It seems foolish to maintain a great church like this for the use of so small a congregation as worships here, and yet the same thing is done all over Ireland, though it would seem to be only common sense to give the big churches to the big congregations, and to provide small churches for the small ones. But I suppose no one in Ireland would dare make such a suggestion.
I am surprised that the energetic vicar of this parish has not decided that the church is too dark and hired some workmen to knock out the lancet windows. These windows are one of its chief beauties, they are so tall, so narrow, so deeply splayed--the very earliest form, before the builders gathered courage to cut any but the smallest openings in their walls. And in the wall of the nave, blocked up and with use unexplained, is a magnificent Irish-Romanesque doorway. Tradition has it that it was the entrance to the tomb of King Murtough O'Brien, and its date is placed at the beginning of the twelfth century. The man who built it was an artist, for nothing could be more graceful than its four semi-circular arches, rising one beyond the other and covered with ornamentation--spiral and leaf work, grotesque animals with tails twined into the hair of human heads, flowers and lozenges, and the familiar dog-tooth pattern, of which the Irish were so fond.
Interesting as the church is, or would be but for the "improvements," it is far outranked by a tiny stone structure just outside--the parish church of Brian Boru himself. It is less than thirty feet long, and the walls are nearly four feet thick, and the two narrow windows which light it, one on either side, are loopholes rather than windows; and the doorway by which it is entered, narrower at the top than at the bottom, is a veritable gem; and the high-pitched roof of fitted blocks of stone is twice as high as the walls;--and on the stone slabs of its pavement Brian Boru was wont to kneel in prayer, five centuries before Columbus sailed out of Palos!
Of course I wanted a picture of this shrine; but there were difficulties, for it stands in a little depression which conceals part of it, and the high wall around the churchyard prevented my getting far enough away to get all of the high-pitched roof on the film. The caretaker, who was most interested in my manoeuvres, brought a ladder at last, and I mounted to the top of the wall, and took the picture opposite the next page; but, even then, I didn't get it all.