Stone circle, Reardnogy More, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Stone Monuments
What marks a Bronze Age stone circle in Reardnogy More today is not a ring of ancient stones but a concrete-rimmed pit, flush with the grass, with a triangular limestone slab laid across it like a lid.
The slab is roughly 1.2 metres long and about a metre wide. Unless you knew what you were looking for, you might walk past it entirely, mistaking it for some piece of agricultural infrastructure, which, in a sense, is exactly what it became.
When the archaeologist Etienne Rynne visited and recorded the site in 1963, he found a small stone circle roughly 4.5 metres in diameter, composed of seven low stones with an outlier to the east. Orthostats, the individual upright stones that form such a circle, rarely stand much above ground level in smaller Irish examples, and here they measured only about 0.3 metres in height. Rynne also noted irregularities in the ground within the circle and speculated that these might represent the remains of a cairn, a mound of stones sometimes covering a burial. By the time the site was examined more recently, the circle itself had effectively vanished. The field, which a 1963 photograph shows as rough, wet marshland, had been drained, reclaimed, and reseeded. In the process of levelling the ground, the landowner appears to have encountered a deep pit at the centre of the circle, lining it with concrete and placing one of the original orthostats over the top as a capstone. A second small slab found inside the pit may also have belonged to the original monument. Whether that pit was always there as a natural feature, or whether it represents a cist, a type of stone-lined prehistoric burial box, that was later adapted into a field drain or well, remains an open question. A boulder burial and alignment, a separate prehistoric monument type in which a large boulder caps a burial, sits some 300 metres to the north, suggesting this upland slope was a place of some significance across a long stretch of prehistory.
The site sits on a south-facing slope in an upland area of north Tipperary, the surrounding land now ordinary improved pasture with little visible to signal its prehistoric past beyond that concrete surround and its limestone cap.