The name of this fort is pronounced ‘Dun Eanees’ in Irish; but the tradition of the name has been almost lost on the island, where it is usually called the Great Dun. It is built on the brow of an overhanging precipice, the loftiest in the three islands, being 302 feet above the surges at its caverned base. These great precipices are composed of four enormous strata of limestone, each about seventy feet thick, and piled one above the other like the stones of some fabulous cyclopean building, one of the upper strata projecting fearfully over the black abyss beneath it. It is necessary to retire to some of the lower cliffs on either side in order to see this great precipice in all its terrific grandeur; and but few heads are steady enough to venture on a peep down the yawning gulf itself. The walls of Dun Ængus are built in a horse-shoe form on the summit of the cliff, at which they terminated on either side.6
There are three enclosures or semicircles, one outside the other, the innermost wall being by much the thickest; and outside the second wall is a chevaux-de-frise, composed of erect slender stones, securely fastened in the rock, and so close to each other that it is impossible to make one's way through them without much time and caution. These must have presented a formidable obstacle to a foe when the walls within were well manned by desperate defenders. None of the Aran forts seem to have suffered so much from dilapidation as Dun Ængus; and it is difficult even now, in many parts, to ascertain its dimensions. The innermost enclosure or keep measures 150 feet from north to south, and 140 feet along the edge of the cliff from east to west. The wall which enclosed this space was, as in the other duns, composed of three distinct coatings, the aggregate thickness of which, as far as can be ascertained in their present ruinous state, was 12 feet 9 inches. The doorway which led into this keep measures only about five feet in height, and rather less than 3 feet 6 inches in width.
This was our culminating point of interest — the chief end and object of our pilgrimage. To have seen this would have amply repaid any of the party for the whole fatigue and trouble of the expedition. This was the Dun Ængus, whose name is always associated with that of Aran, which it has immortalized in the mind of the archaeologist more than all the other remains of antiquity with which the island abounds. This was the Acropolis of Aran, — the Palace-fortress of the days of Queen Maeve, — the venerable ruin which Dr. Petrie, in his evidence before a Government Commission in 1843, described as ‘the most magnificent barbaric monument now extant in Europe.’ We can here only describe its dimensions, its remote antiquity, its site on the beetling brow of the precipice, its walls, now reduced to little more than crumbling piles of loose stones; but the indescribable feelings of sadness, and awe, and enthusiasm, which the place itself inspired, cannot be conveyed to the reader by any words of ours.
The accompanying illustration affords some idea of the appearance of the fort upon the land-side, with the triple wall, the outer circumvallation, and the chevaux-de-frise. It is taken from a drawing made in 1847 by Mr. Cheyne for Mr. Wilde, who had it engraved for Mr. Babington's paper on the Firbolg Forts on the South Isles of Aran, published in the Archaeologia Cambrensis for January, 1858.