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As with most of its prehistoric monuments (apart from Passage-tombs), Irish stone circles are mostly more charming than impressive: Ireland has nothing to compare with the astonishing British masterpieces such as Callanish, Castlerigg, Avebury and Stonehenge.
The nearest Ireland gets to those is the circle which was built to enclose the Passage-tomb at Newgrange.

But circles were being built in the north-west of Ireland at least a couple of hundred years before the dramatic edifices of Britain. These were circles of boulders deriving from the kerbs of the passage-tombs which were constructed in large numbers on good low-lying farmland.

But, as with Portal-tombs, the often diminutive Irish circles are in wonderful locations, complementing rather than dominating the beautiful and even dramatic landscapes they are surrounded by as no later architecture has ever set out to do, much less achieved.

Many are hard to find, but once found, are a delight to the eye in their marriage of landscape with the near-paranoia of human consciousness.

Unlike Britain (whose finest examples are at Brodgar on Orkney and Castlerigg in Cumbria), the largest Irish circles tend to be - as ever with Irish architecture - the least beautiful.

They also not only imitate earthen henges, but in some cases are enclosed by henges or earth-banks. These large Neolithic circles have many stones - sometimes set cheek by jowl - and are 30 metres and more in diameter. Some have alignments on the southern moon, others on the equinoctial sunset.

The Irish circles of the Early Bronze Age, however, are much smaller and quite unlike British examples such as Callanish, Avebury and Stonehenge. They could have been erected by single extended families. Many are only roughly circular. And some are intimately associated with alignments or Stone-rows and circles filled with stones.

The bulk of Irish stone circles belong to the Middle Bronze Age, and are often very small indeed.

They were erected in areas of marginal soils which had never before been exploited and exhausted: the uplands of counties Cork and Kerry, Tyrone and Derry - with a few examples on the Galway-Mayo border. Some of the Munster (Cork/Kerry) circles are so near to each other that they might have been requisite holy places or shrines for families: something between the modern Infant of Prague in the hallway or on the landing, and the roadside Grotto or Calvary. Many include monoliths inside or outside, and some incorporate boulder-burials: rough, diminutive dolmens that already had a long history (e.g. at Carrowmore in Sligo) and could have been do-it-yourself family sepulchres.

Some of these, too, have related alignments or Stone-rows running off into the heather and bog.

Some are really tiny, have only five (occasionally four) stones, and are tucked away in the hills,

whereas others are quite large and prominent, with many stones.

Five is the minimum number which can include two Portal-stones (at the NE), an axial or recumbent stone (at the SW) and two other stones to make a ring.

Almost all the second and third period circles are thus aligned - like the Wedge-tombs with which they were roughly contemporary, and which are sometimes close by. Yet there are no circles in the Burren of Clare, where there are dozens of Wedge-tombs - an area which could never be tilled. On the other hand, one or two Wedge-tombs were built inside circles: the inevitable overlap and borrowing of contiguous and contemporaneous cultures - which goes hand in hand with cultic rivalry and mutual destruction - as even today in Ireland with a burning of a Catholic church by Protestant fanatics, and in the Balkans with the destruction of mosques by Eastern Orthodox Christians.

The assumed association of stone circles and rows with marginal or faltering land and climatic deterioration would suggest that their orientation is in fact an occident ation towards the summer sunset or moonset in the tradition of wedge-tomb builders - an attempt to ensure that the power of the sun would continue its magical effect on over-tilled and monocultural, rather than over-grazed, soils.

But it is foolish and dreary to try and say what they were for . We live in an Age of Explanation, and thus cannot get our compartmentalising minds around phenomena which involved magic, mystery, burial, celebration, the fertility of soil and livestock, machismo and phallic rites, potlatch events, week-long drinking bouts, divination, astrology and star-gazing.

Yet we can, if we tear ourselves away from our literal, mechanistic, domineering, rectangular, concrete mind-set, marvel at the æsthetic magic of constructions which are, paradoxically, in humble sympathy with the landscape that their builders sought to subdue by force-majeure and ritual.

"The past is not over - it has not even passed."
William Faulkner

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