Identifier: romanticireland02mans (find matches)
Title: Romantic Ireland
Year: 1905 (1900s)
Authors: Mansfield, M. F. (Milburg Francisco), 1871- McManus, Blanche, 1869-1935, joint author
Subjects:
Publisher: Boston, L. C. Page & company
Contributing Library: Boston College Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: Boston Library Consortium Member Libraries

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Cormac with his curling, golden hair and opu-lence of barbaric trappings, and the scenesover which he presided were surely in keepingwith his magnificence, though only by a strongeffort of imagination can they now be recalled. The chief and most splendid structures ofthe interior of Ireland in ancient times wereEmania and Tara. The former, the one-time palace of the kings of Ulster, was allegedto have been built about three hundred andfifty years before the Christian era. It existedas late as Columbas time, though it had ceasedto be a royal residence; and the antiquarians,Camden and Speed, attest that fragmentaryremains of this splendid establishment existedeven in their day (seventeenth century). Ifthis be really so, the ruin, if it could even becalled by so explicit a name, must have beenone of the most ancient existing in northernclimes. Tara was a place of greater, and yet moremodern, celebrity. It was situated in the plainof Bregia, which extended between the Boyne, Destiny, Tara
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The Boyne Valley 257 the Liffey, and the sea, and was preeminentabove all other edifices as having been the resi-dence of Irish kings for upwards of a thousandyears. A contributor to the Transactions of theRoyal Irish Academy, writing in 1830, hasdescribed Tara as it appeared to him on a re-cent visit: Only when one finds himself at the baseof the venerable mount does it present an at-titude of much interest. At the left are thegloomy remains of the church of Screen andthe once noble mansion and demesne of LordTara, back of which are the remains of severalold stone edifices and of a particularly narrowbridge which still spans a weedy rivulet. Pass-ing through the villages and by the church, oneidentifies some large rocks as having exercisedthe strength or yielded to the sword of FinMacComhal (Fingal). Here one finds him-self on the summit of Tara; and if he goesthere with none of that wild enthusiasm whichrequires towers and battlements and draw-bridges and bower-windows, and donjon-k

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