Standing stone, Bunacrower, Co. Mayo

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Bunacrower, Co. Mayo

A single upright stone in a rough, undulating pasture in County Mayo is not, on the face of it, a remarkable thing.

What makes this one worth pausing over is the precision with which it was placed and the care that went into keeping it there. Standing 2.4 metres tall but only 0.4 metres wide and 0.2 metres thick, it is a remarkably slender slab, oriented along an east-west axis, with its long, thin profile cutting against the roll of the land around it.

The stone's roughly rectangular form is typical of the prehistoric standing stones scattered across the west of Ireland, erected most likely during the Bronze Age, though the precise date and purpose of any individual example is rarely certain. What is less commonly visible, and worth noting here, is the evidence of how it was originally installed: packing stones, the smaller wedge-like rocks used to stabilise a standing stone in its socket, still protrude at the base. These are usually buried or dispersed over time, and their survival here offers a small, concrete glimpse of the practical work involved in raising such a monument. A survey of the Ballinrobe district compiled by D. Lavelle in 1994 records a second standing stone roughly 100 metres to the south, suggesting this part of Bunacrower may once have formed part of a more deliberate arrangement in the landscape, though what that arrangement signified is now lost.

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Pete F
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