Beaghmore, county Tyrone

Some of the rows in the mist at sunrise on a Midsummer morning.

This superb site is the only excavated and maintained stone-circle site amongst many in central Ulster.
Circles of small stones with tangential alignments of larger ones are common in the Central Tyrone and East Fermanagh area,
and at Beaghmore a group of these, together with about a dozen small cairns were uncovered during peat-cutting.
More may lie in the uncut peat-bog beyond.

Below the bogs and fields of the general area lie "dazzlingly valuable seams of gold",
as well as significant reserves of silver, copper and critical minerals including antimony and tellurium.
At current prices, the known gold reserves alone are worth at least £21 billion.
There may well be a connection, because there is also copper in the stone-circle country
of West Cork and Kerry.

At present 7 circles and 9 rows can be seen - the stones of the rows being from a few centimetres to 1.8 metres high.
Burials and kists were found in some of the cairns. One stone circle is filled with hundreds of small stones set upright.

My dog Oscar gives an idea of how small most of the stones in this photogenic complex are.

But remember, none of these stones is more than 180 cms high!

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