The Forts of Erin. 59 



the summit of some steep natural declivity. The entrance was 

 by a circular or pointed arch between two circular towers, and 

 protected by a barbican or advanced castellated structure. The 

 finest example of this complete fortified castle of the Norman 

 period in Ireland is King John's Castle, Trim, built by De 

 Lacy, early in the thirteenth century. The keep is very bold 

 and massive, square in plan, with a small square tower in the 

 centre of each side wall. The walls are upwards of thirteen 

 feet thick, roughly squared and cornered, but not dressed. In 

 these castles the rooms that were used as reception rooms in 

 the day were turned into sleeping apartments at night. The 

 term " a shakedown " had a real significance at this period, as the 

 ordinary retainers had a shakedown on the floor, the knights 

 and warriors having frequently no better accommodation, the 

 dressing-room being somewhere convenient to the draw well, 

 or what in later times was known as the pump. The square 

 towers replaced the round in churches as well as castles in the 

 thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The yellow steeple at 

 Trim, which was a square tower attached to the abbey, was as 

 strong as any ordinary castle, and on many occasions was used 

 for defensive purposes. A description was next given of the 

 houses the people lived in, made of wickerwork or rods, and 

 plastered over with clay ; also timber houses roofed with 

 shingles. 



The lecturer concluded by giving a description of Tara in the 

 reign of Cormac M'Art, in the middle of the third century, and 

 said three thousand persons each day was the number that Cormac 

 used to maintain in pay, besides poets and satirists, and all strangers 

 who sought the king ; Gauls, and Romans, and Franks, and 

 Frisians, and Lombards, and Albanians, and Saxons, and Picts ; 

 for all these used to seek him, and it was with gold and with 

 silver, and with steeds, and with chariots that he paid them off. 

 Amongst those strangers who visited Cormac's Court, probably 

 amongst those designated Romans, was some early apostle of 

 the Christian faith, who perhaps had travelled from Italy to 

 Britain, and from thence to Erin. Some of these early martyrs 

 who, taking their lives in their hands, reached this far-off isle of 



