Dundrum Bay and Strangford, both very perfect and marked each in its own
way from among the rest. The first, at Legamaddy, has every huge boulder
still in place. There is a lesser ring of stones within the first
circle, with many outliers, of enormous size, dotted among the fields.
It looks as if a herd of huge animals of the early world had come
together in a circle for the night, the young being kept for safety
within their ring, while others, grazing longer or wandering farther
from the rest, were approaching the main herd. But nightfall coming upon
them with dire magic turned them all to stone; and there they remain,
sentient, yet motionless, awaiting the day of their release. By fancies
like this we may convey the feeling of mystery breathing from them.
On the hill-top of Slieve-na-griddle is another circle of the same
enormous boulders. A cromlech is piled in the midst of it, and an avenue
of stones leads up to the circle. Its form is that of many circles with
enclosed cromlechs at Carrowmore, though in these the avenue is missing.
The thought that underlies them is the same, though they are separated
by the whole width of the land; a single cult with a single ideal
prompted the erection of both.
At Drumbo, on the east bank of the Lagan before it reaches Belfast
Lough, there is a massive cromlech surrounded by a wide ring of earth
piled up high enough to cut off the sacred space within from all view of
the outer world. Like the earthwork round the cromlech of Lough Rea, it
marks the boundary of a great nature temple, open to the sky but shut
off from mankind. Even now its very atmosphere breathes reverence.
At Finvoy, in northern Antrim, among the meadows of the Bann, there is a
cromlech within a great stone circle like that on Slieve-na-griddle in
Down, and like many of the Carrowmore rings. The Black Lion cromlech in
Cavan is encircled with a like ring of boulders, and another cromlech
not far off rivals some of the largest in the immense size of its
crowning block.
Three cromlechs in the same limestone plain add something to the mystery
that overhangs all the rest. The first, at Lennan in Monaghan, is marked
with a curious cryptic design, suggesting a clue, yet yielding none.
There is a like script on the cromlech at Castlederg in Tyrone, if
indeed the markings were ever the record of some thought to be
remembered, and not mere ornament. The chambered cromlech of Lisbellaw
in Fermanagh has like markings; they are too similar to be quite
independent, yet almost too simple to contain a recorded thought.
We come once more to Donegal. On the hill-top of Beltaney, near Raphoe,
there is a very massive circle formed of sixty-seven huge blocks. Here
again the Stonehenge ring might be set up within the Irish circle,
leaving an avenue eight paces wide all round it. The sacred fire was
formerly kindled here to mark the birth of Spring. The name of the old
festival of Beltane still lingers on the hill. At Culdaff in north
Donegal, at the end of the Inishowen peninsula, stands another great
stone circle, with which we must close our survey of these titanic
monuments.
We have mentioned a few only among many; yet enough to show their
presence everywhere throughout the land, in the valleys or on mountain
summits, in the midst of pastures or on lonely and rugged isles. One
group, as we have seen, cannot be younger than ten thousand years, and
may be far older. The others may be well coeval. Their magnitude, their
ordered ranks, their universal presence, are a startling revelation of
the material powers of the men of that remote age; they are a testimony,
not less wonderful, of the moral force which dedicated so much power to
ideal ends. Finally, they are a monument to remind us how little we yet
know of the real history of our race.
III.
THE CROMLECH BUILDERS.
In every district of Ireland, therefore, there remain these tremendous
and solemn survivors of a mighty past. The cromlechs, with their
enormous masses upheld in the air, rising among the fertile fields or
daisy-dotted pastures; the great circles of standing stones, starred
everywhere, in the valleys or upon the uplands, along the rough sides of
heather-covered hills. They have everywhere the same aspect of august
mystery, the same brooding presence, like sentinels of another world. It
is impossible not to feel their overshadowing majesty. Everywhere they
follow the same designs in large simplicity; inspired by the same
purpose, and with the same tireless might overcoming the tremendous
obstacles of their erection; they are devoted everywhere not to material
and earthly ends, but to the ideal purposes of the invisible and
everlasting, linked with the hidden life of those who pass away from us
through the gates of death.
