Anomalous stone group, Addergoole More, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Stone Monuments

Anomalous stone group, Addergoole More, Co. Galway

On a north-facing slope in the grassland of Addergoole More, there is almost nothing left to see, and that absence is precisely what makes this place worth knowing about.

The third edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, published in 1932, marked the spot as a dolmen and represented it as a small oval enclosure, oriented roughly northwest to southeast and measuring around ten metres by five. Sometime between that cartographic record and the present, the monument was levelled during land reclamation, leaving the landscape with no visible surface trace of whatever once stood there.

The designation "anomalous stone group" reflects a genuine archaeological uncertainty. Scholars Ruaidhri de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin, writing in 1972, noted two prostrate slabs lying at the road fence, one measuring three metres and the other two and a half metres at their longest dimensions, and suggested these may have formed part of the monument before its destruction. A dolmen, in its typical form, is a megalithic tomb consisting of large upright stones capped by a flat horizontal slab, generally dating to the Neolithic period. Whether that is what stood here, or something else entirely, can no longer be determined from what survives on the ground. The oval enclosure shape recorded on the map adds a further layer of ambiguity, since that configuration does not fit neatly into the standard dolmen typology, hence the cautious classification.

What remains are two large fallen slabs at a field boundary, which most people would pass without a second glance. They carry no plaque, no interpretive marker, and no obvious sign that they were once, possibly, part of a prehistoric structure that was old when the surrounding landscape was first being farmed in any systematic way.

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