Stepping stones, Derreighter, Co. Galway

They were not scattered by chance. They had been placed.

The stones are flat slabs of mica-schist, a layered metamorphic rock well suited to being split into manageable pieces, and their regular intervals suggest deliberate arrangement rather than geological accident. With at least 1.5 metres of undisturbed bog still lying beneath the level at which the cutters were working, and the stones appearing at around 2.3 metres down from the surface, the deposit had been sealed for a very considerable time. Bogs accumulate slowly, typically a metre or so per thousand years under Irish conditions, which gives some loose sense of how long these stones may have been buried, though no excavation has been carried out and no precise date has been established. The working interpretation, cautious and reasonable, is that they may be stepping stones, a way of crossing a wet or difficult patch of ground that was later swallowed by the expanding bog. What had once been a functional path across a hillside became, over centuries, an accidental archive.

The site at Derreighter is not marked or interpreted in any formal way, and the stones themselves remain in situ below ground rather than on display. Their interest lies less in what can be seen today than in what their presence suggests: that the boggy, marginal slopes of this Galway hillside were once crossed by someone with a reason to make the going easier, in a landscape that looked quite different from the one that exists now.