Can we find any clue to the builders of these grand and enduring
memorials, the conditions of their building, the age of our land to
which they belong? If we wisely use the abundant knowledge of the past
already in our possession, there is good reason to believe we can,
establishing much with entire certainty and divining more.
The standing stones and cromlechs, as we know, are everywhere spread
over Ireland, so that it is probable that throughout the whole country
one is never out of sight of one of these solemn monuments. Their
uniform and universal presence shows, therefore, a uniform race dwelling
everywhere within the four seas, a universal stability and order,
allowing such great and enduring works to be undertaken and completed.
We must believe, too, that the builders of these giant stone monuments
were dominant throughout the land, possessing entire power over the
labor of thousands everywhere; and even then the raising of these
titanic masses is almost miraculous.
But the history of the standing stones and cromlechs is not a page of
Irish history only, nor can we limit to our own isle the presence of
their builders, the conditions of dominion and order under which alone
they could have been raised. We shall gain our first trustworthy clue
by tracing the limits of the larger territory, beyond our island, where
these same gray memorials are found.
[Illustration: Brandy Island, Glengarriff.]
The limits of the region in which alone we find these piles and circles
of enormous stones are clearly and sharply defined, though this region
itself is of immense and imposing extent. It is divided naturally into
two provinces, both starting from a point somewhere in the neighborhood
of Gibraltar or Mount Atlas, and spreading thence over a territory of
hundreds of miles.
The southern cromlech province, beginning at the Strait of Gibraltar,
extends eastward along the African coast past Algiers to the headland of
Tunis, where Carthage stood, at a date far later than the age of
cromlechs. Were it not for the flaming southern sun, the scorched sands,
the palms, the shimmering torrid air, we might believe these Algerian
megaliths belonged to our own land, so perfect is the resemblance, so
uniform the design, so identical the inspiration. The same huge
boulders, oblong or egg-shaped, formidable, impressive, are raised aloft
on massive supporting stones; there are the same circles of stones
hardly less gigantic, with the same mysterious faces, the same silent
solemnity. Following this line, we find them again in Minorca, Sardinia
and Malta; everywhere under warm blue skies, in lands of olives and
trailing vines, with the peacock-blue of the Mediterranean waves
twinkling beneath them. Northward from Minorca, but still in our
southern cromlech province, we find them in southeastern Spain, in the
region of New Carthage, but far older than the oldest trace of that
ancient city. In lesser numbers they follow the Spanish coast up towards
the Ebro, through vinelands and lands of figs, everywhere under summer
skies. This province, therefore, our southern cromlech province, covers
most of the western Mediterranean; it does not cover, nor even approach,
Italy or Greece or Egypt, the historic Mediterranean lands. We must look
for its origin in the opposite direction--towards Gibraltar, the Pillars
of Hercules.
From the same point, the Pillars of Hercules, begins our second or
northern cromlech region, even larger and more extensive than the first,
though hardly richer in titanic memorials. From Gibraltar, the cromlech
region passes northward, covering Portugal and western Spain; indeed, it
probably merges in the other province to the eastward, the two including
all Spain between them. From northern Spain, turning the flank of the
giant Pyrenees at Fontarrabia, the cromlech region goes northward and
ever northward, along the Atlantic coast of France, spreading eastward
also through the central provinces, covering the mountains of the Côte
d'Or and the Cevennes, but nowhere entering north Italy or Germany,
which limit France to the east. There is a tremendous culmination of the
huge stone monuments on the capes and headlands of Brittany, where
France thrusts herself forward against the Atlantic, centring in Carnac,
the metropolis of a bygone world. Nowhere are there greater riches of
titanic stone, in circles, in cromlechs, in ranged avenues like huge
frozen armies or ordered hosts of sleeping elephants. From Brittany we
pass to Ireland, whose wealth, inherited from dead ages, we have already
inventoried, and Britain, where the same monuments reappear. More
numerous to the south and west, they yet spread all over Britain,
including remote northern Scotland and the Western Isles. Finally, there
is a streamer stretching still northeastward, to Norway and some of the
Baltic Islands.
