[Illustration: Fig. 33.--Iron Helmet found in the Monea Crannog, front and side view.]
Front View of Bronze Shield from Lough Gur. Diameter 28 inches.]
The shield, of which the accompanying plate gives a correct representation, was found in the bog close to the banks of Lough Gur, County Limerick; and near it were the head and antlers of a _Megaceros Hibernicus_. This shield is a disc of bronze, slightly convex, and strengthened by a series of six concentric circles formed of hollow bosses, about two hundred in number, surrounding the central umbo. It appears to have been carried slung on the shoulder, the slinging loops being fixed so as to form bosses on the obverse equal in size to those contained in the circle: it was furnished with a very small handle, interiorly traversing the umbo. The rim is an inch three-quarters in width; the diameter, two feet three and three-quarter inches. The holes with which the shield is pierced are not proofs of warfare; it was the discoverer--a boy with a fishing gaff--who inflicted the injuries in bringing his novel spoil to land.[98] The Rev. James Graves considered the looseness of the rivets at the inside loops for the strap by which the shield was carried, to be proof that some material, most probably the hide of an animal, had originally formed an inner lining, as the thin bronze being in itself incapable of withstanding the impact of a fishing-gaff, could afford little real protection against even ordinary weapons of warfare. The coating of sheet bronze may be viewed rather as ornamentation than as rendering the shield more impenetrable; or it may have been but a variety of the arrangement of studs or circles of bronze affixed to bucklers of wood or leather--
“Whose brazen studs and tough bull-hide Had death so often dashed aside.”
In the Museum of Antiquities at Edinburgh may be seen a bronze shield of like character.
In the Crannog of Lisnacroghera was discovered, with many warlike weapons, a disc of thin bronze, its centre from one-third its circumference descending into a hollow, at the base of which is an aperture: the ornamented side, as here portrayed, must have been intended to be the front, as the other side is quite plain. “Can it be the centre of a shield, other portions of which were composed of less durable materials? Certain it is, that thin circular plates of bronze, displaying similar depressions, have been found both in England and in Ireland, and are supposed to be connected with the mounting of shields.”