The story of Beaghmore
Beaghmore was lost under blanket bog for thousands of years. It came to light in the late 1930s when local historian George Barnett was watching the peat being cut and spotted stones emerging from the turf. In all, around 1,269 stones were uncovered, revealing a monument no one had known was there.
Excavation followed in stages from 1945 to 1949, when the site passed into State Care, with further work in 1965. Archaeologists found that the stone circles, rows and cairns date from the Bronze Age, broadly between about 2000 and 1200 BC. Beneath them lay evidence of even older activity: hearths and flint tools carbon-dated to around 2900 to 2600 BC, and traces of a Neolithic cultivation site that the later builders covered over.
What survives is seven stone circles between 10 and 20 metres across, ten stone rows and twelve round cairns covering burials. The stones are deliberately low. One theory is that the monument was raised in response to worsening soil and the spreading bog, an attempt to mark and hold the land as the climate turned against early farmers. Several of the rows align with sunrise at the solstice and with moonrise, suggesting the people who built it were tracking the sky.
Today Beaghmore is a Scheduled Historic Monument in State Care, free and open to all. The full extent of the complex may never be known, because more stones and cairns are thought to lie hidden in the peat that still surrounds the cleared ground.