ABSTRACT
A castle is the defence of a man who is obliged to mistrust his neighbours. An Anglo-Saxon lord even an Anglo-Saxon king lived among his own people, with nothing more than a hedge or a ditch to separate him from those who were subordinate to him. On the monument to Charles Stuart Parnell in Dublin there is an inscription to the effect that no one may set bounds to the march of a nation. However Ireland and England may quarrel, they are necessary to one another: they were wedded when they first became islands, and they cannot be divorced. The flat top distinguishes them from the rounded hillock-tumuli wherein the magnates of the Bronze Age were buried; but otherwise there is little external difference between them, and there is some excuse for the early antiquaries who could not understand that all earth-works are not necessarily prehistoric.
