Monument, Ballyglass, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Monument, Ballyglass, Co. Mayo

In the pasture at Ballyglass, a sod-covered mound of earth and stone sits on a low, roughly circular rise, with ground falling away sharply to the west.

It is not obviously a grave, not quite a cairn, and not much to look at now, standing barely 0.8 metres at its highest point. But Ordnance Survey mapmakers in both 1838 and 1915 knew it well enough to mark it with a name: simply, "Monument". What they recorded was a late seventeenth-century commemorative structure, probably stone-built and possibly tiered, raised in memory of one Bartholomew French, who, by local tradition, died after falling from a horse.

The fuller story was partly recovered in the early twentieth century by Lord Oranmore and Browne, who visited the site and found a memorial stone lying on the grass nearby, its inscription already badly worn. He transcribed what he could make out, and the text is worth reading in full: it asks the reader to pray for the soul of Bartholomew French, deceased the sixteenth of September 1688, aged seventy-eight years, and calls on God to be merciful to his wife Megg French and his son Patrick French, who caused the monument to be made for them and their posterity, dated 1689. Even by the time Lord Oranmore and Browne visited, most of the structure had already been broken up and carted off to build field walls in the neighbourhood, a fate that was not unusual for dressed or worked stone in rural Ireland. Today the mound itself has been absorbed into a field wall running northeast to southwest, which overlies the southern edge of the base.

The memorial stone has fared no better. A rectangular slab, roughly 0.7 metres long and 0.55 metres wide, now leans against a sheep-gap in the wall about eight metres to the southwest of the mound. One face is rough, the other smooth but thick with lichen. The inscription, reportedly raised in false relief rather than cut into the stone, has entirely vanished from the surface; nothing can now be made out by eye. What Lord Oranmore and Browne transcribed in the 1915 to 1916 period remains the only surviving record of what it said.

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Pete F
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