Stone row, Tawnywaddyduff, Co. Mayo

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Stone Monuments

Stone row, Tawnywaddyduff, Co. Mayo

Four stones arranged in a rough north-south line in a Mayo bog might not sound like much, but the Tawnywaddyduff stone row is the kind of monument that rewards careful attention precisely because it is so easy to miss.

Two of the stones barely protrude above the moss and pine needle detritus of a forestry plantation floor, deeply embedded in the underlying peat, and the tallest among them reaches only a metre in height. Together they span just under six metres, graded in height from north to south, with the most substantial stone at the southern end: a pointed upright with an angular, lozenge-shaped cross-section that stands in quiet contrast to its lower neighbours, two of which have a roughly D-shaped profile. The northernmost stone is so engulfed in peat that its long axis appears to run perpendicular to the others, though it may still belong to the same alignment.

Only half of this row was known to scholarship until relatively recently. In 1964, the archaeologists Ruaidhrí de Valéra and Seán Ó Nualláin recorded two standing stones protruding from the bog surface, noting their north-south alignment and the small hollow surrounding their bases. They observed that the stones sat at a noticeably higher level than the structural uprights of a court tomb located roughly fifteen metres to the north-east, a court tomb being a type of Neolithic megalithic monument with a roofless forecourt fronting a segmented burial chamber, and concluded the two features were unlikely to be directly connected. A depression in the bog immediately to the south, they suggested, pointed to past quarrying, perhaps for gravel. It was not until November 2012 that two further stones were identified just south of the pair de Valéra and Ó Nualláin had described, extending the row and suggesting a more deliberate prehistoric arrangement than the earlier record alone could indicate.

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