“I observed on the side of the mount the stump of an old thorn-bush. My guide informed me that the bush itself had been blown down one windy night, many years ago, and had been left to rot on the ground where it fell, no one daring to touch it, though in general the poor people are ready enough to appropriate to themselves anything burnable that they may find by the wayside. Young trees they will steal with very little remorse, but wood growing on one of these fairy mounts is almost always secure from their depredations. “On the following day I visited a similar hill, the Moate-o’-Ward, which was likewise covered with white thorns, and in the sequel I met with great numbers of these artificial hillocks, of which Ireland contains many more than England or Scotland. The people call them moats, a word used in English to designate the ditch of a fortress. In Irish they are called ‘raths,’ a word bearing precisely the same signification. They are also sometimes called ‘Dane’s Mounts’; for in Ireland, as every art of destruction is charitably set down to Cromwell’s account, so every erection of a remote date is attributed to the Danes. “The popular belief is quite unanimous, therefore, in giving the Danes the credit of having erected these tumuli, as fortresses whence they might hold the country in subjection; and when the Danes had been expelled, an Irish chief here and there chose the deserted fastness for his dwelling-place. The learned are not quite so unanimous in their views as to the origin of these erections. Some go with the stream, and set them down to Danish account; others believe the hillocks to be of a much more ancient date, and to have formed the strongholds of the ancient native kings. In the north of Ireland is a mound of enormous size, said to have been the seat of the kings of Ulster. “Probably this earthy architecture, which appears to have been so widely diffused over Ireland, was the work of different ages, of various races, and had more objects than one in view. Nearly all the nations of Europe, in the infancy of their civilization, seem to have delighted in the erection of these artificial hills. The whole of Southern Russia is full of them, and we meet with them in Hungary, Turkey, Scandinavia, and Denmark, as well as in England and Ireland; but nowhere in such numbers as in Ireland, whence we may conclude that the ancient Irish must have built many of their raths long before the Danes arrived among them. “It is also probable that they were erected with different objects in view. Some, we know, were intended as boundary marks, and some, we know, were raised over the remains of distinguished heroes and chiefs. From some it was customary for the law-givers and judges to announce their decisions to the assembled multitude, and on others kings were anointed and crowned. The Druids required sacred hills to offer their sacrifices on, and where a natural hill was not to be had an artificial one, no doubt, was often formed.