Standing stone - pair, Keerglen, Co. Mayo

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone – pair, Keerglen, Co. Mayo

Two upright boulders stand roughly two metres apart on a waterlogged hillside in County Mayo, and one of them appears to have been chosen, or shaped, to echo the mountain it faces.

The taller stone, positioned at the south-western end of the pair, is broadly trapezoidal, its profile rising to a low hump that mirrors the distinctive silhouette of Nephin Mountain visible on the southern horizon. Whether this resemblance was deliberate is impossible to say with certainty, but the alignment is difficult to ignore: the two stones are set on a north-east to south-west axis, and the taller one points, in its own quiet way, toward the peak it seems to imitate.

The site sits on the south-facing slope of an east-west ridge in upland blanket bog, close to the townland boundary between Keerglen and Ballykinlettragh, with the Keerglen River running at the base of the slope and smaller streams to either side. Standing stones of this kind, earthfast upright boulders fixed directly into the ground, are found across Ireland and generally date to the Bronze Age, though precise dating at any individual site is rarely straightforward. What makes this pair particularly easy to overlook is the bog itself. The smaller stone, which has a more rounded profile and measures at least thirty centimetres above ground, has sunk so deeply into the peat and is so thoroughly concealed by heather that it reads less as a monument than as an accident of the landscape. No other stones or boulders are visible nearby, which makes the deliberate pairing of these two all the more striking.

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