superstructure at a period antecedent to Mr. Comerford's recollection. There is no order set out in the books of the corporation for the removal of either the Market Cross or Croker's Cross, as is the case with respect to many of the city gates, towers, and other relics of ancient Kilkenny, which were swept away about the same period. When Croker's Cross disappeared, I have been unable to ascertain; but Dr. Ledwich, on the authority, it would seem, of the Rev. Mervyn Archdall, who had a drawing made of the monument ten years before its removal, states, that the Market Cross was taken down in 1771, so far confirming the account given by Mr. Buchannan.1

We have preserved to us three different views of the Market Cross, in all of which the monument is represented as perfect, the artists taking the liberty of repairing the mischief done by Cromwell's soldiers. Of these, the drawing which belonged to the Rev. Mervyn Archdall, being simply a kind of architectural elevation, unaccompanied by any pictorial accessaries, was engraved in Vallancey's "Collectanea," and copied into the first volume of the "Dublin Penny Journal." The two others were obtained by the late William Robertson, Esq., for the purpose of illustrating the work which he intended to have published on the antiquities of Kilkenny. One of these, taken apparently from the end of Chapel-lane, represents the

Since this paper was read before the Society, one of the oldest inhabitants of Kilkenny, B. Scott, Esq., sen., Solicitor, has informed me that, although the Market Cross had been removed at a period antecedent to that to which his memory reached, yet in his early youth, when it may be supposed all the incidents connected with the destruction of the monument were fresh in the recollection of the townsmen, he often heard his father say that the intention of alderman Blunt and the corporation was, to have re-erected the Cross on the Parade, and that it was solely with the view of improving the city, by widening the thoroughfare in High-street, that it was taken down; but the lower order of people, knowing Mr. Blunt's inveterate hostility to the habits of the idlers who used to assemble at the Cross, incorrectly attributed its demolition to the object stated by Mr. Buchannan. The Minute Book of the corporation furnishes some evidence corroborative, to a certain degree, of Mr. Scott's version of the story. At a meeting of the council, held on the 5th of November, 1770, Anthony Blunt presiding as mayor, the following order was made-" Ordered, and it is hereby requested of the Gentlemen of the Board, that they will furnish in writing such schemes and proposals of works for the utility and ornament of this City as appear to them proper to be carried

into execution, that this Board may determine on them and be enabled to employ the surplus money in their hands for such laudable purpose." Whether any such proposals were laid before the body accordingly, does not appear on the Minute Book; but on the 29th of June, 1772, the following entry was made-"Whereas Mr. Anthony Blunt, late Mayor, has presented a Bill alledged by him to be due for several expenditures he alledges to be made for the use of said Mayor and Citizens, Ordered that the present Mayor (the Rt. Hon. Otway, Lord Desart) and Sir Wm. E. Morres be and are hereby empowered to examine and finally determine the balance due on said Bill, and they are hereby empowered to give him a draft on sight on the Treasurer for the amount of the same." Unfortunately the bill alluded to is not extant: it is probable that it contained an item for the removal of the Market Cross. Mr. Scott states that within his own memory the cut stones which had formed the monument were piled in the yard attached to the house of Mr. Blunt, in Coal Market; that it had been the intention to preserve them carefully and reerect the structure on the Parade, but that the occurrence of Mr. Blunt's difficulties diverted his mind from the object, and, ultimately, the stones of this valuable architectural remain were made use of for common building purposes.

Tholsel and Langton's old house, now known as the Butter-slip, in the back ground; but the representation of the Cross is manifestly incorrect as regards the base, which is depicted with a flight of upwards of a dozen steps, whilst Motraye tells us there were but six, and Dr. Ledwich says only five. However, the other drawing of Mr. Robertson's (which was copied, I understand, from a painting in the possession of the late Mr. Purcell Mulhallen, of High-street) is by far the most beautiful and interesting of the three, being evidently faithful in the delineation, and not alone exhibiting the general effect of the monument itself, but also supplying a curious glimpse of the quaint old houses of the High-street as they appeared before the removal of the Cross, and some of them as they stood within my own recollection, preserving in detail the surrounding high-peaked gables, projecting penthouses, and picturesque bay windows which characterised the ancient urban architecture of Kilkenny. This interesting picture has lately been lithographed and given to the public by James G. Robertson, Esq., to whom the Society is indebted for permission to use the stone from which the graphic illustration accompanying this paper has been printed.