We are, therefore, confronted with the visible and enduring evidence of
a mighty people, spreading in two main directions from the Pillars of
Hercules--eastward through Gibraltar Strait to sunny Algeria, to
southern Spain and the Mediterranean isles; and northward, along the
stormy shores of the Atlantic, from within sight of Africa almost to the
Arctic Circle, across Spain, Portugal, France, Ireland, Britain, and the
lands of the Baltic and the North Sea. Throughout this vast territory
there must have been a common people, a common purpose and inspiration,
a common striving towards the hidden world; there must have been long
ages of order, of power, of peace, during which men's hearts could
conceive and their hands execute memorials so vast, so evidently meant
to endure to a far distant future, so clearly destined to ideal ends.
There must have been a great spiritual purpose, a living belief in the
invisible world, and a large practical power over natural forces, before
these huge monuments could be erected. Some of the stones upheld in the
air in the Irish cromlechs weigh eighty or ninety or a hundred tons. If
we estimate that a well-built man can lift two hundred pounds, it would
demand the simultaneous work of a thousand men to erect them; and it is
at least difficult to see how the effort of a thousand men could
be applied.
We are led, therefore, by evidence of the solidest material reality to
see this great empire on the Atlantic and along the western
Mediterranean; this Atlantean land of the cromlech-builders, as we may
call it, for want of a better name. As the thought and purpose of its
inhabitants are uniform throughout its whole vast extent, we are led to
see in them a single homogeneous race, working without rivals, without
obstacles, without contests, for they seem everywhere to have been free
to choose what sites they would for their gigantic structures. And we
are irresistibly led to believe that these conditions must have endured
throughout a vast extent of time, for no nation which does not look back
to a distant past will plan for a distant future. The spiritual sweep
and view of the cromlech-builders are, therefore, as great as the extent
of their territory. This mysterious people must have had a life as
wonderful as that of Greece or Rome or Egypt, whose territories we find
them everywhere approaching, but nowhere invading.
What we now know of the past history of our race is so vast, so
incredibly enormous, that we have ample space for such a territory, so
widespread, so enduring, as we have seen demanded by the position of the
cromlechs and standing stones; more than that, so overwhelming are the
distances in the dark backward and abysm of time, to which we must now
carry the dawn of human history, that the time needed for the building
of the cromlechs may seem quite recent and insignificant, in view of the
mightier past, stretching back through geologic ages. The nineteenth
century may well be called the age of resurrection, when long-forgotten
epochs of man were born again into our knowledge. We can carry back that
knowledge now to the early Miocene period, to which belong the human
relics found by the Abbé Bourgeois on the uplands of Thenay, in central
France; and no one believes that the early Miocene age can be as recent
as a million years ago. A vast space separates the Thenay relics from
the later traces of man found in Pliocene sands with the bones of the
archaic meridional elephant,--at a date when the German ocean was a
forest, full of southern trees and huge beasts now long since departed
from the earth. A period hardly less vast must separate these from the
close of the glacial age, when man roamed the plains of Europe, and
sketched the herds of mammoths as they cropped the leaves. That huge
beast, too, has long since departed into the abyss; but man the artist,
who recorded the massive outline, the huge bossed forehead, the
formidable bulk of the shaggy arctic elephant, engraved in firm lines on
a fragment of its tusk,--man still remains. Man was present when
rhinoceros and elephant were as common in Britain as they are to-day in
Southern India or Borneo; when the hippopotamus was as much at home in
the waters of the Thames as in the Nile and Niger; when huge bears like
the grizzly of the Rockies, cave-lions and sabre-toothed tigers lurked
in Devon caverns or chased the bison over the hills of Kent. Yet this
epoch of huge and ferocious monsters, following upon the Age of Ice, is
a recent chapter of the great epic of man; there lies far more behind
it, beyond the Age of Ice to the immensely distant Pliocene; beyond this
as far as the early Miocene; beyond this, again, how much further we
know not, towards the beginningless beginning, the infinite.
