Standing stone, Ballynacourty, Co. Galway

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Ballynacourty, Co. Galway

Standing stones are common enough features in the Irish landscape, but the one at Ballynacourty in County Galway has a particular physical quirk that sets it apart from many of its neighbours.

On its south-western face, roughly sixty centimetres above the ground, the stone narrows noticeably, dropping from a base thickness of 0.58 metres down to just 0.35 metres, where a natural ledge has formed in the limestone. It is not a deliberate cut or carving but a geological accident, the kind of feature that catches the eye once you know to look for it.

The stone itself is a substantial limestone slab, 2.3 metres tall and 1.4 metres wide, rectangular in plan and oriented on a north-west to south-east axis. It sits in undulating pastureland, the sort of quiet agricultural ground that contains far more prehistoric material than its everyday appearance tends to suggest. Standing stones, erected during the Bronze Age in most cases, served purposes that remain genuinely uncertain; theories range from ritual and ceremonial functions to boundary markers or aids to astronomical observation, and none has been definitively settled. What is clear is that placing a slab of this size upright required considerable collective effort, and that whoever did so chose this particular spot deliberately. The stone was recorded by McCaffrey in 1952.

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