Megalithic structure, Lissard More, Co. Mayo

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Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic structure, Lissard More, Co. Mayo

Beneath the improved pasture of Lissard More in County Mayo, a small megalithic complex lies buried, its stones still present but no longer visible or accessible.

What once stood here was recorded in OPW topographical files from 1947: a flat capstone measuring 1.8 metres by 1.8 metres, raised roughly 45 centimetres above ground level on five or six smaller supporting stones, and set at the centre of a low earthen mound about nine metres in diameter. That combination of capstone, supporters, and encircling mound suggests a modest portal or dolmen-type structure, the kind of prehistoric funerary or ceremonial monument that appears across Ireland in various forms from the Neolithic period onward. What makes this particular site unusual is not its form but its company: a holed stone stood 6.7 metres to the north, and a standing stone rose 2.4 metres to the south. Holed stones, relatively rare in the Irish megalithic record, are upright stones bored through with a deliberate perforation, the purpose of which is still debated, though ritual and boundary functions have both been proposed.

The 1947 record captured the site at a moment when it was already, presumably, long past any active use. At some point after that survey, all three features, the capstone structure, the holed stone, and the standing stone, were removed from their original positions and buried during land reclamation work. Such clearances were common across rural Ireland throughout the twentieth century, as drainage schemes and agricultural improvement programmes reshaped land that had been left rough or marginal for centuries. The result, here as elsewhere, is a site that survives only in paper records and beneath the surface, its spatial relationships between the three monuments now impossible to read in the landscape.

There is nothing to see at Lissard More today. The stones are underground, their exact positions obscured, and the low mound that once framed the capstone has been levelled away. The site belongs to a category of places that exist more fully in archive than on the ground, known to have been there, confirmed by measurement and description, but effectively erased from the visible world.

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