This rock is crowned with buildings that speak of war and peace, but of peace rather than war. There stands intact Cormac's Chapel, finest example of Irish building in the pre-Norman style; round-arched, solid, barrel-roofed, decorated with string-courses of dogtooth moulding. Beside it is the great cathedral built by the O'Brien lord of Thomond, cathedral and fortress in one; unroofed now, dismantled, and ruinous, yet hardly beyond reach of repair, since the choir was used as a cathedral till the latter part of the eighteenth century. Then an archbishop got an Act of Parliament authorizing him to unroof it and providing a regiment of soldiers to execute the work. Archbishop Price's reason for such an enterprise may not seem wholly conclusive; he liked--good easy man--to drive in comfortable state to his cathedral door, and no coach and horses could conveniently ascend the winding path up the Rock. Beside the cathedral is the tall Round Tower, and on the north side of the Rock, many remains of choir schools and other monastic buildings. On the level plain and in the town are other monasteries ruined yet not wholly shorn of their splendour; and within a few miles, Holycross Abbey and Athassel speak of the wealth and culture which were destroyed in this rich land of the Golden Vale. But the Rock itself, standing up there, crowned with such a group of buildings as no other of Ireland's high places can parallel, is the true object of pilgrimage; and the view from it over the Golden Vale, to the noble Galtee peaks and pinnacles due south of you, and the long waving line of Comeragh Mountains which runs continuously east from them along the valley of the Suir, is a prospect worth long journeying. Nor is that all. Slievenamon rises dome-shaped from the eastern plain, a gap between it and the outlying spurs of Comeragh showing where the Suir, headed off its southward course by Galteemore, finds a way eastward to the sea: and to the north beyond the plain is the far-off range of Slievebloom, dividing Leinster from the Shannon; and nearer towards Athlone and the Shannon are the low hills with the Devil's Bit nipped out of the top of them. II