IRISH ROUND TOWERS.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3243, 22 November 1881, Page 4

IRISH ROUND TOWERS.

We haVb , all heard of the Irish round towers ThtTV were for a long time the puzzle of archaeologists. Books upon books were written to p/ove that they were built by the Phoenicians. One » utuor describes, with all the pomp of language of which an Irishman is capable, the P nesb of Baal > in hia robe of Tyrian purple, .mounting to the top, and there, with wild ck , slnn g. of uproarious cymbals, saluting the rising sun. Others, who had a shrewd suspK ,,l^ 11 the Phoenicians never came nearer x .i'eland than south-western Spain, assigned theiT 1 , a still earlier origin. They imagined a people called Cuthites, or Chaldees, highly skilled in the arts, who lived in Ireland up to about 1000 8.C., and who built the towers, and also a good many of the crosses which we fondly imagine to be Christian. Of course, the notion has been disproved time after time; but folly survives a good many beatings, and, in spite of Dr. Petrie, who quotes the Irish annals for the exact dates when some of the more important round towers were built, a good many people in England, as well as in Ireland, believe the round towers to be pre-Christian, and not the work of Irish builders. The argument runs thus : The Irish, before the Normans came over, never built with any more durable materal than clay and wattles ; these towers were there long before the Normans came ; therefore, as the Irish did not build them, somebody else—Phoenician, Cuthite, or other pro-historic inhabitants—must have done so. Unfortunately for the argument, its major premise is not true ; the Irish did build with stone, ' though rarely. There are the old " cathairs," or stone-walled forts, and the stone-fenced monasteries on the Skelligs and elsewhere ; and some of the stone-roofed ctrarches, so peculiar to the country, have their dates as well fixed as any of our cathedrals. Irish round towers, it is pretty certain, belong to churches. Church towers were not originally intended for bells ; they were for defence against sudden assaults, and began to be built in France and elsewhere just when the attacks of the Norsemen ushered in the darkest of the dark ages. But why were the Irish towers round ? Probably because the monkish architects only knew how to build them round, having learnt in seme country where there was no available ashlar stone, and not changing their plan when they got among the splendid limestone of Ireland. — All the Year Round.