Megalithic structure, Finned, Co. Sligo

Co. Sligo |

Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic structure, Finned, Co. Sligo

In a pasture field near Finned in County Sligo, a loose arc of ancient stones sits on a gentle east-facing slope, and nobody is quite sure what it is.

That uncertainty is itself what makes the site worth knowing about. Most megalithic remains, however fragmentary, can be slotted into a recognised category: a portal tomb, a stone circle, a cairn. This one resists all such tidiness.

What survives is a roughly semi-circular arrangement of seven upright stones, spanning about 4.8 metres in diameter, with a further seven stones lying scattered across the ground nearby, almost certainly fallen uprights from the same structure. If those displaced stones once stood in place, the original setting would have formed something closer to a complete ring or enclosure. The northern half of the structure has been removed entirely, whether by farming, stone robbing, or some earlier disturbance, and with it any chance of identifying an entrance or determining how the monument was originally oriented. What makes the site stranger still is the material from which it was built. Every stone used in its construction is of conglomerate, a sedimentary rock formed from compressed gravel and pebble fragments, while the limestone that dominates the surrounding landscape was apparently passed over entirely. Whoever built this went out of their way to source a different stone, though why remains unknown. Without a clearer sense of the structure's original form, it is not possible to say with confidence whether this was a ceremonial enclosure, the kerb of a burial monument, or something else altogether. It sits in its field, half gone, made of the wrong stone, pointing nowhere in particular.

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Pete F
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