connection from very early times between the south coast of Spain and the north of Africa hardly admits of a doubt. The facility with which the Moors occupied it in the seventh century, and the permanence of their dominion for so many centuries, is in itself sufficient to prove that a people of the same race had been established there before them, and that they were not a foreign race holding the natives in subjection, but dwelling among their own kith and kin.
It seems in vain to look among the written annals, either of Spain or Ireland, for a rational account of these events. Both countries acknowledge to the fullest extent that the migration did take place; and the Spanish race of Heremon is one of the most illustrious of those of Ireland, and fills a large page in its history. So, too, the Spanish annalists fill volumes with the successful expeditions of their countrymen to the Green Island.[1] The mania, however, of the annalists of both countries for carrying everything back to the Flood, and the sons and daughters of Noah, so vitiates everything they say, that beyond the fact, which seems undoubted that such migration did occur no reliance can be placed on their accounts of these transactions.
One only paragraph that I know of seems to have escaped perversion. In his second chapter of his fourth book, D. O'Campo states:—"Certain natives of Spain called Siloros (the Siluri), a Biscayan tribe, joined with another, named Brigantes, migrated to Britain about 261 years before our era, and obtained possession of a territory there on which they settled."[2] This is so consonant with what we know of the settlement of the Silures on the banks of the Severn that there seems no good reason for doubting its correctness. It is more doubtful, however, whether any Spanish colonies reached Ireland at so early an age. Even allowing for the existence in the north-east of Ireland of the realm of Emania, the only kingdom in Ireland of which we have any authentic annals before the Christian era, there was plenty of room for the contemporary existence of the race of Heremon in the south and west. Tara did not then exist, and, in fact, according to the
