Anomalous stone group, Eochaill, Co. Galway

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Stone Monuments

Anomalous stone group, Eochaill, Co. Galway

In a townland with the evocative Irish name Baile na mBocht, meaning roughly "the settlement of the poor", a long rectangular structure of upright slabs lies in a state of considerable ruin.

It is not immediately obvious what it once was, and that uncertainty is part of what makes it interesting. Classified as an anomalous stone group, it resists easy categorisation, sitting somewhere between the known types of prehistoric and early historic field monuments without fitting neatly into any of them.

The structure is the westernmost of four related monuments in the area, and in 1869 the geologist George Henry Kinahan recorded the group as the "Ruins of two Fosleac and two Ointigh", terms that suggest distinct structural types, though their precise meanings in this context remain unclear. What survives today measures 8.8 metres in length, just over a metre wide, and stands only about 0.6 metres high. It is aligned roughly north to south and retains a side-chamber on its western face, though only two slabs of that chamber remain. All of the endstones are gone, which makes it impossible to read the full original form of the structure with any confidence. The measurements and surviving fabric were recorded by Tim Robinson in 1980, and the site forms part of a wider cluster that evidently once constituted something more coherent, even if that coherence is now largely lost to time and weathering.

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