ingredient, although the author of a
work, published in London in 1596, entitled _Sundrie Newe and Artificial
Remedies against Famine_, does suggest the use of heath tops to make a
"pleasing and cheape drink for Poor Men, when Malt is extream Deare;"
much, we suppose, on the same principle that shamrocks and grass were
used as a substitute for potatoes in the famine year, when the starving
Irish had no money to buy Indian corn. But famine years were happily
rare in Ireland in the times of which we write; and it will be
remembered that on one such occasion the Irish king prayed to God that
he might die, rather than live to witness the misery he could not
relieve.

[Illustration: MOULD FOR CASTING BRONZE CELTS.]

It would appear that butter was also a plentiful product then as now.
Specimens of bog butter are still preserved, and may be found in the
collection of the Royal Irish Academy. The butter was thus entombed
either for safety, or to give it that peculiar flavour which makes it
resemble the old dry Stilton cheese, so much admired by the modern _bon
vivant_. A writer in the _Ulster Archaeological Journal_ mentions that he
found a quantity of red cows' hair mixed with this butter, when boring a
hole in it with a gouge. It would appear from this as if the butter had
been made in a cow-skin, a fashion still in use among the Arabs. A
visitor to the Museum (Mr. Wilmot Chetwode) asked to see the butter from
Abbeyleix. He remarked that some cows' heads had been discovered in that
neighbourhood, which belonged to the old Irish long-faced breed of
cattle; the skin and hair remained on one head, and that was red. An
analysis of the butter proved that it was probably made in the same way
as the celebrated Devonshire cream, from which the butter in that part
of England is generally prepared. The Arabs and Syrians make their
butter now in a similar manner. There is a curious account of Irish
butter in the _Irish Hudibras_, by William Moffat, London, 1755, from
which it appears that bog butter was then well known:--

"But let his faith be good or bad,
He in his house great plenty had
Of burnt oat bread, and butter found,
With garlick mixt, in boggy ground;
So strong, a dog, with help of wind,
By scenting out, with ease might find."

A lump of butter was found, twelve feet deep, in a bog at Gortgole,
county Antrim, rolled up in a coarse cloth. It still retains visibly the
marks of the finger and thumb