Anomalous stone group, Barnasrahy, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Stone Monuments
At Barnasrahy in County Sligo, there is a grouping of stones that resists easy classification.
It has been recorded and given a monument number, yet it carries the designation "anomalous", which in archaeological terms signals something genuinely difficult to place. The stones do not fit the recognised categories of standing stones, stone circles, megalithic tombs, or field boundaries neatly enough to be filed under any of them. That ambiguity is, in itself, worth noting. Sligo is a county already crowded with prehistoric stonework, from the passage tombs of the Knocknarea ridge to the court cairns of the Bricklieve Mountains, and yet something at Barnasrahy still manages to sit outside the established typologies.
Beyond the fact of its existence and its classification as anomalous, the available record for this particular site is thin. No excavation reports, no detailed measurements, no historical accounts of the stones have surfaced in publicly accessible form. What can be said is that the placename Barnasrahy likely derives from the Irish, and that the area sits within a broader landscape of County Sligo that has been inhabited, farmed, and marked with stone since the Neolithic period. The word "anomalous" in an archaeological record is rarely applied carelessly; it tends to indicate that someone looked carefully and found the arrangement unusual enough to flag without being able to say precisely why.