Monument, Glassillaun, Co. Galway

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Monument, Glassillaun, Co. Galway

Along the road between Tully and Salrock in Connemara, on the southern verge, there is a monument that no longer exists to the eye.

It appears on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, that meticulous mid-nineteenth-century survey which recorded the Irish landscape in extraordinary detail, yet nothing visible survives on the ground today. No stone, no mound, no depression. Whatever was once there has been absorbed back into the land, leaving only a cartographic ghost and a reference number in an archaeological inventory.

What little is known places it in suggestive company. It sits roughly 100 metres east of a chapel site, and about 850 metres east of a pair of monuments described as similar in character. That clustering, a chapel alongside older structures, is a pattern seen elsewhere across the west of Ireland, where early Christian sites were frequently established in proximity to pre-existing ceremonial or funerary monuments. Whether this particular monument predated the chapel, or was contemporary with it, is impossible to say now. Paul Gosling's Archaeological Inventory of County Galway, published in 1993, preserves the reference without resolving it, which is itself a kind of honesty about how much has simply vanished.

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Pete F
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