Standing stone, Ballinvoher, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Stone Monuments
In the undulating grassland of Ballinvoher, a standing stone has quietly ceased to exist, at least above the surface.
No visible trace of it remains, and yet it holds a place in the archaeological record, a monument defined largely by its absence and by the paperwork that once confirmed it was there.
The stone was recorded on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, where it was named 'Cloghbrack', a name that in Irish broadly suggests a speckled or mottled stone. It stood roughly 325 metres south of a nearby stone pair, two upright standing stones set in proximity to one another, a formation that appears elsewhere across the Irish landscape and whose precise prehistoric purpose remains a matter of some debate. By the time the third edition of the OS map was produced in 1920, the Cloghbrack stone had vanished from the record entirely, and the name had migrated northward to the stone pair instead. Whether the stone was removed, buried, or simply overlooked by the later surveyors is not known. What the maps together suggest is that sometime between the mid-nineteenth century and 1920, a prehistoric monument disappeared from the surface of a County Galway field without leaving any explanation behind.