306 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 



23 feet deep and 12 feet wide at the bottom; and external to these fosses 

 are lesser ramparts 5 feet high and IS feet wide at base. The original height 

 of the central rampart must have been very great. The cross-section gives 

 an extreme width of 120 feet from out to out. At one part of the included 

 area are two circular hillocks, each with a parapet of large stones round it, 

 which Canon Lett suggests were citadels in which a chief resided. The 

 defences at four places were carried through bog, now almost cut away. 

 At these places the old Ordnance Survey map indicates lines of piles, upon 

 which foundation no doubt the ramparts were raised ; and at the western end 

 the map shows a line of piles starting at right angles to the entrenchment 

 through a portion of bog which has since disappeared. Here, Canon Lett says, 

 the peasants remember the oak piles with collars of the same attached ; whence 

 they say the ditch " went out into the country and away through Ireland." 

 Lor further details I refer to the paper of Canon Lett. The situation of this 

 enormous entrenched camp fully entitles it to the name of " The Gates of the 

 iJTorth " ; and if connected, as I cannot doubt it originally was, in accordance 

 with the traditions of the country folk, by a continuous line of earthworks 

 with the Worm Ditch on the west, fragments of which exist in the same 

 parish, and on the east by a similar line running round the base of Slieve 

 Gullion to Meigh, near Xewry, where the " Dane's Cast," or " Valley of the 

 Black Pig," commences and runs northward to Scarva^ the whole would 

 form a very complete defensive boundary. But it may be objected that 

 there is no proof that the Dorsey had any connexion with the Worm 

 Dyke on the one hand or the Dane's Cast on the other. O'Donovan, the 

 great master of Irish archcBology, in one of his letters from Carrickmacross, 

 speaks of the A^alley of the Black Pig, showing its " warlike ditch and rampart 

 here, too," up the sides of barren hills ; and though he had also seen the 

 Yalley of the Black Pig in the Glen Eee Valley from ISTewry to Scarva, 

 a similar earthwork with a similar name, and likewise the Dorsey inter- 

 mediate between the two, and constructed on a similar but larger plan, he 

 was not able at that time to look upon the three structures as connected, 

 or to conceive them as having ever been continuous. 



Now, if we refer to other ancient earthworks of this sort in Great 

 Britain and elsewhere, we shall find that boundary entrenchments similar 

 to the Worm Ditch and following an analogous design were furnished at 

 intervals with camps connected with the trenches/ Borlase refers to the 

 " Opus Dannorum or Dannewerke," which stretched from sea to sea across 

 the Cimbric Chersonese, between Schleswig and Holstein, from Eckernforde 



' Dolmens of Ireland, vol. iii. 



