Yet the whole region about Krakortok bears evidence of former cultivation. Garden patches were in the neighborhood of all the buildings. The church and two other buildings were inclosed by a wall, the outlines of which I had no difficulty in determining, and which, judging from the mass of stones, must have been about five feet high. The church interested me most. Its walls are still quite perfect to from ten to eighteen feet altitude, and even the form of the gable is yet preserved. The door-ways, three in number, are not in the least disturbed by time; the windows are mostly entire, except on the north side, and the arched window in the eastern end is nearly perfect. Beneath this window was the chancel, and the church was constructed with singular exactness as to orientation. This could scarcely be by accident, for the same accuracy is to be observed in all the other sacred buildings that have been discovered in the neighborhood—the walls standing within less than one degree of the meridian line, and even this may have been an error of my instrument which I had not the means of correcting, rather than an error of the Northmen. They were evidently close observers of the movements of the heavenly bodies, and must have known the north with great exactness, and they built their church walls accordingly. These walls were four and a half feet thick. The stones were flat, and no cement appears to have been used other than blue clay. In one angle of the church-yard there had been a building which I supposed to have been the almonry; and in another part was the house of the priest or bishop, the walls of which are still perfect to the top of the door-way, and one of the windows. [Illustration: GROUND-PLAN OF RUINS.] Outside the church wall, but not far removed from it, there was a building evidently of much pretension. It was divided into three compartments, and was sixty-four by thirty-two feet. There was another still farther to the westward, others to the east, and one on the natural terrace above the church. Altogether the cluster of buildings which composed the church estate—where dwelt the officers who governed the country round about, and administered in this distant place, at what was then thought to be “the farthest limit of the habitable globe,” the ordinances of the pope at Rome—were nine in number: a church, a tomb, an almonry, five dwellings, and one round structure; the walls of which latter building had, like those of the church-yard, completely fallen, but the outline of the foundation was preserved. The walls had been four feet thick, and the diameter of the building in the clear was forty-eight feet. It had but one door-way, which opened towards the church.