In Glen Druid of the Dublin hills is a cromlech whose granite crown weighs seventy tons.  Not far off is the Mount Venus cromlech, the covering block of which is even more titanic; it is a single stone eighty tons in weight.  Near Killternan village, a short distance off, is yet another cromlech whose top-most boulder exceeds both of these, weighing not less than ninety tons.  Yet vast as all these are, they are outstripped by the cromlech of Howth, whose upper block is twenty feet square and eight feet thick, a single enormous boulder one hundred tons in weight.  This huge stone was borne in the air upon twelve massive pillars of quartz, seven feet above the ground, so that a man of average height standing on the ground and reaching upward could just touch the under surface of the block with his finger-tips.  Even a tall man standing on the shoulders of another as tall would quite fail to touch the upper edge of the stone.  If we give this marvelous monument the same age as the Fermanagh circles, as we well may, this raising of a single boulder of one hundred tons, and balancing it in the air on the crest of massive pillars may give us some insight into the engineering skill of the men of ten thousand years ago.

Across the central plain from Howth Head the first break is the range of Loughcrew hills.  Here are great stone circles in numbers, not standing alone like so many others, but encompassing still stranger monuments; chambered pyramids of boulders, to which we shall later return.  They are lesser models of the three great pyramids of Brugh on the Boyne, where the river sweeps southward in a long curve, half-encircling a headland of holy ground.

From near Howth to the Boyne and north of it, the coast is low and flat; sandhills matted with bent-grass and starred with red thyme and tiny pansies, yellow and purple and blue.  Low tide carries the sea almost to the horizon, across a vast wilderness of dripping sand where the gulls chatter as they wade among the pools.  Where the shore rises again towards the Carlingford Mountains, another cromlech stands under the shadow of granite hills.

A long fiord with wooded walls divides the Carlingford range from the mountains of Mourne.  The great dark range thrusts itself forth against the sea in somber beauty, overhanging the wide strand of Dundrum Bay.  The lesser bay, across whose bar the sea moans under the storm-winds, is dominated by the hill of Rudraige, named in honor of a hero of old days; but under the shadow of the hill stands a more ancient monument, that was gray with age before the race of Rudraige was born.  On five pillars of massive stone is upreared a sixth, of huge and formidable bulk, and carrying even to us in our day a sense of mystery and might.  The potent atmosphere of a hidden past still breathes from it, whispering of vanished years, vanished races, vanished secrets of the prime.