Site of Liagan of Kilconnell, Glebe, Co. Galway

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Stone Monuments

Site of Liagan of Kilconnell, Glebe, Co. Galway

There is a site in the townland of Glebe, near Kilconnell in County Galway, where nothing at all survives.

No stone, no outline, no earthwork. What was once recorded as standing there has vanished so completely that even the ground gives no indication anything was ever present. This kind of total erasure is not unusual in the Irish countryside, but the object that disappeared here is worth pausing over: a liagan, a term used in early Irish for a standing stone, often one with ceremonial, commemorative, or boundary significance.

The stone is referred to in the Ordnance Survey Letters, a remarkable set of correspondence compiled in the 1830s when surveyors travelled the country gathering local knowledge ahead of the first large-scale mapping of Ireland. The letters were later published by Michael O'Flanagan in 1927, and his edition records a church in the area that stood near a standing stone known as the Liagan of Kilconnell, with the note that the stone was, at the time of writing, already destroyed. Whether it was removed for building material, broken up, or simply lost to agricultural clearance is not recorded. The church itself has fared no better. There is no visible surface trace of either structure on the ground today. The stone may have functioned as a boundary marker associated with the church, which would place it within a long tradition of using upright stones to define ecclesiastical enclosures or parish territories in early medieval Ireland.

What remains is essentially a place-name and a fragment of description, preserved only because someone thought to write it down before the last traces were gone.

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