Inscribed stone, Balla, Co. Mayo

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Stone Monuments

Inscribed stone, Balla, Co. Mayo

In the graveyard at Balla village in County Mayo, a small sandstone slab sits in the uppermost course of a mortared wall, its carved face turned outward for anyone who looks closely enough to notice.

The carving is known locally as the 'evil eye', and the name is apt: the design resembles exactly that, a central circular indentation with a curved arc above and below it, each arc cut in two close-set parallel grooves, the whole thing measuring roughly 16 centimetres high and 22 centimetres across. It is not monumental in scale, but it is precise, deliberate, and entirely unexplained.

The slab itself is rectangular, measuring 41 centimetres high, 32 centimetres wide, and 14 centimetres thick. It is built into the eastern face of a wall that fronts a limestone altar, positioned at the wall's southern end. The altar and its surroundings form part of a graveyard complex, the kind of layered sacred site common across the west of Ireland, where pre-Christian and Christian uses of landscape tended to accumulate rather than replace one another. The carving was recorded by Rynne in 1998, who noted it carefully but was unable to find any comparable design elsewhere. That absence of parallel is itself significant; it means the stone cannot be neatly filed alongside known traditions of Irish stonework, whether early medieval, penitential, or folk in character. The eye motif appears in many cultures as a protective symbol, a ward against malevolent forces, but whether that meaning applies here, or whether the local name simply reflects what the carving looks like rather than what it once meant, remains an open question.

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