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XII. 



OX CEETAIS" TYPICAL EAETHWOEKS AND EINTG-WALLS 

 IN THE COUNTY LIMEEICK. 



Paet n. THE EOYAL FOETS IS COSHLEA 



Continued from Vol. xxxiii (C),. p. 42. 



By THOMAS JOHNSON WESTEOPP, M.A 



[Plates XXXIX-XLII.] 



[Bead Novkcbee 30, 1916. Published February 16, 1917.] 



HlSTOElCAlXT the most interesting forts in the Co. Limerick are those round 

 the flank of Sliabhriach and the remains at Bruree and Duntrileague. These 

 were the royal residences of the local princes of the Dal Cais, and as such 

 they are endowed with a mass of early legend, some evidently non-Christian, 

 and perhaps in its origin prehistoric. The legends were principally collected 

 (no doubt from the tradition of the hereditary gidld of bardic historians 

 at Cashel) by the good and learned Cormac mac Cuileanan, king-bishop of 

 Cashel, in about A.D. 890. Unfortunately his valuable compilation, the 

 Saitair of Cashel, has long disappeared, possibly in the civil wars of the 

 mid seventeenth century ;' and though many extracts from it remain, there is 

 no certain evidence that any entire copy survived to the eighteenth century. 

 The confident allegation that there was a copy in the Library of Trinity 

 College, Dublin, in 1710 may be classed with the present-day assertions 

 that King Brian's actual harp is preserved there, or that his sceptre exists in 

 the collection of the Eoyal Irish Academy. Of course we have many other 

 corroborative (or contradictory) legends in other tales, and we have great 

 need of an impartial study, lingiustic as well as critical, of these sources. 



The period referred to may possibly (as many facts tend to prove) give 

 the b^innings of natural tradition (as distinct from artificial fictions) known 

 to the bardic historians before the fatal ambition sprang up to carry Irish 



' A copy or abstract of part of it, dated 14.54, is cited by O'Curry from Laud MS. 610. 

 Extracts from it are not infrequent, as in the Tract on the Dal gCais. False citations 

 are not unknown, e.g. Hely Button's, from Miss Beaufort, from an obscure local history 

 of no authority, as to the sacred fire being kept in the Round Towers. 



