Monument, Inishshark, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Holy Sites & Wells

Monument, Inishshark, Co. Galway

On the south-eastern end of Inishshark, a small island off the Connemara coast, there is a monument that no longer exists in any visible form, and whose precise location has never been confirmed.

It appears on the 1838 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, marked by name in Roman script, which tells you roughly where it was but nothing about what it looked like. When someone went to look for it in August 1984, they found no surface trace at all.

The monument was probably associated with St Leo, a figure connected to the early Christian heritage of the island. What form it originally took is uncertain. It may have been a leacht, a low cairn-like structure built from stones and typically associated with early Christian devotion and prayer, examples of which survive elsewhere on Inishshark. Alternatively, it could have been a wayside cairn, a simple accumulation of stones marking a path or a place of local significance. The island was permanently evacuated in 1960, when its last remaining inhabitants were resettled on the mainland, and the slow disappearance of such small monuments, untended and unrecorded in detail, is a pattern repeated across the abandoned islands of the west coast. Whatever St Leo's monument once was, it had left no mark on the ground by the time anyone thought to record it formally.

Rated 0 out of 5

Visitor Notes

Review type for post source and places source type not found
Added by
Picture of Pete F
Pete F
IrishHistory.com is passionate about helping people discover and connect with the rich stories of their local communities.
Please use the form below to submit any photos you may have of Monument, Inishshark, Co. Galway. We're happy to take any suggested edits you may have too. Please be advised it will take us some time to get to these submissions. Thank you.
Name
Email
Message
Upload images/documents
Maximum file size: 100 MB
If you'd like to add an image or a PDF please do it here.

Advertisement