Standing stone, Bearanach Thoir, Co. Mayo

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Bearanach Thoir, Co. Mayo

In a field in Bearanach Thoir, County Mayo, a prehistoric standing stone has acquired an unintended afterlife as livestock furniture.

The shallow wet depression that now encircles its base is not ancient ritual, nor some quirk of the local geology; it is simply the result of generations of cattle and sheep using the stone as a scratching post, gradually wearing away the ground around it until the slab now sits on a modest pedestal of sod, ringed by a waterlogged groove of its own making. There is something quietly comic about this, and something quietly poignant too. Whatever purpose the stone originally served, it has spent a very long time being useful to animals.

The stone itself is an upright slab measuring 1.05 metres in height, 0.57 metres in width, and tapering in thickness from 0.25 metres at the base to 0.16 metres at the top, so that it grows slightly slimmer as it rises. Its long axis runs on a roughly north to south alignment, a orientation common to many Irish standing stones, though whether that alignment carried astronomical, territorial, or ceremonial significance in this case is not recorded. Standing stones of this type are among the most enigmatic monuments in the Irish landscape; raised at various points during the Bronze Age or earlier, they have resisted confident interpretation for generations. What is known is that this one does not stand alone. A second standing stone sits approximately 300 metres to the north, hinting that the two may have been part of a broader arrangement, a pairing or a route marker, though the relationship between them remains unresolved.

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Pete F
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