Holed stone, Lissard More, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Stone Monuments
In the townland of Lissard More in County Mayo, a roughly shaped stone lies buried.
It is not lost exactly, but it is no longer where it stood, and no one is quite sure what became of it after the land around it was reclaimed and reshaped. What makes it worth knowing about is what it once was: a holed stone, a type of prehistoric monument in which a deliberate perforation was worked through the rock, in this case a narrow oval opening measuring ten centimetres by five, and just seven and a half centimetres deep. On the opposite face sat a shallow circular hollow, around ten centimetres across, of the kind sometimes called a cup mark. Whether these features served a ritual purpose, a practical one, or something we no longer have the language for is a question that Irish archaeology has never fully resolved.
Office of Public Works topographical files from 1947 recorded the stone alongside two companion monuments: a megalithic structure sitting 6.7 metres to the south, and a standing stone a further 2.4 metres beyond that. The three formed a loose cluster in the landscape, the kind of grouping that suggests long and deliberate use of a particular spot across prehistoric generations. At some point after that survey, all three were removed from their original positions and buried during land reclamation work, the kind of agricultural improvement that reshaped enormous tracts of the Irish countryside through the mid to late twentieth century. The megalithic structure, the standing stone, and the holed stone now lie underground somewhere in the same townland, preserved perhaps, but inaccessible and effectively erased from the surface of the place they once marked.