Ireland/Irish > Black's guide to Dublin and the Wicklow mountains. With plan of Dublin

TO LARAGH AND WICKLOW.
53
western doorway, which is blocked up with rubble work, has
a square top. About half a mile from Golden Ball is an
enormous cromlech known as the Giant’s Grave. It is a huge
mass of granite about twenty-three feet in length, seventeen
in breadth, and six in thickness, supported upon a number of
stones varying from three to seven feet in height. To our left
are the mines of Shankhill, and a little further off, the castle
in which James II. is said to have passed the first night after
his defeat at the Boyne. The walls are still perfect, and it is
used as a shepherd’s house. The name of it is Puck’s Castle.
Springfield, the property of Mr. Thomson, appears on our
right, and then by
THE SCALP, we pass from the county of Dublin into that
of Wicklow. The Scalp, although void of grandeur, exhibits
sufficient beauty to be admired. It is “ a deep defile,
formed by the operations of nature in the bosom of a rock
or mountain composed of granite. The sides are acchvi-
ties, but not so near the perpendicular as to prove inac¬
cessible, and the whole surface of the ascent on both sides is
covered with prodigious and disjointed masses of stone, which
shoulder each other in tumultuous confusion, and threaten to
fall upon and crush the passenger at each adventurous foot¬
step. When the traveller looks back and views this tremen¬
dous chasm in dreary perspective, he is almost induced to
believe that the base of the mountain has, at some remote
period, given way throughout the extent of the ravine he has
passed, and the incumbent mass fallen into the hollow earth,
thus leaving a frightful channel, not to be accounted for on a
consideration of the ordinary works of nature.” A less poetis
though not less correct description is given by Seward in his
Hibernian Gazetteer, 1789, where, under the head of Scalp,
we find the following account :■—“ A curious chasm, where is
a road cut through a rock, on the top of a very high mountain,
about six miles from Dublin. This place consists of heaps of
stones of enormous sizes, piled curiously on each other, and
forming one of the most striking natural objects in the king¬
dom. The sides of the chasm are not perpendicular, but slope
from the top considerably.” The Scalp has lost some of its
picturesque effect since the abandonment of the old road to
Enniskerry, which ran at the bottom of the chasm.
ENNISKERKY is our halting place, and here we find a