Leacht cuimhne, Cill Éinne, Co. Galway

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Leacht cuimhne, Cill Éinne, Co. Galway

On the island of Inis Mór, the largest of the Aran Islands, there stands a small mortared pier that is easy to walk past without a second glance.

It is roughly square in plan, just over a metre wide on each side and rising to about 1.85 metres, with faint traces of render still clinging to its surface and a cross set on top. A leacht cuimhne, meaning a memorial monument or commemorative cairn in Irish, is a form of marker with deep roots in Irish religious and funerary tradition, typically a simple upright structure erected at a place of significance or remembrance. This particular example, in the townland of Cill Éinne, is more precisely dated than many of its kind.

Set into the north-east face of the structure are two plaques, both commemorating a man named John Wiggin and both dated 1837. Beyond that name and that year, the stone does not elaborate. Tim Robinson, whose meticulous mapping and writing on the Aran Islands in the late twentieth century first brought this monument to wider notice, recorded its presence in 1980. Who John Wiggin was, what brought him to Inis Mór, and why two plaques rather than one were considered necessary, the monument itself declines to say. The doubling is quietly puzzling, suggesting perhaps a repair or replacement at some point, or simply a commemorative gesture made twice over by people who wanted to be certain he would not be forgotten.

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