Standing stone, Ballytoohy More, Co. Mayo

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Ballytoohy More, Co. Mayo

On Clare Island, off the Mayo coast, a squat block of purplish conglomerate-like rock sits just inside a roadside wall on the Lighthouse Road, overlooking the small valley that runs down to the shore at Portlea, known locally as Portle.

It is not a dramatic monument by any measure: roughly a metre long, 70 centimetres wide, and rising to about 1.35 metres at its tallest north-western edge. Its surface, including a roughly flat top, is heavily colonised by lichen, giving the whole stone a speckled, weathered appearance that makes it easy to miss. Two other shapeless blocks of similar rock lie on the verge a short distance to the south-east, but these were never deliberately placed; the standing stone proper is the one set upright, its long axis oriented roughly north-north-east to south-south-west.

The stone does not appear to be deeply embedded in the ground, and small outcrops of bedrock are visible in the field surface immediately around it, which raises quiet questions about how securely it was ever anchored, and whether what survives is the full original height. The surrounding pasture retains clear traces of old cultivation ridges, the corrugated remains of former lazy-bed agriculture that once shaped much of this island landscape. Despite all this, the stone's precise location has caused persistent confusion: Westropp, writing in 1911, gave a clear account of where it stood, yet the monument was repeatedly plotted incorrectly on successive Ordnance Survey maps, a reminder that even well-documented sites can slip between the cracks of the cartographic record.

The stone stands immediately inside the wall on the western side of the Lighthouse Road, about 75 metres north of the townland's southern boundary, and sits on ground that is up to a metre above the road level itself. Visitors walking the Lighthouse Road should look for it set back just behind the wall rather than in open ground, easily overlooked among the uneven field surface unless you are specifically looking for that low, broad, purple-tinged block with its lichen-crusted top.

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