being nine inches--the same breadth continues throughout--the bottom of the canoe is perforated with six rather cleanly cut round holes, about three quarters of an inch in diameter. [Illustration: Fig. 198.--Dug-out Canoe found near the Crannog of Lough Mourne.] _Lisnacroghera_ crannog lies at a little distance from Broughshane, in the parish of Skerry, barony of Antrim. About the year 1882, workmen employed in cutting turf--bared by the partial drainage of the lough--came upon oaken timbers laid in regular order; unfortunately nearly all were removed before anyone acquainted with the peculiarities of crannog structure had seen them, and in the autumn of 1883, most of the timbers had disappeared, though a few of the encircling piles remained in position. Some remarkable antiquities, discovered either within or around it, have been rescued from oblivion and destruction. A spear with iron head and butt, and rivets of bronze, and the iron sword-blades enclosed in sheaths of bronze (which are now in Canon Grainger’s museum), seem to call for prominent notice. With regard to these the Rev. James Graves says:--“It cannot be denied that this crannog find is one of the most important and valuable yet recorded in Ireland, especially in its bearing on the style and the chronology of the art of that early period when the bronze and iron eras overlapped. The spears have bronze butts, with terminal iron heads, for such were discovered in the crannog, whilst no spear-heads of bronze--an imperishable metal--were found. The bronze rivets remained in the shafts by which the iron heads had been secured. All this reminded one of the ninth century legend of the armourers of the Tuatha dé Danann when preparing for battle with the Fomorians at the northern Moytura. The mode of workmanship is graphically described:--Goibniu at his forge finishes the spear-heads in three hammer-strokes (probably they went through three processes in their fabrication); so it was also with the work of Luchtiné on the ashen spear-shafts, and Creidné on the bronze rivets. When Goibniu had finished the iron lance-head, he seized it with his pincers and sent it quivering into the door-post. Then Luchtiné launched the finished shaft so surely aimed that it found the socket of the lance-head, and penetrating to the bottom was firmly fixed there: whilst Creidné instantly flung from his pincers the finished _bronze_ rivet with so sure and true an aim that it entered the rivet-holes to the required depth, and so the weapon was completed (_Three Irish Glossaries_, p. 32, _Sanas Cormaic_, p. 123). Hence, without assuming that the bronze-iron age should be thrown back to the mythic period of the Tuatha dé Danann and the Fomorians, it is evident that in the ninth century there was a tradition of its characteristics and existence in Ireland, and that of so remote a date as to suit the myth of the contest of the gods of light and life with the deities of darkness and death.