544 



In our present state of archaeological knowledge it would be almost 

 idle to speculate as to the age of these monuments, or the people by 

 whom they have been erected. By some they are called Celtic, and the 

 people who erected them Celts ; while others hold that they have been 

 raised by a people ethnologically different from the Celts — cromleac 

 building and burying being a form of sepulture in all. probability prac- 

 tised before the arrival of the Celt, as it has been certainly followed in 

 countries where neither Celt nor any other branch of the Aryan or 

 Indo-European race ever penetrated; for we find such in Syria, and 

 along the northern coast of Africa. The race that erected cromleacs 

 must have been much more widely diffused over the world's surface 

 than the Celtic, and in all probability that race existed in our own 

 country before the Celts. 



Le Baron A. de Bonstetten, in his "Essai surles Dolmens," published 

 at Geneva last year, at pp. 5, 6, 7, &c, enters minutely into the classi- 

 fication and description of the various kinds of existing cromleacs 

 (dolmen being the word adopted on the Continent to signify what in 

 the British Isles we call a cromleac). Unless we suppose the monu- 

 ment near Eathkenny to be a cromleac in ruins, we cannot bring it 

 under this most recent and carefully studied classification of such 

 remains. 



If we adept the meaning of the term cromleac, which probably 

 has come to us through the W elsh, to be a leaning stone, or inclined 

 stone, I am disposed to think that this monument near Eath- 

 kenny is perfect as it now stands ; that it never consisted of more 

 than the two stones ; and that this may be a type of monument not 

 hitherto noticed or described. I am the more impressed with this be- 

 lief, because up to about thirty years ago another slab, popularly re- 

 membered as very similar, nearly, but not quite, as large as that just 

 described, and facing in the same direction, existed in an adjoining 

 field, at a point 275 yards south-east from the present one. What 

 mystic characters it may, or may not, have contained inscribed upon 

 it no one now can tell. The man — Christy Downey — still lives, who, 

 in his zeal for agricultural improvement, subjected this stone to the 

 operation of blasting ; and its debris were afterwards worked up into 

 fences and drains. He states that in the act of blasting " this stone 

 was raised entire into the air for about six feet above the surface of the 

 ground, and it then broke into pieces." 



There was also a third " big stone," of still smaller dimensions, 

 which he describes as lying quite flat, and about two perches to the 

 east of the one just mentioned as destroyed. Erom what he saw in the 

 destruction of the first stone he would not undertake to break or to 

 blast this one, though less in size than the other. He therefore dug a 

 deep pit on one side of it ; and when in the act of prizing the stone into 

 the pit, he says that "such a whirlwind came about my legs as asto- 

 nished me ; and I saw the effects of the wind on the surface for six or 

 eight perches all round." Under the centre of the stone, he states, 

 " there was a cavity of about the size of a good pot, with black mould 



