Qualla: Drombeg Stone Circle

Drombeg Stone Circle: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ingo Mehling, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1957, when archaeologists excavated the central area of Drombeg stone circle, they found an inverted pot. Inside the pot were the cremated remains of a young adolescent, wrapped in thick cloth, mixed with sweepings from the funeral pyre. Smashed pottery sherds lay nearby. The radiocarbon dates put the circle's active use between 1100 and 800 BC - roughly three thousand years ago, when these stones were already being shaped and set into the ground above a small Cork valley. The circle is small, only 9.3 metres across. Locals call it The Druid's Altar. The druids came later. The grief is older.

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Image: Ingo Mehling | CC BY-SA 3.0

Drombeg Stone Circle: Seventeen Stones

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ingo Mehling, CC BY-SA 3.0. The circle originally consisted of seventeen closely spaced stones of local sandstone. Thirteen survive. Two of them, on the northeast side, stand 1.8 metres high - the entrance portals, taller than the rest. Directly opposite them, on the southwest, lies the longest stone in the...

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Image: Ingo Mehling | CC BY-SA 3.0

Drombeg Stone Circle: The Carvings

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dzjamkokarlis, CC BY-SA 4.0. The long recumbent stone has two egg-shaped cup-marks carved into its surface, one of them ringed. Cup-and-ring marks appear across Atlantic Europe in the Bronze Age, from Galicia to Scotland, their meaning still debated. The archaeologist Terence Meaden has suggested that a petr...

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Image: Dzjamkokarlis | CC BY-SA 4.0

Drombeg Stone Circle: The Pot at the Centre

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit WI resident, CC BY-SA 4.0. What sets Drombeg apart is not the architecture but what was buried in it. The excavation of 1957 - led by Edward Fahy from University College Cork - found, near the centre of the circle, the inverted urn containing the cremated remains. The bones were those of a young adolescent...

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Image: WI resident | CC BY-SA 4.0

Drombeg Stone Circle: Beside the Circle

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JuZedlr, CC BY-SA 4.0. About 40 metres to the west of the circle lie the remains of a small Bronze Age settlement: two round stone-walled huts and a fulacht fiadh - one of the curious horseshoe-shaped cooking mounds that dot the Irish landscape, characterised by a hearth, a well, and a stone-lined wate...

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Image: JuZedlr | CC BY-SA 4.0

Drombeg Stone Circle: Why They Aligned It

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alan Simkins, CC BY-SA 2.0. Stand inside the circle at midwinter, around the 21st of December, and watch the sun setting. It drops directly along the axis of the monument, framed by the two portal stones, sinking toward the long recumbent altar. This is not a unique alignment among Bronze Age monuments - ma...

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Image: Alan Simkins | CC BY-SA 2.0