Pillar Stone, Cill Mhuirbhigh, Co. Galway

Subrectangular in plan, undressed, and bearing no carvings or inscriptions, it rises from flat pastureland to the south-east of Fearann an Choirce in the townland of Cill Mhuirbhigh, where it has been quietly absorbed into a field boundary running roughly north to south. It is not fenced off or labelled. It simply stands there, doing double duty as an ancient monument and a section of wall.

Pillar stones of this kind are among the harder prehistoric and early medieval features to date with confidence. They were erected across Ireland for various purposes, some funerary, some territorial, some as waymarkers, and the absence of decoration here offers no obvious clue as to age or intention. What local tradition does suggest, recorded by O'Flanagan in 1927, is that the stone marks the grave of a great saint, a belief that would place it within the same devotional landscape as the early Christian sites that make Inis Mór unusually dense in ancient remains. T. J. Westropp noted the stone in 1895, and Tim Robinson mapped it in 1980, so it has attracted scholarly attention for well over a century without giving much away.