Henry O’Brien, a young Kerryman who died at twenty-seven, set out to solve the riddle of Ireland’s slender stone round towers. His answer — that they were raised by the Tuatha Dé Danann as temples of an Eastern, pre-Christian religion — sweeps through etymology, scripture, geology and Irish legend, and this edition adds a memoir of the author.
Its theories are rejected by archaeologists, who date the towers to the early Christian centuries, but it is a curious monument of Romantic antiquarianism. Download the free EPUB.