ON AN ANCIENT CEMETERY AT BALLYMACUS, COUNTY OF CORK.

BY JOHN WINDELE, ESQ.

A controversy respecting the antiquity of supposed Milesian graves at Glenaish, near Cahirconree, in Kerry, originating in a communication from the Rev. John Casey to one of the Tralee papers, and brought before the Kilkenny Archæological Society by the Rev. Dr. Rowan, has, by reminding me of a discovery of similar ancient interments made by the late Mr. A. Abell and myself, at Ballymacus, induced a wish to place the particulars on record, accompanied by such facts and observations as may assist in elucidating the question at issue.

Ballymacus lies on the sea shore, between the estuary of Oysterhaven and Kinsale harbour, and within view of the Sovereign's Islands. No tradition exists at present referable to the place; but its sepulchral character is preserved in the name of Park na Killa, the field of the graves, forming part of the townland. Neither is there any vestige or memory of any church or Christian cemetery. The field has been long used under tillage, and the discovery of the graves was merely accidental. We caused five of them to be opened; they were all formed alike, and contained similar remains. They were constructed of flag-stones set edge-ways forming the sides and ends of oblong

kists, varying in length from 5 to 5 feet, in breadth about 2 feet, and in depth between 12 and 18 inches. From these proportions we were induced to conjecture that they were either the graves of females, or of youths not grown up to manhood, or that the persons interred had not been laid out at full length. Certainly they belonged not to any of those gigantic children of Anak, said by the romancists to have formed the primeval population of our island; nor to those stalwarth Fenii of whom Ossian sung and tradition delights to tell. On examining them, seriatim, few remains of mortality could be found, the larger portions of the skeleton having perished under the operation of time and moisture. Fragments of skulls and jaw-bones with teeth quite sound, and portions of the bones of the lower extremities, so brittle as to be easily reduced almost to powder where only a slight pressure was applied, were all that had survived the waste and injuries of many centuries. None of the bones appeared to have been subjected to the action of fire, or undergone cremation. We made close search for implements or utensils, weapons, beads of amber or glass, shells, trinkets, charcoal, &c., known to have been frequently interred with the body in ancient times; but were unable to find anything of this description. The flag-stones were also examined, with a similar result, for any traces of inscriptions. Nothing remained to tell the story of the tenants of those long-forgotten graves. The whole had been covered over with rude flag-stones, and they lay from north-west to south-east.

I have from time to time seen, in other places, remains of similar sepulture, which may be denominated field burial, as at Oughtehery, in the parish of Aghina, west of Cork, adjoining an ancient circular Pagan kiel or cemetery. Their upper outlines approach very near the surface of the soil. These (several in number) I did not myself examine; but the tenant to the farm, who accompanied and pointed them out to me, stated that he had himself opened many of them some years before, and finding nothing but skulls and bones he closed them up again. In like manner at Cahirachladdig, in the same parish, seven or eight oblong kists were found some time since by a cottier tenant in his cabbage garden, but finding human remains he quickly covered them in, lest his family should take a dislike to the place. He also assured me that he saw no relic of any kind in any of the graves. Again at Knockagrogeen, on the road between Dingle and Smerwick, in the county of Kerry, I was shown, in 1848, several stone graves, some of which had been cut through in constructing a new road. Here also bones were found. But graves of this description are not always devoid of extraneous articles. In the Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, vol. ii. p. 186, we have a record of a cemetery near Bray, containing several similar graves; in these, however, the bones crumbled away, although the teeth remained unaffected by the exposure. With these remains were found some Roman coins. In the Archæologia also (vol. ii. 632-33) a discovery

of a field of graves is described, in some of which, besides skeletons, urns and rings were found. These graves were situate near Mullingar, and had been opened in 1748.

