Inscribed stone, Corroy, Co. Mayo

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Stone Monuments

Inscribed stone, Corroy, Co. Mayo

In the enclosure of a rath in Corroy, County Mayo, there is, or perhaps was, a large flat stone bearing a carefully incised circle.

The problem is that nobody has been able to find it since 1953. A rath, to be clear, is a circular earthen ringfort, typically of early medieval date, built as an enclosed farmstead. It is within one such enclosure that this slab was discovered lying flat at its centre, which raises questions that the surviving documentation cannot fully answer.

The stone was recorded by a man named R. B. Aldridge, who came across it in 1953 and did what any conscientious observer might do: he noted its dimensions, wrote brief descriptive notes, and produced a sketch. The slab measured roughly a metre in length and just under a metre wide, with a thickness of about twenty centimetres. On one face, a circle roughly sixty-five centimetres in diameter had been incised into the stone. Aldridge's notes and sketch remained unpublished, preserved in topographical files. When the rath was inspected again in 1996, the stone was simply gone. Whether it was removed, buried beneath accumulated earth, or had been moved before Aldridge himself arrived is unknown. What remains is a sketch of something that may no longer exist in any accessible form, a record of an object that slipped out of sight between one generation of observers and the next.

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Pete F
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