chancel and transept, with the chambers over them, are of the fourteenth. Ross Abbey, near Headfort, co. Galway, has the cloister perfect; and a great part of the domestic buildings, with the kitchen and offices of the fifteenth century, may be made out, though in a ruinous state. The Abbot's house has suffered less. It is a small house of three stories, joining to the north-east corner of the chancel; it has fireplaces in the upper rooms, and an oven in the lower one: it is of the sixteenth century, rather later than the rest of the buildings, which are of the fifteenth. In the kitchen is a curious round reservoir of stone for keeping fish alive, with a stone pipe leading into it from the river. The chapter-house is tolerably perfect, and has in one corner a curious sort of bay window, popularly called a confessional, and having more of that appearance than usual. Here, as in most of the abbey churches in Ireland, a tall square tower of small dimensions has been built in the fifteenth century between the nave and chancel. Such towers are generally introduced within the walls of an earlier building, and the fashion spread so rapidly and so widely, that they were probably considered a necessary part of an improved mode of fortification. They usually have habitable rooms in them. Towers of this description remain at Hoare Abbey, near Cashel, and Kilmallock Abbey, co. Tipperary, Clare-Galway Abbey, co. Galway, Trim Abbey, and Swords, co. Meath, and many others. These square towers appear to have taken the place of the round towers as belfries for the churches, when the art of cutting stone had become more common. They are equally tall, and often nearly as slender, the size of the tower being remarkably small in proportion to the height. A few of them are probably of the fourteenth century, as at Drogheda, but the greater part are of the fifteenth. On the other hand the round towers are rarely later than the thirteenth, though some have had the upper story added or rebuilt in the fifteenth.
We come now to the Castles and Towers, which were the only dwelling-houses of the nobility and gentry of Ireland until the sixteenth or seventeenth century. Before that time it was not safe to live in a house that was not strongly fortified. The larger castles, such as Maynooth and Trim, on the borders of the English pale, were more properly military fortresses than domestic habitations; still they were the chief residences of great families. Maynooth, for instance, was the seat of the family of Fitzgerald, afterwards the Earls of Kildare, and originally built, or rather commenced, in 1176, by Maurice Fitzgerald, who had obtained a grant of the manor from Strongbow in that year; it was afterwards enlarged at various times, and was always a large and important castle. The additions
