There are more than threescore of these circles at Carrowmore, under Knocknarea.  Yet Carrowmore is only one among many memorials of dead years within our horizon.  At Abbey-quarter, within the town-limits of Sligo itself, there is another great ring of boulders, the past and the present mingling together.  On the northern coast, across the Bay of Sligo, where the headland of Streedagh juts forth into the sea, there is another giant necklace of gray blocks ranged upon the moor.  Farther along the shore, where Bundoran marks the boundary of Donegal, a cromlech and a stone circle rise among the sand-banks.  All have the same rugged and enduring massiveness, all are wrapped in the same mystery.

Eastward from Sligo, Lough Gill lies like a mirror framed in hills, wreathed with dark green woods.  On a hill-top north of the lake, in the Deer-park, is a monument of quite other character—­a great oblong marked by pillared stones, like an open temple.  At three points huge stones are laid across from pillar to pillar.  The whole enclosure was doubtless so barred in days of old, a temple of open arches crowning the summit of the hill.  The great ruin by the lake keeps its secret well.

Another ring of giant stones rests on a hillside across the lake, under the Cairn hill, with its pyramid crown.  All these are within easy view from our first vantage-point on Knocknarea, yet they are but the outposts of an army which spreads everywhere throughout the land.  They are as common in wild and inaccessible places as on the open plain.  Some rise in lonely islands off the coast; others on the summits of mountains; yet others in the midst of tilled fields.  They bear no relation at all to the land as it is to-day.  The very dispersion of these great stone monuments, scattered equally among places familiar or wild, speaks of a remote past—­a past when all places were alike wild, or all alike familiar.

Where the gale-swept moors of Achill Island rise up toward the slope of Slievemore Mountain, there are stone circles and cromlechs like the circles of Carrowmore.  The wild storms of the Atlantic rush past them, and the breakers roar under their cliffs.  The moorland round the towering mountain is stained with ochre and iron under a carpet of heather rough as the ocean winds.

Away to the south from Slievemore the horizon is broken by an army of mountains, beginning with the Twelve Peaks of Connemara.  Eastward of these hills are spread the great Galway lakes; eastward of these a wide expanse of plain.  This is the famous Moytura of traditional history, whose story we shall presently tell.  Ages ago a decisive battle was fought there; but ages before the battle, if we are not greatly misled, the stone circles of the plain were already there.  Tradition says that these circles numbered seven in the beginning, but only two remain unbroken.