Station Monuments, Drumacoo, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Holy Sites & Wells
In a field in east Galway, roughly four hundred metres from the old monastic site at Drumacoo, two religious monuments were carefully recorded on the 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, placed about twenty metres apart.
Today, neither can be found. No earthwork, no stone, no depression in the grass marks where they stood. The northern of the two is catalogued, located, and entirely absent.
The term "station monument" refers to a fixed point used during the rounds of a traditional Irish religious practice known as "stations" or "pattern" observances, in which devotees would walk a prescribed circuit, pausing to pray at particular markers, often associated with a local saint or sacred site. The Drumacoo monuments would have belonged to this kind of devotional landscape, tied to the monastic enclosure nearby. By the time the antiquarian McCaffrey conducted his survey in 1952 and published his findings, the northern monument had already vanished without trace, leaving only the cartographic evidence from over a century earlier to confirm it had ever existed.