Mayo: A Wide Variety of Monuments in a Day

Recent images of sites that I haven't yet visited in the Burren, County Clare almost set me off on a trip to see them, but I decided to stay focused and head back to Mayo for my next book - Monu-Mental About Prehistoric Mayo. I'm so happy that I did. The weather was stunningly good and my route took me to some wonderful monuments, as well as a couple of sad-looking battered ones.

The sites included a holy well, an ogham stone, a bullaun stone, a court tomb, a stone circle, two wedge tombs and some portal tombs. What a variety!

This trip highlighted the need to get the townland correct when recording sites. two of the sites I turned up at I had already visited, but had got the townland wrong. I first visited these some time ago and took the nearest townland from the OS map when adding the sites to megalithomania. I'll correct these as I'm making entries for this trip.

One of the portal tombs has some decoration in the form of a partial ring of cup-marks: an arrangement that can't be natural. Decoration on a portal tomb is exceedingly rare. The bullaun stone is a triple-basined beauty; the court tomb is rather nice, but not a stunner by any means; one of the portal tombs is remote, rarely visited and very nice; the wedge tombs were both ruinous (one much more so than the other, though); and the stone circle was a bonus: I didn't expect there to be any remains left, to be honest.

Mayo is looking good, but there's so much amazing stuff there, and I keep coming across more great monuments. It's hard to know if I'll manage to get around all the sites and fit them into a book, but I'll try.

I'd like to say thanks to all the people who've contacted me through my Contact Page recently with information about sites I haven't visited yet. I do enjoy seeing the images and putting them on my list of places to visit one day.