The Pipers Stones, Athgreany, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Stone Monuments
At the northern end of a small steep-sided ridge in County Wicklow sits a bronze age stone circle that has, over the centuries, lost much of its original arrangement, yet retained an air of deliberate geometry.
Of the sixteen granite blocks now recorded at the site, only five remain upright in their original positions. Five more are prostrate but probably near where they once stood; three have been clearly moved; and two are simply too small to have been part of the circle at all. What survives suggests an interior diameter of around 23 metres, with the standing stones ranging from 1.3 to 1.92 metres in height.
Separate from the main ring, roughly 40 metres to the north-east and set downslope, stands a single large stone known as The Piper. It is technically a glacial erratic, a boulder deposited by ice rather than placed by human hands, yet it almost certainly formed an intentional part of the site. The stone is notable for two well-defined grooves running across its top at right-angles to each other, along with a curved groove on the upper surface of a prostrate stone in the south-eastern part of the circle. These marks are not entirely natural in origin. The pair of upright stones at the north-east of the circle face directly towards The Piper, which has led researchers to suggest they may have marked the original entrance. An account from the Ordnance Survey Letters, compiled by O'Flanagan in 1928, recorded as many as twenty-nine stones at the time of the survey and noted that someone had recently attempted to plant the site with trees, an intervention that does not appear to have taken hold. The same account described a trench dug around the inner edge of the circle and a bank running between the stones, the remnant of which is still faintly visible at the south-east.
The site sits on the high northern end of its ridge, which gives it a slightly elevated aspect over the surrounding landscape. The cup-marked erratic known as The Piper, standing close to 1.95 metres tall and roughly 2.9 metres in diameter, is easy to find just downslope from the main circle to the east, and the deliberate grooves on its upper surface reward a close look.