landslips, huge crags of rock resting discordantly, one on the other, 

 with broken gullies and clefts between them. Standing on some of 

 the highest points of these cliffs, it is curious to mark what a 

 straight line their most striking features preserve along the coast 

 fi-om near Brandon Head to Sybil Point for a distance of 12 miles, 

 and how these features re-appear iu the same straight line 5 miles 

 beyond Sybil Point in the island called Inishtooskert, which rises 

 abruptly from the sea into a jagged peak 573 feet high. (Fig. 2.) 



' ' The centi'al ridge of the promontory in like manner shows its 

 submarine continuation in the great Blasket Island, running off 

 from Dunmore Head, and rising to height of 960 feet. There is an 

 almost absolutely perpendicular precipice of that height on the 

 north side, which keeps a height of 900 feet for a distance of about 

 a mile. Still farther out to sea, the Tearaght Island (see fig. 9, 

 p. 47) rises abruptly to 602 feet, the other Blasket Islands being 

 400 or 50 feet, and finally, the larger of the Foze rocks, 11 miles 

 from the mainland, juts up to 103 feet from water of twice that depth. 

 These islets, and the deep sounds and stormy straits between them, 

 give us, doubtless, a picture of what every part of the mountains of the 

 mainland have been in their turn in the successive stages of their last 

 slow elevation above the sea." 



(p. 29.) — " Brandon Sead. — The wide indentation in the coast, to 

 the east of this point, extends to the western base of Knocknabrestee 

 Mountain (2500 feet high), which terminates at Brandon Head, and 

 here we find the Old Pv.ed Sandstone concealed by a mass of rubbish 

 formed from itself, the result of an enormous landslip, which covers 

 the seaface of the cliffs for a width of 750 yards or nearly half a 

 nule." 



(p. 45.) — " T?ie Blmlcet Islands. — The Great Blasket Island, which 

 lies at the distance of one mile to the west of Dunmore Head, is 

 three miles and three-quarters in length, with an average width of 

 half a mile." 



(p. 49.) — "And here on the shore of Tralee Bay, at the distance 

 of about two miles east of Castlegregory, we find large roots and stems 

 of fir trees standing upright in the sand and shingle of the shore." 



