ROSCREA, 30 m. N. of Clonmell, stands on the very verge of the county, and is a thriving and wealthy town, on the post road from Dublin to Limerick, standing in a fertile and populous district. At the entrance of the town the tourist will notice the very curious architectural decorations of the Ch., with its Saxon doors and niches, its sepulchral crosses; and lofty round tower, 80 feet in height and 15 feet in diameter, possessing also the singularity of a window with a pointed arch at the height of 30 feet from the ground. The Castle (1213) is now a barrack. Monaincha, about 3 m. from Roscrea, and about 1 m. S. from the road leading to Burros in Ossory, cannot fail to be highly interesting to the antiquary as the birth-place of the long celebrated monastic order of the Culdees, a Christian but not Roman Catholic sect, that commenced in the 6th century, according to Ledwich, in this remote corner of the world, in a little island in the midst of a bog, sometimes called Innisnabeo, or the "Island of the living." Columba was their founder, as may be seen at large in _Ledwich's Antiquities of Ireland_, p. 56; and it is a curious fact at the present moment, that so adverse were the Culdees to the tenets and practice of the Church of Rome, as to draw down the wrath of the Vatican, and the festival of St. Columba was forbidden in the other parts of Ireland. The bog in which these ruins are now to be seen was formerly a lake: for Giraldus Cambrensis describes it as such in 1185, with two islands, one containing a Ch. and the other a Chapel; a fact that must render a visit interesting to the geologist. The geologist who directs his research to the bog of Allen will naturally visit this bog of Monela, which is but a continuation of it; and here he will not fail to notice the extraordinary fact, that what was the lesser is now become the greater isle. The easternmost of the two is the largest, and contains about 2 acres; in it stands the Culdean Abbey, of which considerable vestiges still remain. The tourist will particularly observe the arch of the choir, which is semicircular or Saxon, and on which sculpture seems to have exhausted her treasures: a nebule moulding adorns the outward semicircle of the portal, a double nebule with beads the second, a chevron the third, interspersed with the triangular frette, roses and other ornaments. It is also decorated with chalices, artfully made at every section of the stone, so as to conceal the joints. Here the ruins afford some research for the mineralogist, as part of the stones used are of a whitish grit, brought from the neighbouring hills of Ballaghmore, but being porous they have suffered much from the weather; whilst the columns of the choir are of a harder texture, close-grained, reddish in colour, and once highly polished. These have evidently been quarried on the S.W. side of the bog, and are a species of schistus, splitting into laminæ