We are, therefore, face to face with an ordered series of almost
boundless ages, geologic epochs of human history succeeding each other
in majestic procession, as the face of our island was now tropical, now
arctic; as the seas swelled up and covered the hills, or the bottom of
the deep drove back the ocean and became dry land, an unbroken
continent. The wild dreams of romance never approached the splendid
outlines of this certain history.
There are dim outlines of man throughout all these ages, but only at a
comparatively recent date have we traditions and evidence pointing to
still surviving races. At a period of only a few thousand years ago, we
begin to catch glimpses of a northern race whom the old Greeks and
Romans called Hyperboreans or Far-Northerners; a race wild and little
skilled in the arts of life; a race of small stature, slight, dusky,
with piercing eyes, low brows, and of forbidding face. This race was
scattered over lands far north of the Mediterranean, dwelling in caves
and dens of the earth, and lingering on unchanged from the days of
mammoth and cave-bear. We have slight but definite knowledge of this
very ancient race--enough to show us that its peculiar type lingers to
this day in a few remote islands on the Galway and Kerry coast, mingled
with many later races. This type we find described in old Gaelic records
as the Firbolgs, a race weak and furtive, dusky and keen-eyed, subjected
by later races of greater force. Yet from this race, as if to show the
inherent and equal power of the soul, came holy saints and mighty
warriors; to the old race of the Firbolgs belong Saint Mansuy, apostle
of Belgium, and Roderick O'Conor, the last king of united Ireland. In
gloomy mountain glens and lonely ocean islands still it lingers,
unvanquished, tenacious, obscurely working out its secret destiny.
This slight and low-browed race, of dark or sallow visage, and with
black crisp hair, this Hyperborean people, is the oldest we can gain a
clear view of in our island's history; but we know nothing of its
extension or powers which would warrant us in believing that this was
the race which built the cromlechs. Greek and Roman tradition, in this
only corroborating the actual traces we ourselves possess of these old
races, tells us of another people many thousand years ago overrunning
and dominating the Firbolgs; a race of taller stature, of handsome
features, though also dark, but with softer black hair, not crisp and
tufted like the hair of the dwarfish earlier race. Of this second
conquering race, tall and handsome, we have abundant traces, gathered
from many lands where they dwelt; bodies preserved by art or nature, in
caverns or sepulchres of stone; ornaments, pottery, works decorative and
useful, and covering several thousand years in succession. But better
than this, we have present, through nearly every land where we know of
them in the past, a living remnant of this ancient race, like it in
every particular of stature, form, complexion and visage, identical in
character and temper, tendency and type of mind.
In Ireland we find this tall, dark race over all the west of the island,
but most numerous in Kerry, Clare, Galway and Mayo; in those regions
where, we know, the older population was least disturbed. In remote
villages among the mountains, reached by bridle-paths between
heath-covered hills; in the settlements of fishermen, under some cliff
or in the sheltered nook of one of our great western bays; or among the
lonely, little visited Atlantic islands, this dark, handsome race, with
its black hair, dark-brown eyes, sallow skin and high forehead, still
holds its own, as a second layer above the remnant of the far more
ancient Firbolg Hyperboreans. We find the same race also among the
Donegal highlands, here and there in the central plain or in the south,
and nowhere entirely missing among the varied races towards the
eastern sea.
[Illustration: Sugar Loaf Mountain, Glengarriff.]
But it is by no means in Ireland only that this tall, dark, western race
is found. It is numerously represented in the nearest extension of the
continent, among the headlands and bays and isles of Brittany--a land so
like our own western seaboard, with its wild Atlantic storms.
Following the ocean southward, we find the same race extending to the
Loire, the Garonne, the Pyrenees; stretching somewhat inland also, but
clinging everywhere to the Atlantic, as we also saw it cling in Ireland.
