Stone sculpture, Aughris, Co. Sligo

Co. Sligo |

Stone Monuments

Stone sculpture, Aughris, Co. Sligo

Beneath the townland of Aughris in County Sligo, a carved stone slab once sat inside a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage typically associated with early medieval settlements in Ireland, used for storage or refuge.

The carving it bore was no ordinary incised mark. In relief, it showed a human figure that appeared to be wearing a crown. There may also have been writing or symbols worked into the surface alongside it. A crowned figure rendered in stone, tucked into an underground structure in the west of Ireland, is the kind of find that raises more questions than it answers, and those questions now have no object to settle against.

At some point in the 1960s or 1970s, the slab was removed from the souterrain. The landowner recalled its existence and its removal, but the circumstances that followed placed it beyond easy recovery. After a death in the family, the stone was given away. Where it went, nobody has since been able to establish. It passed out of the archaeological record and into private hands, and its current location remains unknown. What survives is the account itself, a description detailed enough to suggest something genuinely unusual once existed here, but not enough to date it, attribute it, or interpret the figure with any confidence.

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