With Druidism departed the forests of the ilex and the quercus from Aran. May we venture to hope that, in the coming changes, Aran may once more be re-afforested, and that the islanders, who have now no coal, no timber, and no turf to burn, may have at least timber to burn in great abundance in the near future? [Sidenote: FORTRESSES OF ARAN.] The immense fortresses on the islands are said to be the finest specimens of barbaric military structures extant in Europe. Built by the pagan Firbolgs in the first century of the Christian era, these mortarless walls, Cyclopean as they are called, having braved the tempests of nineteen hundred years, still stand. On the large island, and within four miles of our hotel, is Dun Ængus, which, covering many acres, is on a precipice hundreds of feet in height. This fortress, in the form of a horse-shoe, is unapproachable on the sea side, where the Atlantic surges heavily against the solid rock, whose surfaces are seamed, and scarred, and torn by the violence of the billows driven against them by the winter tempests. Unapproachable by an enemy from the sea, it is equally unapproachable by an enemy from the land, the only entrance thereto being by a narrow avenue skirting the edge of the cliff. The fortress consists of three enclosures, the inner, the middle, and the outer. The inner measures 160 feet, on what may be called the axis major from north to south of the horse-shoe on the ground plan, whilst along the cliff it measures 144 feet. The mortarless wall which surrounds this inmost enclosure is about 1100 feet from end to end, by 18 feet in height, and 12 feet in thickness. Now this one wall is made up of three walls, each four feet thick, one against the other, like the coats of an onion, which arrangement occurs in the middle and outside enclosures, and which has this advantage, that if an enemy should succeed in breaking down the exterior envelope, he would find behind it a new face of masonry, instead of the easily disturbed loose interior of a dry stone wall. The space between this inner and the next outside, or middle enclosure, is perfectly clear, leaving ample scope for military manoeuvres. The outside wall, which is almost an ellipse, encloses about eleven acres, all studded over with an army of white pointed stones, set slope-wise into the earth, like almonds on a plum-pudding, save where a narrow avenue is left, so that no assailing force could possibly approach the second wall, without having its ranks broken by those intricate piles which answer the _chevaux-de-frise_ of modern fortifications. The doorway with sloping jambs of Egyptian pattern through the outer wall admits only one or two assailants together. [Sidenote: DUN ÆNGUS.]