Leacht cuimhne, Eoghanacht, Co. Galway

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Leacht cuimhne, Eoghanacht, Co. Galway

On a low bluff above the road between Eoghanacht and Creig na Chéirín on Inis Mór, a compact stone pier stands just over a metre and three-quarters tall, topped by a cross inscribed with the letters IHS, the traditional Christogram derived from the Greek name for Jesus.

It is not a boundary marker or a field monument in the usual sense; it is a leacht cuimhne, a commemorative memorial of a type found across the west of Ireland, typically erected at the spot where someone died or as a lasting mark of mourning in the landscape.

Two plaques set into the north-east face name the person remembered: Patk Folan, with a date of 1819. The structure itself is mortared and rectangular, measuring roughly 1.15 metres on each side at the base, modest in footprint but solid in construction. The Folan name is deeply rooted in the Aran Islands, and whoever commissioned this memorial went to some effort, given that cut stone and mortar were not trivial materials to obtain on an island dependent on the mainland for most supplies in the early nineteenth century. The reference to the monument in Tim Robinson's work of 1980 suggests it was a known feature of the local landscape well before it entered any formal record.

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