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THE IRISH PENNY JOURNAL.

    NUMBER 4.      SATURDAY, JULY 25, 1840.      VOLUME 1.

[Illustration: CAISLEAN-NA-CIRCE, OR THE HEN'S CASTLE.]


Our prefixed illustration gives a near view of one of the most
interesting ruins now remaining in the romantic region of Connemara, or
the Irish Highlands, and which is no less remarkable for its great
antiquity than for the singularly wild and picturesque character of its
situation, and that of its surrounding scenery. It is the feature that
gives poetic interest to the most beautiful portion of Lough Corrib--its
upper extremity--where a portion of the lake, about three miles in
length, is apparently surrounded and shut in by the rocky and precipitous
mountains of Connemara and the Joyce country, which it reflects upon its
surface, without any object to break their shadows, or excite a feeling
of human interest, but the one little lonely Island-Castle of the Hen.
That an object thus situated--having no accompaniments around but those
in keeping with it--should, in the fanciful traditions of an imaginative
people, be deemed to have had a supernatural origin, is only what might
have been naturally expected; and such, indeed, is the popular belief. If
we inquire of the peasantry its origin, or the origin of its name, the
ready answer is given, that it was built by enchantment in one night by a
cock and a hen grouse, who had been an Irish prince and princess!

There is, indeed, among some of the people of the