A little farther south, Lough Gur lies like a white mirror among the rolling pasture-lands of Limerick, set amongst low hills.  On the lake’s shore is another metropolis of the dead, worthy to compare with Carrowmore on the Sligo headland.  Some of the circles here are not formed of single stones set at some distance from each other, but of a continuous wall of great blocks crowded edge to edge.  They are like round temples open to the sky, and within one of these unbroken rings is a lesser ring like an inner shrine.  All round the lake there are like memorials—­if we can call memorials these mighty groups of stone, which only remind us how much we have forgotten.  There are huge circles of blocks either set close together or with an equal space dividing boulder from boulder; some of the giant circles are grouped together in twos and threes, others are isolated; one has its centre marked by a single enormous block, while another like block stands farther off in lonely vastness.  Here also stands a chambered cromlech of four huge flat blocks roofed over like the cromlech under Slieve Callan across the Shannon mouth.

The southern horizon from Lough Gur is broken by the hills of red sandstone rising around Glanworth.  Beside the stream, a tributary of the Blackwater, a huge red cromlech rises over the greenness of the meadows like a belated mammoth in its uncouth might.  To the southwest, under the red hills that guard Killarney on the south, the Sullane River flows towards the Lee.  On its bank is another cromlech of red sandstone blocks, twin-brother to the Glanworth pile.  Beyond it the road passes towards the sunset through mountain-shadowed glens, coming out at last where Kenmare River opens into a splendid fiord towards the Atlantic Ocean.  At Kenmare, in a vale of perfect beauty green with groves of arbutus and fringed with thickets of fuchsia, stands a great stone circle, the last we shall record to the south.  Like all the rest, it speaks of tremendous power, of unworldly and mysterious ends.

The very antiquity of these huge stone circles suggests an affinity with the revolving years.  And here, perhaps, we may find a clue to their building.  They may have been destined to record great Time itself, great Time that circles forever through the circling years.  There is first the year to be recorded, with its revolving days; white winter gleaming into spring; summer reddening and fading to autumn.  Returning winter tells that the year has gone full circle; the sun among the stars gives the definite measure of the days.  A ring of thirty-six great boulders, set ten paces apart, would give the measure of the year in days; and of circles like this there are more than one.