Nor will the tourist exploring Lancashire think the time lost that he may spend among the sea-beaten remains of the Peel of Fouldrey,--the cluster of historic towers which forms so conspicuous an object when proceeding by water to Piel Pier, _en route_ for Furness Abbey and the Lakes. The castle owes its existence to the Furness abbots, who, alarmed by the terrible raid of the Scots in 1316, repeated in 1322, temp. Edward II., discreetly constructed a place for personal safety, and for deposit of their principal treasures. No site could have been found more trustworthy than the little island off the southern extreme of Walney. While artillery was unknown Fouldrey must have been impregnable, for it was not only wave-girt but defended by artificial moats, and of substance so well knit that although masses of tumbled wall are now strewn upon the beach, they refuse to disintegrate. These huge lumps are composed partly of pebbles, and of cement now hard as rock. The keep is still standing, with portions of the inner and outer defences. Traces of the chapel are also discoverable, indicating the period of the erection; but there is nothing anywhere in the shape of ornament. The charm of Fouldrey is now purely for the imagination. Hither came the little skiffs that brought such supplies to the abbey as its own broad lands could not contribute. Here was given the welcome to all distinguished visitors arriving by sea, and from Fouldrey sailed all those who went afar. To-day all is still. No voices are heard save those of the unmusical seafowl, and of the waves that toss up their foam-- "Where all-devouring Time Sits on his throne of ruins hoar, And winds and tempests sweep his various lyre." "Peel," a term unknown in the south of England, was anciently, in the north, a common appellation for castellets built as refuges in times of peril. They were often no more than single towers, square, with turrets at the angles, and having the door at a considerable height above the ground. The word is variously spelt. Pele, pile, pylle, and two or three other forms, occur in old writers, the whole resolving, apparently, into a mediæval _pelum_, which would seem to be in turn the Latin _pila_, a mole or jetty, as in the fine simile in Virgil, where the Trojan falls smitten by a dart: "Qualis in Euboico Baiarum litore quondam Saxea pila cadit," etc.--_Æneid_, ix. 710, 711.