Bolougne-Sur-Mer | Page 7

easy to reconcile the apparent difference between the two accounts, if we assume that the wounded Monarch was carried in a dying state to join the fleet which lay at anchor in the fine bay which then formed the outer harbour of Boulogne, and that he had at least the consolation of dying on board his own ship.
Muir N'Icht, or Portus Ictius, then possessed the finest harbour in northern Gaul. From the days of Julius Caesar, Portus Ictius, or the harbour of Boulogne, was the port from which the Roman troops sailed to Britain, and the harbour to which they steered on their return. On top of Caligula's tower there was a lighthouse for the guidance of vessels at sea. The very fact that King Niall made use of this harbour when he raided Armorica in the twenty-seventh year of his reign, makes it likely that he sailed into the same harbour when first invading that country in the ninth year of his reign. The sons of the soldiers who took part in the second raid were still alive; and the memories of both expeditions were still fresh in the minds of the brave Irish Scots when St. Patrick wrote his "Confession."
The records of both expeditions were undoubtedly read at the annual Feast of Tara, when the Kings, nobles and learned were accustomed to meet annually and examine the National records (Keating, pp. 337--388).
The triumphant march of devastation made by the Irish Monarch in the ninth year of his reign, when he led his troops "from the walls of Antoninus to the shores of Kent"; the successful raid into Armorica which commenced with the capture of the Roman encampment at Haute Ville, Boulogne, and ended in the plundering of the surrounding country, must have been the burden of many a warlike song whenever the Irish minstrels chanted the glorious triumphs of King Niall's invincible troops. It is, therefore, but natural to suppose every man, woman, and child in Ireland had often heard the name of Bonaven, where the soldiers of King Niall stormed the encampment, and where the ever-conquering Monarch expired.
St. Patrick, who, according to the "Scholiast," the Fifth and Tripartite Lives, and Heating's "History" (p. 312), was captured in Armorica, and who, according to Hersart de la Villemarque and Dr. Lanigan, was taken captive at Boulogne, was well aware that every Irishman would know the town to which he was referring when he declared in his "Confession" that his father, Calphurnius, and consequently he himself, hailed from the suburban district of Bonaven Taberniae, or Bononia, where the Roman encampment stood.

HISTORY OF THE TOWN BONAVEN, OR BONONIA.
THE ancient records of Bononia, or Boulogne-sur-Mer, date back to about half a century before Christ--to the time when Julius Caesar, anticipating Napoleon the Great, stood on the north-eastern cliffs of that town gazing through the Channel mist on the dim outline of that Britain which he had resolved to subjugate.
At that period two headlands stretched out into the sea for a distance of three miles--one on the northeastern side of the town, near to what is now known as Fort la Cresche; and the other from Cape Alpreck, about three miles lower down on the south-western coast. These headlands, stretching out into the sea, so encircled a bay as to form it into an outward haven.
The inner harbour of Boulogne was approached by a narrow channel dividing the north-eastern from the south-western cliffs; and the waters of the bay, flowing through it and uniting with the River Liane in covering the present site of the lower town, rushed onwards as far as the valley of Tintelleries and the vale of St. Martin.
Facing the site of the present town there was an island called Elna, and on it was built the ancient town of Gessoriac, which was connected with the mainland by a bridge. Realising the future importance of the place both for naval and military purposes, Caesar commissioned Pedius, a native of Bononia, in Italy, to lay out a town on the declivity of the Grande Rue, leading to Haute Ville, as the upper town and the hill leading to it are called at the present day. (Bertrand's "History of Boulogne-sur-Mer," pp. 17, 18. "Walkernaer's Geography," vol. i., p. 454).
The walls of the present fortifications of Haute Ville, built in the thirteenth century, rest on the ancient foundations of the old Roman encampment. This fact was proved at the time when a tunnelling was made for the railway from Boulogne to Calais under Haute Ville ("Dictionnaire Historique et Archeologique du Pas de Calais," vol. i, p. 22). The circuit of the present fortifications, about 700 yards square, present to-day the appearance pf the old Roman encampment. "The camp of a Roman legion," writes Gibbon, "presented all the appearance of a fortified city. As