Standing stone, Liagán, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Liagán, Co. Galway

There is nothing left to see at Liagán.

What once stood as a substantial prehistoric standing stone in the pastureland east of the old road between Moycullen and Oughterard was broken up sometime in the 1930s, leaving only its name and a handful of recorded descriptions behind. That absence is itself a quiet kind of archaeology.

The stone was known traditionally as Clough-more Legaun, and it had attracted attention for centuries before its destruction. The scholar Roderic O'Flaherty noted it as early as 1684, a record later cited by Hardiman in 1846. By the nineteenth century, the antiquarian William Wilde, better known today as the father of Oscar Wilde but himself a serious recorder of Irish monuments, gave a careful physical account of it. He described a large limestone flag, already fallen, having been thrown down by the great storm of 1839, and measured it at roughly 3.8 metres long, 2.3 metres wide, and 0.33 metres thick. Those are substantial dimensions for a standing stone, which in the Irish prehistoric tradition typically refers to a single upright block of undressed stone, often erected during the Bronze Age, though the precise purposes of such monuments remain a matter of debate. Wilde's description suggests a monument of real presence, lying flat in the Connacht pasture like a door fallen from its frame.

The storm of 1839, sometimes called the Night of the Big Wind, was one of the most destructive weather events in Irish recorded history, and the fact that it could topple a stone of this scale gives some sense of both the force of that night and the precarious balance on which such monuments sometimes stood. That it survived another century after falling, only to be broken up in the 1930s, adds a particular edge to its loss.

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