Three Stones: The Cross and the Circle

Return of Ancient

The people who stare at stones

Photo of The Cross Man by Karen Cox.

Three years after writing Mayo Atlantis, three stones refused to yield their secrets. We started calling ourselves the people who stared at stones. It wasn’t just puzzlement. They were oddly compelling, and had something in common with a lot of modern art. On occasion I took some friends along to look at them, and after appreciating their odd beauty, they would inevitably say: “But what does it mean?”

I didn’t know. But the mystery of the three stones outside Westport demanded a better explanation than what we’re currently offered: ‘megaliths that were later Christianised with crosses’.

What if the explanation was indeed straightforward? How about a star map? A story in Mayo Atlantis recounted Philip Callahan’s discovery that Irish round towers mapped out the precession of the equinoxes around the Northern celestial pole.

The problem was that the circles on the Boheh stone didn’t look like anything I could recognise in the night sky. But if the round towers mapped out the precession, were their builders not building on prior knowledge? If the earth had moved on in time and space, maybe I had to look back. But where to start?

A folk story recounted in Mayo Atlantis is the Long Stone of Lugh in The Neale is six thousand years old. The persistence of knowledge kept secret and passed down through generations is real. (Not everything is on the internet.)

Astronomers use software such as Stellarium to look back and forward in time, so I tried the same thing, I set a bearing for the Boheh stone, 100 metres above sea level and started to reverse back in time. The figure of 6,000 year old stones cames from stories in the 1800s so I added on a couple of hundred years, set the time to 6,200 BCE, and looked into the northern sky.

Not recognising the constellations, I swept around to east and then south when to my astonishment I saw a shape very low in the sky that I had seen before in real life, on a visit to South Africa. It was the Southern Cross standing on the Irish horizon, and leaning slightly to the right.

The Cross Man was a map of the Southern Cross! And the Boheh stone was no map of the other stones, or a map of underground water but a map of the Southern night skies six thousand two hundred years ago. The cross at the base of the top stone was the Southern Cross. The other circles, some doubled for brightness, were the stars of surrounding constellations, Centaurus prominent overhead and to the left. The domed Boheh stone, an upside down planetarium, was also marking the moment of the disappearance of the Southern Cross. The Lankill stone, carved with crosses in circles on both sides, made the three into the shape of a cross when seen from above.

The Southern Cross won’t be seen from this island for another 13,000 years or so. Our ancestors had left us a helpful reminder.

I laughed. For years, I had been trying to sense the meaning of the stones. I was laughing at the idea that their creators made their meaning so clear, imagining them standing back to survey their work.

“People in the future will never misinterpret this, right?”

The exhibition Three Stones: The Cross and the Circle runs from 21-30 September in the Gallery on Castlebar Road in Westport.

Tickets at irieland.co from 7 September.