Clifford's Monument, Garrow, Co. Roscommon

It measures roughly 3.5 metres across at the base and barely reaches knee height. It was not always so modest. This is, or at least was, a formal commemorative monument marking the spot where Sir Conyers Clifford, Governor of Connacht, was killed during the Battle of the Curlews in 1599.

The monument was erected by Lord Lorton in the late eighteenth century, on what was understood to be the precise location of Clifford's death. It was originally built as a limestone octagon, a shaped and dressed structure rather than a simple cairn, and would have read clearly as a deliberate memorial on the hillside. By the 1830s, however, the antiquarian John O'Donovan noted that it had already been reduced to around one metre in height, a process of decay and disturbance that has continued since. Today it survives as little more than a rubble mound. The battle it commemorates was a significant one: an Irish force under Red Hugh O'Donnell ambushed an English column attempting to relieve the siege of Collooney, and Clifford's death in the engagement was a considerable blow to English authority in Connacht at the height of the Nine Years' War. The monument's history has also attracted a layer of confusion. One nineteenth-century account mistakenly identified it as a memorial to a Captain Alexander Weir, supposedly killed in a skirmish with Sarsfield's troops during the Williamite wars of 1690, an error that says something about how easily the memory attached to an unmarked stone can drift over time.

For those wanting a more legible commemoration of the 1599 battle, a sculpture representing a Gaelic chief has been installed in a car park in the nearby townland of Doon, erected by the National Roads Authority. The hillside monument itself, by contrast, rewards a closer look precisely because it has been so thoroughly reclaimed by the landscape, a formal limestone structure now indistinguishable from the ground it stands on.