Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 3.djvu/116

96 tain, by the ceremony of placing him on a certain stone, may deserve especial notice. This usage appears to have been retained so late as the sixteenth century. Spencer, in his View of the state of Ireland, says that "They use to place him that shalbe their captaine, upon a stone alwayes reserved for that purpose, and placed commonly upon a hill: in some of which I have seen formed and ingraven a foot, whichthey say was the measure of their first captaines foot, whereon hee standing, receives an oath to preserve all the auncient former customes of the countrey inviolable;—after which, descending from the stone, he turneth himself round, thrice forward and thrice backward." On the hill of Lech, or of "the Stone," near Monaghan, may still be seen the inauguration stone of the Mac-Mahons, under which the golden chair of the kings of Ireland is traditionally believed to have been deposited: the impression of a foot was effaced by the owner of the farm within the present century. The usages observed at the installation of chiefs are noticed at great length in "the Customs of Hy-Fiachrach," given in the valuable series of publications by the Irish Archæological Society; but this custom of the Mac-Mahon sept has not been noticed. Possibly the singular stone, marked with the print of a gigantic foot, traditionally attributed to Fingal, and still to be seen in the neighbourhood of Oban, in Argyllshire, may be the vestige of some similar inaugural custom.

We must refer our readers to the pages of Mr. Shirley's interesting work for the detailed account of the superiority assumed by the O'Neils over the Mac-Mahon sept, and the settlement of Monaghan by Sir William Fitzwilliam, in 1590, compiled from the valuable evidences which are preserved in the State Paper Office. The history of Farney, under the various measures devised during the reign of Elizabeth, for the amelioration of the distracted state of the country, the relation of the expedition of the earl of