Welcome to Irish Stones.
Hi! Thanks for visiting this page.
The aim of this website is to collect all my visits, photos and notes about the megalithic and medieval historical places of Ireland. The website is continually growing and more entries will be added in the future.
There are five pages, the 5 W's, where I explain something about me, what I'm doing and why I'm doing it.
All the monuments that I visited and included in the database can be browsed by several criteria, so that you can easily read only what you are interested in.
Every monument page has full information, with geographic coordinates, OS grid references, type of monument, the county where it’s in and the map number. Every page has one to a dozen or more photos. All the photos have been taken by me with a digital camera. From every page you can easily see what other monuments are in the range of 20 kilometres.
For the sites that I visited in the year 2003 I only have 35mm photos. Unfortunately they’re slides, so they won’t be published until I scan them all, and it might take a while. Occasionally, though, I will upload single scanned slides where I want to show you what major changes occured to places over the years.
In the meantime I thought to use some of the frames of the digital videos I shot during the visits. The quality of these frames won't match the quality of a high resolution digital photo, but it's better than nothing.
For a reason that escapes me, during the trip in the year 2003 I didn't take any coordinate for all the monuments that weren't prehistoric. So all the churches, crosses, castles and so on that I saw in that year aren't listed in these pages.
For a likewise unknown reason, in the years 2006 and 2007 I didn't register the geographic coordinates down to the decimals, hence the figures you'll read will all be round numbers.
There's an A-Z list, useful to group all the monuments in alphabetical order. If you only remember the first one or two letters of a place, it'll be easier to find it if you read a list rather than guessing.
In the menu there are also two interactive maps, one with clickable counties and one with clickable OS maps. This way you can plan a visit even more easily, according to your needs.
With the Find a Map utility you'll be able to pick the right OS Map if you have a Grid Reference that you don't know what map it is on.
The Multimap is a fancy way to visually represent and gather all the monuments I visited so far. It's been useful to me too because I realized that I unintentionally focused more on certain areas than others. I'll try to compensate for it in the future.
My first visit to the Irish monuments dates from June 1994, but only since 2003 I started taking coordinates and notes for each of them. I thought to include all the previous visits in a simple list named The days before GPS. This list cannot be browsed for each visit, but if some of the monuments listed in it have been recently re-visited, they'll have a link to the page with full information.
There's a section that links some of the monuments in this database to one or more movies, The Stones in the Movies. You will learn that even in a classic or less known movie an ancient monument had a role.
The section with the Glossary should help you understand something about the monument types I included in this website. Just click on the monument type in the Glossary page and you'll read a short description about it.
The FAQ section gives you some quick answers to some of your doubts.
The last item in the menu is the What's NEW? page. Here is listed all that concerns about the updating of the pages or the adding of new features to this website or just any change to those features.
There is also a search engine that gives you results by entering the full name of the place or just part of it. In the case of more places with part of the name in common, more results will be displayed.
This website will be of help to anyone who shares the same passion and wants to visit the same places.
Enjoy your staying and, if you feel like, leave a comment in the guestbook.
Compliments, suggestions, questions and criticisms are welcome!
1578 monuments and 16103 pictures in the database.