Qualla: Uragh Stone Circle

Uragh Stone Circle: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Five low stones in a small ring, eight feet across. Beside them, a single standing stone, ten feet tall, oriented to the southwest. Between Lough Inchiquin and Lough Cloonee Upper, on a low rise where the wind carries the smell of bog water and gorse, the Uragh Stone Circle has held its position for somewhere between three thousand and four thousand years. Nobody knows who built it. Nobody knows precisely what for. The centre has been dug out by treasure hunters who left empty-handed, because the people who placed these stones had not buried treasure here. They had buried something we no longer know how to name.

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Uragh Stone Circle: An Axial Five-Stone Circle

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Archaeologists have a category for what stands at Uragh. The site is one of 79 surviving stone circles in counties Cork and Kerry, and one of a smaller sub-group called axial five-stone circles, where five low megaliths form a D-shape closed by an axial stone laid lengthways at t...

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Uragh Stone Circle: Three Thousand Years of Standing

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Stone circles in Britain, Ireland, and Brittany were built across a long span - somewhere between 3300 and 900 BCE - from the late Neolithic into the Early Bronze Age. More than 1300 of them survive today. Archaeologists believe they served multiple functions: burials, ceremonies...

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Uragh Stone Circle: Two Lakes and a Larger Question

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The setting matters as much as the stones. The circle sits between two loughs on the Beara Peninsula, in a landscape that has not changed greatly since the Bronze Age. The hills are bare or thinly wooded. The light shifts constantly with the Atlantic weather. Cloud shadows move a...

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