the shore curves in clay cliffs to the north-east, leaving, between it
and the iron headland beyond, a shallow exposed bay wherein many a proud
ship has met her doom. Nestling at the north side of the headland and
sheltered by the latter from Atlantic storms stands one of the most
remarkable groups of ancient ecclesiastical remains in Ireland--all that
has survived of St. Declan's holy city of Ardmore. This embraces a
beautiful and perfect round tower, a singularly interesting ruined church
commonly called the cathedral, the ruins of a second church beside a holy
well, a primitive oratory, a couple of ogham inscribed pillar stones,
&c., &c.

No Irish saint perhaps has so strong a local hold as Declan or has left
so abiding a popular memory. Nevertheless his period is one of the great
disputed questions of early Irish history. According to the express
testimony of his Life, corroborated by testimony of the Lives of SS.
Ailbhe and Ciaran, he preceded St. Patrick in the Irish mission and was a
co-temporary of the national apostle. Objection, exception or opposition
to the theory of Declan's early period is based less on any inherent
improbability in the theory itself than on contradictions and
inconsistencies in the Life. Beyond any doubt the Life does actually
contradict itself; it makes Declan a cotemporary of Patrick in the fifth
century and a cotemporary likewise of St. David a century later. In any
attempted solution of the difficulty involved it may be helpful to
remember a special motive likely to animate a tribal histrographer,
scil.:--the family relationship, if we may so call it, of the two saints;
David was bishop of the Deisi colony in Wales as Declan was bishop of
their kinsmen of southern Ireland. It was very probably part of the
writer's purpose to call attention to the links of kindred which bound
the separated Deisi; witness his allusion later to the alleged visit of
Declan to his kinsmen of Bregia. Possibly there were several Declans, as