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Category Archives: Blog
Favourite Places
Ronan Mulligan, member of San Fransisco based rock band The Hooks talks about some of his favourite places in Sligo. Ronan left Sligo in 2003 to bring The Hook’s brand of Rock N’ Roll to the States. He has been … Continue reading
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Place Names
Irish place names, like place names in other countries usually derive from a description of a feature in the landscape, a man made feature or a person. However, when Irish place names were anglicised many lost their original meanings. Even today … Continue reading
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Carrowmore and the Goddess Beara
Like so many other ancient sites in Sligo, Carrowmore is associated with ancient legend. Long before the reign of Queen Maeve when the mythical gods and goddesses watched over the land there lived a Goddess named Beara.
Beara had planned to build a set of enclosures in which she could keep her animals safe. She gathered a large number of stones from around the local landscape that she would use to construct the enclosures. She then filled her apron with them for ease of carriage and set off. However while flying over the area now known as Carrowmore she dropped a number of these stones which then fell to the ground.
The stones fell into a large clearing surrounded by forest. As the stones fell to the ground they created a series a cairns which still stand today. Continue reading
Countess Markievicz
This statue of Countess Markievicz is located in Rathcormack, Co. Sligo and was unveiled in 2003. Countess Markievicz was born Constance Gore-Booth in 1868. She was the daughter of local land owner Sir Henry Gore-Booth and spent her childhood living … Continue reading
Five Free Heritage Sites to Visit in Sligo
1. Carrowkeel Carrowkeel is one of the four major passage tomb cemeteries in Ireland. It consists of 14 passage tombs situated on the Bricklieve mountains. The cairns are in various states of preservation. One of the cairns, Cairn G has … Continue reading
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The Bat Cairn
One of the last things most people expect to see during the middle of the day would be a bat given their nocturnal nature. So on my last visit to Carrowkeel I was surprised to find a lone bat hanging … Continue reading
Quartz as a link to the past
I had a discussion recently with a couple of people about how quartz could be seen as a link to the past. One person observed that today quartz is commonly used to cover graves of the deceased and that it … Continue reading
Carrowmore Tomb 7 from Knocknarea
I heard Tomb 7 in Carrowmore described a while ago as one of the “poster boys” of Carrowmore. It is one of the more intact tombs in the Carrowmore cemetery and possibly the most photographed. Tomb 7 is usually photographed with Knocknarea and Maeve’s Cairn in the background.
I wondered how the tomb would appear if viewed from Knocknarea, so the last time I was up on the summit of the mountain I pointed my camera in the direction of Carrowmore and tried to take a few pictures, luckily it was a clear day so Carrowmore was visible in the distance.
Although the picture below is not of high quality it is just possible to make out the round stone circle surrounding Tomb 7 in the center of the image.
The picture below is zoomed in further on Tomb 7 from the same angle, again it is not of a high standard due to the restrictions of the digital camera zoom used but the round stone circle and tomb are easily identifiable.
Maeve’s Cairn on Video
Sometimes pictures don’t convey the true size or scale of their subjects. Heapstown Cairn and Maeve’s Cairn are examples of this. It is hard to gauge the size of the cairns from photographs because there are no other familiar buildings or structures nearby to compare them to. It is not until a person visits these sites before they can appreciate their actual size.
However if a person cannot visit the sites video is a means by which the scale of these monuments can be conveyed. I was on YouTube recently and came across a clip that made up a series of videos about ancient monuments in Ireland and Britain. One of the clips features Maeve’s Cairn on Knocknarea.
The clip can be found here. About twenty five seconds into the clip, the host is shown walking up Maeve’s cairn. To me the actual cairn seems even bigger in the video than it does in real life although this was probably just the angle the camera shot the scene from. Even so, for anyone that has only seen pictures of Knocknarea and Meave’s Cairn the clip makes interesting viewing as it gives a good indication of just how large this megalithic cairn actually is.