Coming from the West into Louisburgh in Mayo, there’s a big stone on the bank of the Bunowen River. It’s hard to miss on a sunny winter afternoon when the stone glows in the light of the setting sun.
December 2023. The Little Bear Stone in Louisburgh. Pictures by Rónán Lynch.
Curious about the markings on the stone, I stopped one afternoon to take a closer look. And the stone is most curious. It’s properly monumental, a big curved stone 2.5 metres tall, 2 metres across, and 1.5 metres deep. Towards the top of the stone four diamond-shaped holes are carved deep into the stone, which appears to be granite. Up close, the diamond shapes have unusual heft. It brought to mind the way I drew stars as a child. As soon as I thought of stars, I was struck by the pattern’s similarity with the stars of Ursa Minor, the Little Bear.
The constellation lives in my mind’s eye. Its brightest star Alpha Ursae Minoris marks the northern celestial pole, but we call it Polaris. Early in winter evenings in this part of the world, Ursa Major sits just over the horizon, its eastern stars pointing up to Polaris. Hanging from Polaris is Ursa Minor, and at the bottom of the constellation is a row of four stars, two bright, all visible to the naked eye. They’re known as the guardians of the pole, as they rotate closely around the North Pole.
For a very particular reason, this row of stars was well known to people who lived here two to three thousand years ago. The northern celestial pole moves in a great circle over thousands of years. Between 1500 BC and about 500 AD, Kochab was the bright star closest to the northern pole.
The diagram above shows the cycle of the celestial axis. The North Pole is now close to Polaris. Thuban marked the North Pole 5,000 years ago, and Vega marked the pole 13,000 years ago. Two thousand years ago, the closest bright star was Kochab. Image from EarthSky showing Pherkad and Kochab pointing to the north pole around the year 0.
Below is an image from software Stellarium of Pherkad, Kochab, 5 Ursae Minoris and 4 Ursae Minoris.
Last year I wrote that the Boheh Stone and Cross Man Stone near Westport appeared to map out the stars of Crux and Centaurus, last visible in these skies over six thousand years ago. The disappearance of such a remarkable constellation as the Southern Cross gives rise to knowledge: the historical record says that Hipparchus discovered the precession after the Southern Cross disappeared over the horizon in Athens in 400 BC.
It seemed perfectly possible that our ancestors knew of and marked the precession of the equinoxes. It also seemed possible that the pattern on the Louisburgh stone was a star sequence, marking out a long stretch of polar time.
The picture below, taken on an overcast day, is the stone at the Bunowen with a close up of the four carved diamond-shaped holes.
Have a look now at the Stellarium star map superimposed on the stone. (This is a still from the video at the end of this piece.)
Later that evening I searched national maps, surveys, and monument databases. The stone didn’t officially exist. I started to wonder if a megalithic trickster was on the loose, a sculptural Banksy carving constellations onto giant stones and leaving them in public places.
I made inquiries around Louisburgh and word came back that the stone was a recent arrival, some time inside the last ten years. A search on Google Maps turned up a picture from 2011 showing an empty field. But there did appear to be a big stone buried between the footpath and the wall.
More inquiries led me to a local man who recalled that the stone had been dug up seven or eight years earlier. Workers had come to fix the path by the bridge and decided to remove the protruding stone. At the invitation of the owner, rather than haul it away, they set it up inside the wall of the field, with the pattern on the south-facing side of the stone. Someone who witnessed the excavation said the pattern wasn’t visible until the stone was hauled out.
We know that constellations of distinction — such as the Southern Cross — feature to this day on national flags. It would not be surprising that someone decided to carve the Kochab sequence in stone to mark its distinction.
What the stone was originally called and why it was buried, we don’t know. For now, I call it the Little Bear stone. Maybe it will point us somewhere new.