Clochan, Eochaill, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Settlement Sites

Clochan, Eochaill, Co. Galway

On cleared level pasture in Eochaill, a collapsed cairn sits in quiet disarray, its stones tumbled but not entirely mute.

What was once a carefully constructed monument now reads as a rough circular mound, roughly 13.5 metres long and 13.3 metres wide, its original form legible only to those willing to look closely. At the south-east edge, external stone revetting, the courses of upright or angled stones used to hold a cairn's outer face in place, remains visible, hinting at the deliberate engineering that once gave this structure its shape.

The monument is recorded as part of a broader grouping known as Baile na mBocht, and within its rubble-filled interior the outline of a chamber can still be made out, measuring around 3.1 metres by 2.8 metres. A clochan, in Irish tradition, can refer to a beehive-shaped stone structure or, more loosely, to a stone monument of some antiquity, and this site belongs to that older, more ambiguous category of prehistoric cairned chambers whose original purpose, whether burial, territorial marking, or ritual, is rarely recoverable with certainty. The site was noted by Kinahan as early as 1869 and later recorded by Robinson in 1980, suggesting it has attracted intermittent attention from those with an eye for the quietly anomalous in the landscape of west Galway.

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Pete F
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