Cloghalegaun, Streamstown, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Stone Monuments

Cloghalegaun, Streamstown, Co. Galway

On a hilltop in Connemara, overlooking the quiet inlet of Streamstown Bay, a small group of standing stones resists easy classification.

Two schist uprights, set 1.75 metres apart along a northeast to southwest alignment, form the core of the arrangement: the northern stone is triangular in plan and stands 1.1 metres high, while the southern is rectangular and reaches 2.1 metres. A further 9 metres to the southeast, a thin irregular monolith of just 0.8 metres stands apart from the pair, with a fourth, smaller stone lying flat beside it. It is the kind of site that invites questions without quite answering them.

Scholars have wrestled with how to categorise Cloghalegaun. Gibbons and Higgins, writing in 1988, floated the possibility of a stone circle, though the arrangement also bears comparison with what archaeologists call four-poster monuments, a type of prehistoric structure typically comprising four standing stones set at the corners of a rough rectangle, most commonly associated with Scotland and northern Britain. The site had already attracted notice considerably earlier; Kinahan recorded it in 1872, and Ormsby followed in 1914, suggesting a long thread of curiosity about these stones even before formal archaeological survey. Ó Nualláin also referenced the site in 1988, placing it within a broader study of Irish standing stone groupings. Whether the original arrangement was once more extensive, or whether these few stones are essentially what was always there, remains unresolved.

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