Standing stone - pair, Corrower, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Stone Monuments
Two boulders standing roughly a metre and a half apart in the pastureland of Corrower have been arranged, at some point in the prehistoric past, along a precise north-south axis.
That deliberateness is what sets them apart from the landscape around them, which is otherwise hilly farmland on a rise, with higher ground pressing in from the north and the long outline of Nephin Mountain just visible on the far horizon to the west-southwest. The stones are not especially tall, but they are carefully differentiated: the southern stone is the larger of the pair, reaching 1.6 metres in height with a pronounced triangular profile that tapers from a base thickness of 0.75 metres to 0.35 metres at the top. The northern stone is shorter and slightly more rounded in outline, and leans a little to the east, though it too narrows towards its apex in a rough triangle.
Paired standing stones of this kind are found at scattered locations across Ireland, and while their precise purpose remains a matter of debate among archaeologists, alignment, whether astronomical, territorial, or ceremonial, is generally assumed to have played some role. What makes the Corrower site particularly interesting is the density of prehistoric remains in its immediate vicinity. An ogham stone, one of those upright slabs incised with the early Irish script that uses a series of notches and lines along a central stem to represent letters, lies about 200 metres to the northwest. A low earthen mound sits roughly 150 metres in the same direction, and a rath, the circular earthwork enclosure that was a common form of enclosed farmstead during the early medieval period, occupies a position about 150 metres to the southwest. Whether these features were ever functionally connected is unknown, but their clustering in the same patch of Mayo hillside suggests this ground held significance across a considerable span of time.