Beaghmore Stone Circles
Taking the A505 westwards from Cookstown in County Tyrone, I found my right-hand turning to the Beaghmore Stone Circles after about 15 minutes. Having just visited the Giant’s Causeway, I was expecting to be one of many visitors to these Bronze Age relics. The drive through the countryside afforded wonderful views of the Sperrin Mountains, though I had to be careful as the road was narrow in places. After about four miles, I saw the sign pointing into a field. There were two other cars. The sun was out and the wind was blowing from the south-east. According to the information board, this area had Northern Ireland’s darkest sky, meaning there was little light pollution here, even in this modern age of 24-hour street lighting, car headlights, and planes flying overhead.
In a way, the fact about the darkest sky might have applied whenever the Beaghmore Stone Circles were created. For anyone expecting a Stonehenge-size spectacle, please read your guidebooks before you travel. Beaghmore has hundreds of stones, arranged in 7 circles, 10 rows, and a dozen cairns, but none of them are more than three feet in height.
The stone circles are in pairs, apart from one, which is filled with over 800 small, upright stones. This individual circle is known as the Dragon’s Teeth and is thought to represent a comet. The alignments of the circles correlate to movements of the heavenly bodies and three of the rows point to sunrise at the summer solstice.
The site was discovered by a local historian George Barnett in the late 1930s during peat cutting when precisely 1,269 stones were uncovered. The site was partially excavated in the four years after the end of the second world war when it was taken into state care. The circles were also excavated in 1965. Investigation of the site indicates that the area has been occupied since Neolithic times though the stone circles and cairns are attributed to the earlier part of the Bronze Age c. 2,000–1,200 BC. Further stones and cairns may still lie hidden in the adjacent peat.
There is little doubt Beaghmore marked a focal point for religious and social gatherings. Some archaeologists believe the circles acted as observatories for lunar, solar or stellar events (hence the comet idea for the Dragon’s Teeth stone circle). The alignments of the circles do correlate to movements of the heavenly bodies, three of the rows point to sunrise at the summer solstice, and one of the stone rows is aligned towards moonrise at the same period. What is unusual is the stone rows have a high and low arrangement where short rows of tall stones run beside much longer rows of small stones. I have found no explanation as to what this could mean. Some of the stone cairns on the site have been found to hold cremated human remains, so it is possible that at least part of the function of the site was for burials.
Whatever the reason for its existence the fact most of the stones are still here is extraordinary. It would appear to me that the peat kept the stones hidden and left us all a mystery no one has yet been able to solve.