In the absence of other evidence, we can only assume, on conjecture, founded upon the nature of the sites the contents of some and general analogy, that this form of sepulture was purely Pagan and of very high antiquity, and that, generally speaking, they were the graves of the middle and humble classes, whilst the monolith, the crom leac, the carn, and the barrow marked the graves of the noble and distinguished. I can hardly subscribe to the opinion that such graves indicate a battle-field. They are too carefully and systematically formed, and too few, even where most numerous, to appertain to such sites. Judging from the absence of cremation in the Ballymacus graves, we should incline to assign to them a more remote date than those discovered at Mullingar, inasmuch as it is the received opinion of antiquaries, that simple inhumation, or burial of the body, was the original and earliest, as it was the most natural, form of sepulture, and preceded the practice of burning by many ages. The latter usage was

not known to the Hebrews, Persians, or Egyptians, nor to the Carthaginians (notwithstanding that Virgil, by an anachronism, consumes the body of Dido on the pyre), until the time of Darius. Although burning was known to the Greeks at the time of the Trojan war, Pliny and Cicero expressly affirm, and the same may be inferred from Plutarch, that it was only introduced at Rome at a later periodprobably not until the time of Sylla; but it went early out of fashion, and was superseded by inhumation burial in the 4th century.

The use of the funereal pyre prevailed in Britain many ages previous to the Roman invasion. The Gauls practised cremation in Cæsar's time. According to Olaus Wormius, inhumation and burning, as each obtained, marked a distinct period in the history of Scandinavia. We have sufficient evidence, however, in Ireland, from the examination of our tumuli, &c., that after the latter mode of interment had been introduced here, both kinds of burial were practised coevally. We have a very interesting instance of this in the exploration of the carn at Cloghmanty, in September, 1851, by the Rev. Messrs. Mease and Graves, with Mr. Prim. The carn, the leacht, the dumha, or mound, continued still to mark the external form of the monument, no matter what the mode of disposal of the body may have been. Some of our historians allege, that cremation had been abolished in Ireland by the monarch Eochaidh, some centuries before the Christian era, but I suspect this requires confirmation. The opinion which has also been advanced, that the practice, when adopted, was confined to the opulent and the distinguished, may have been better founded.

But a new test has been applied by Dr. Rowan, for the ascertainment of the age of ancient sepulchres, in the communication made by him to this Society at its last sitting, adopting which we should greatly

reduce the antiquity of many ancient monuments and their contents, hitherto regarded as belonging to very primitive periods. Unless, according to this gentleman's opinion, human remains, on exposure to the air, decompose and rapidly vanish, leaving not a wreck behind, they lose the character of any remote age: inasmuch as he declares his belief, that there is no recorded case of "dust unreturned to dust" for 2250 years; whilst the general evidence, he says, goes to contradict its possibility. Standing upon this conviction, he rejects the presumed age of the Glenaish graves of the Milesian invaders, and sustains the conclusion he has formed by the following facts and arguments:

..

"In the Etruscan tombs," he tells us, "which are continually discovered in Italy, I believe the invariable effect of the admission of air is, that the remains found in them literally vanish from sight in a few moments, under the eye of the beholder. I myself can testify, that being present at the opening of a tomb in the catacombs of that city [Rome], in a very few moments after the slab was removed, by which the air had been excluded for at least fifteen centuries, the remains enclosed, which at first presented the seemingly solid structure of a human skeleton, disappeared, and it was only by holding our tapers close to the floor that we could discern an outline of a human form traced out by a substance somewhat resembling cheese mould. . . Now if the process of decomposition was thus complete in the dry air and puzzuolano soil of Rome, and in the case of bodies buried within the Christian era, when we weigh the probabilities of bones remaining unpulverized in our moist climate and soil for a much longer period, I fear the conclusion will be against your (i.e., the Rev. Mr. Casey's) conjecture." This rule, applied to the remains found in Irish graves, must at once comparatively modernize them wherever they resist the admission of air. We should be prepared at once to review all that has been delivered to us in connexion with ancient sepulture by British and Irish archæologists, and, examining them by such a test, reject many conclusions, inferences and speculations which our good easy explorers of Celtic, Roman, Saxon, and Scandinavian barrows and monuments had with too unreflecting a facility enunciated. Such delvers and dreamers as the Bethams, the Roche Smiths, the Wrights, the Akermans, Lukises, Worsaaes, &c., who, we had imagined, had done service by the revelations which their researches had enabled them to make, would find that they had laboured under a species of hallucination, and had delved in ignorance of the true principles which should have guided them. Their speculations must be treated as myths, and as deserving of all repudiation.

But before adopting such extreme conclusions, it is necessary that Dr. Rowan's reasoning should be well and carefully weighed. For myself, from all the consideration which I have been able to give the subject, I am of opinion that he has too hastily generalized upon, and attached an undue importance to, partial and insufficient facts, which