made from the black weed, and the other from the red. The black usually grows above the low-water mark of the neap-tide, whilst all the red grows below it. The red weed kelp is the most valuable, as in general it gives salts containing iodine. Marine plants, such as the sea-anemones, the rock-grown samphire, and the sea-cabbage grow around the islands in great profusion.

Another remarkable feature in Aran is the enormous amount of fine quartzose—moving sands which, blown in thick clouds by the winds, fill the nooks and corners and crevices of the islands. These sands, which are said to possess the property of preserving bodies uncorrupted after death, might be fixed and utilized in the same manner as the sands of Arcachon on the west coast of France have been fixed and utilized, by planting therein vast forests of the Pinus maritima, the interlacery of whose roots would do the twofold duty of fixing the sands and creating a soil enriched by the amount of nitrogen therein digested and deposited. At Trawmore, on the south of Killeany Bay, proofs have lately been discovered not only of the movement of the sand-hills, but also of the appearance of fields and buildings submerged on the sea-coast.

These islands in prehistoric times must have suffered much from the convulsions which then shook the world—in later times they appear to have suffered little, though Richard Kirwan the chemist relates that in his memory, in the year 1774, a fearful thunderstorm visited Inishmore, when a granite block of enormous dimensions, called the "Gregory," was struck by lightning, shattered to atoms, and flung into the sea.

CHAPTER II

The "remnants of things that have passed away" are many on these islands. In no other part of the United Kingdom are there confined in spaces so narrow so many monuments of Pagan times; here are evidences of two great ages of civilization—that of the Druids and that of the Christians; but, whether of the Druids or of the Christians, Aran had been the retreat in early times of the contemplative and the learned. Sequestered and undisturbed, the natives have even to this day preserved much of the moral and physical remains of the ancient world.

The Aranites in their simplicity consider the remains of the Druids as inviolable, being as they fondly imagine the enchanted haunts and property of aerial beings, whose power of doing mischief they greatly dread and studiously propitiate. The natives believe that the "cairns" or circular mounds are the sepulchres of the mighty men of old, men of renown, whose acts and deeds even now are celebrated in songs sung at the cottage firesides by minstrels to the strings of the wandering harper: on every lip are the exploits of Churcullen, of Gol, son of Morna, of Oscar, and of Ossian, and here are pointed out the places where they lived and died. We have also the immense "cromlechs" or altar flags, supported on perpendicular pillars, as we may venture to call the unhammered stones of about three feet in height, whilst under those "cromlechs" still rest the remains of heroes whose faithful dogs interred with them bear them company even in death. Here, too, no bad memory is retained of the sacred fires of Bal (another name for the sun), which were kept burning; for the sun, and the moon, and the stars were by them reverenced; but the sun of the Druids was supposed to be the most noble type of the Godhead—the most glorious object of the material creation. The mysterious stones, twelve in number, encircling the altars of sacrifice, sometimes said to be zodiacal rings, after the twelve signs of the zodiac, are here frequently to be found. The purifying ordeals the cattle were subject to at Aran until a very late period are yet there remembered. The sacred fires on the first day of each of the quarters blazed from cairn to cairn, amid prayers for the fruits of the earth, and even yet, on St. John's Eve in June, huge bonfires are lighted near every village through the island, for the holy flame was considered essential to the cattle as a preservative from contagious disorders. The Druids kindled after their manner two immense fires, with great incantations, close to each other, whilst between those fires the cattle were driven, and if they escaped unharmed it was considered as auspicious as it would be inauspicious for man and beast to be therein harmed, and hence the saying, "Placed between the two fires of Baal." Concerning the mysteries of their religion, the Druids did not commit them to writing, and therefore it is that so little is known of their teachings or of what they taught, and what they did teach is said by some to have been taught in the Greek language, "to the end," writes Sir Edward Coke, "that their discipline might not be made so common amongst the vulgar, nay more, their very names and appellations may serve as a proof of their use of the Greek tongue, they being called Druids from [Greek: Drys], an oak, because, saith Pliny, they frequent the woods where oaks are, and in all their sacrifices they use the leaves of those trees."[2]

With Druidism departed the forests of the ilex and the quercus from Aran. May we venture to hope that, in the coming changes, Aran may once more be re-afforested, and that the islanders, who have now no coal, no timber, and no turf to burn, may have at least timber to burn in great abundance in the near future?

The immense fortresses on the islands are said to be the finest specimens of barbaric military structures extant in Europe. Built by the pagan Firbolgs in the first century of the Christian era, these mortarless walls, Cyclopean as they are called, having braved the tempests of nineteen hundred years, still stand. On the large island, and within four miles of our hotel, is Dun Ængus, which, covering many acres, is on a precipice hundreds of feet in height. This fortress, in the form of a horse-shoe, is unapproachable on the sea side, where the Atlantic surges heavily against the solid rock, whose surfaces are seamed, and scarred, and torn by the violence of the billows driven against them by the winter tempests. Unapproachable by an enemy from the sea, it is equally unapproachable by an enemy from the land, the only entrance thereto being by a narrow avenue skirting the edge of the cliff. The fortress consists of three enclosures, the inner, the middle, and the outer. The inner measures 160 feet, on what may be called the axis major from north to south of the horse-shoe on the ground plan, whilst along the cliff it measures 144 feet. The mortarless wall which surrounds this inmost enclosure is about 1100 feet from end to end, by 18 feet in height, and 12 feet in thickness. Now this one wall is made up of three walls, each four feet thick, one against the other, like the coats of an onion, which