Stone circle, Banagher, Co. Cavan
Co. Cavan |
Stone Monuments
On a patch of uneven elevated pasture in County Cavan, seven standing stones rise at intervals from a low grassy bank, tracing the western arc of what was once a stone circle roughly sixteen metres in diameter.
The eastern half is gone, but what remains is enough to read the original shape, and the scale of what once stood here begins to make sense when you consider that this circle was not built in isolation.
The circle forms part of a wider complex of burial and ritual sites compressed into an area of about 150 metres by 130 metres, a concentration that suggests this landscape held sustained ceremonial significance over a long period of prehistoric use. Stone circles of this kind typically date to the Bronze Age, and were often associated with funerary practices, communal gathering, or the marking of astronomical alignments, though the precise purpose of any individual example is rarely certain. This one sits on elevated ground with Slieve Glah rising to the north-west, a relationship between monument and horizon that is unlikely to be accidental. The grassy bank from which the surviving stones emerge, around 3.5 metres wide and half a metre high, represents the degraded remains of a more substantial original structure. At least four further monuments have been identified in the immediate vicinity, making this one of the denser ritual landscapes recorded in the county.