Qualla: Killycluggin

Killycluggin: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1922 a country doctor and amateur archaeologist named R.A.S. Macalister published a short paper about a strange decorated stone he had found in a field in County Cavan. The stone was broken — smashed deliberately, by chisel and hammer, all the way down one side until the ornament was obliterated. The local farmers told Macalister that the damage had been done within living memory, simply to clear an obstruction from a field. Other locals had dug around the stone hoping to find buried treasure; what they found, instead, were the remains of a small burnt human cremation. The stone was almost certainly the broken remains of Crom Cruach — the pre-Christian Irish idol that Saint Patrick is said to have destroyed in the fifth century. The field was in a townland called Killycluggin.

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Killycluggin: The Magh Slécht

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Killycluggin covers just seventy-six statute acres on the south side of Slieve Rushen, four kilometres from Ballyconnell, in the historic territory of Tullyhaw. Its name shifts across the centuries — *Killcloggin* in 1609, *Kilclogen* in 1610, *Kilcloghan* in 1630, *Killerluggin*...

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Killycluggin: The Stone Circle

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

What still stands at Killycluggin, mostly fallen, is a Neolithic stone circle: a sub-circular raised area about twenty-two metres across, originally enclosed by eighteen stones. Only five of them remain upright today. The largest stone is just under four metres long, now lying on...

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Killycluggin: The Killycluggin Stone

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The stone is decorated in classic La Tène style — the curvilinear, hair-spring spiral patterns that mark Iron Age Celtic art across western Europe. The carving is deep and crisp, organised into rectangular panels by straight vertical and horizontal lines. The main fragment is rou...

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Killycluggin: Smashed With Intent

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

What strikes everyone who looks at the Killycluggin Stone is that the smashing of it was not accidental. The destruction is deliberate, systematic, and ideological. Someone chiselled the decoration off one entire side of the stone, all the way down to the base. Whether that someo...

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Killycluggin: The Other Antiquities

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Killycluggin is unusually rich in archaeology for a townland of its size. Alongside the stone circle and the Crom Cruach stone, the Archaeological Inventory of County Cavan records a Bronze Age stone cist discovered during the excavation of the standing stone; a megalithic tomb o...

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