The Rock of Cashel is a striking object at a considerable distance - on a nearer view it exhibits one of y<sup>e</sup> largest & most beautiful piece[s] of Gothic ruins I ever saw. This was once the Cathedral. Here is a needle tower. Besides y<sup>e</sup> ruins of y<sup>e</sup> Cathedral there are y<sup>e</sup> remains of three abbeys near y<sup>e</sup> town. The Archbp’s house is handsome & lately built but hardly ever visited by its present owner. The new church is in a good stile of building.
It is not a little remarkable that this place, y<sup>e</sup> see of an Archbp. should at present be without a [Protestant] church. A new one indeed is building but, for want of money, not likely to be soon finished. As this place swarms with Papists this defect becomes more notorious and more severely felt by those few Protestants that reside here. The city is tolerably neat for an Irish town. It may occasion some suspicion, that all y<sup>e</sup> descendants of O. Cromwell’s soldiers, who were settled here after y<sup>e</sup> wars, should have become R. Catholicks, a persuasion as opposite to that of a rigid Puritan as can well be imagined. But it must be remarked that they were most of them too old to live to bring up their children which, in probability, were got from a R. Catholick mother. [Unpaginated] |