In earlier centuries, long before our era opened, we find this same race
spread far to the east,--as far, almost, as the German and Italian
frontier,--so that at one time it held almost complete possession of
France. South of the Pyrenees we find it once more; dominant in
Portugal, less strongly represented in Spain, yet still supplying a
considerable part of the population of the whole peninsula, as it does
in Ireland at the present day. But it does not stop with Spain, or even
Europe. We find the same race again in the Guanches of the Canary
islands, off the African coast; and, stranger still, we find mummies of
this race, of great antiquity, in the cave-tombs of Teneriffe. Further,
we have ample evidence of its presence, until displaced by Moorish
invaders, all along northern Africa as far as Tunis; and we come across
it again amongst the living races in the Mediterranean isles, in
Sardinia, Sicily and Southern Italy. Finally, the Tuaregs of the Central
Sahara belong to the same type. Everywhere the same tall, dark race,
handsome, imaginative; with a quite definite form of head, of brow, of
eyes; a well-marked character of visage, complexion, and texture
of hair.
Thus far the southern extension of this, our second Irish race; we may
look for a moment at its distribution in the north. Across the shallow
sea which separates us from Britain we find the same race, clinging
always to the Atlantic seaboard. It dominates south Wales, where its
presence was remarked and commented on by the invading Romans. It is
present elsewhere through the Welsh mountains, and much more sparsely
over the east of England; but we have ample evidence that at one time
this tall, dark race held the whole of England in undisputed possession,
except, perhaps, for a remnant of the Hyperborean dwarfs. In the west of
Scotland, and especially in the Western Isles, it is once more numerous;
and we find offshoots of the same race in the dark-haired
Norwegians,--still holding to the seaboard of the Atlantic.
Such is the distribution of this once dominant but now dwindled race,
which has gradually descended from the summit of power as ancient Rome
descended, as Greece descended, or Assyria or Egypt. But we can look
back with certainty to a time when this race, and this race only, held
complete possession of all the lands we have mentioned, in north or
south, in Europe or northern Africa; holding everywhere to the Atlantic
coast, or, as in the Mediterranean isles, evidently pressing inward from
the Atlantic, past the Pillars of Hercules, through the Strait of
Gibraltar.
It is evident at once that the territory of this race corresponds
exactly, throughout many countries, with the territory of the cromlechs
and standing stones; where we find the one, as in Ireland, Brittany,
Spain, we find the other; where the one is absent, as in Germany, or
northern Italy or Greece, the other is likewise absent. The identity is
complete. We are justified, therefore, in giving the same provisional
name to both, and calling them Atlantean, from their evident origin not
far from Atlas, and their everywhere clinging to the Atlantic coast. We
can find traces of no other race which at all closely fulfills the
necessary conditions of uniform and undisputed extension, through a long
epoch, over the whole cromlech region--the only conditions under which
we can conceive of the erection of these gigantic monuments, or of the
long established and universally extended spiritual conditions which
make possible such vast ideal enterprises.
In this race, therefore, which we have called Atlantean, we find the
conditions fulfilled; of this race, and of no other, we still find a
lingering remnant in each of the cromlech countries; and we hardly find
a trace of this race, either now or in the past, in the lands which have
no cromlechs or standing stones.
We have already seen that the standing stones of Cavancarragh, four
miles from Fermanagh, were, within the memory of men still living or of
their fathers, buried under ten or twelve feet of peat, which had
evidently formed there after their erection. We have here a natural
chronometer; for we know the rate at which peat forms, and we can,
therefore, assign a certain age to a given depth. We have given one mode
of reckoning already; we find it corroborated by another. In the Somme
valley, in northern France, we have a Nature's timepiece; in the peat,
at different levels, are relics of the Roman age; of the Gaulish age
which preceded it; and, far deeper, of pre-historic races, like our
Atlanteans, who preceded the Gauls. The date of the Roman remains we
know accurately; and from this standard we find that the peat grows
regularly some three centimeters a century, or a foot in a
thousand years.
On the mountain side, as at Cavancarragh, the growth is likely to be
slower than in a river valley; yet we may take the same rate, a foot a
thousand years, and we shall have, for this great stone circle, an
antiquity of ten or twelve thousand years at least. This assumes that
the peat began to form as soon as the monument was completed; but the
contrary may be the case; centuries may have intervened.