Leacht

The National Monuments Service's description

Located at Rue or Rubha point, at the east end of the Inishmurray. Indicated on the OS 6-inch maps as ‘Laghta Patrick’ (Leachta Phádraig). Also known as ‘Leachta Cuimhne’.
This is a National Monument (no. 117) in state ownership.
Various authorities describe a leacht and cross (SL001-011002-) at this site, but the monument was destroyed by storm damage and the cross is lost or stolen (i.e. it could not be located in the field in 1998–99 or by subsequent inquiry).
By the time of the survey of 1998, the upstanding part of the structure was entirely dispersed. In the immediate environs, small and medium rubble overspreads a flat grassy expanse of 30 m (north/south) by 16 m (east/west). Much of this is probably storm rubble. Some may be remnants of kelp-drying walls. There was no visible, upstanding feature obviously corresponding to the remains of a leacht and no cross slab. This is in startling contrast to early descriptions and even some more recent ones (following). Compare, for instance, O’Donovan (1836 'Sligo Letters' OS Letters, no. 36. Royal Irish Academy) – ‘The leachta is a square pile of stones, on the top of which an ornamental stone cross stands’ – with Herity (1989a [1995b, 115]) – ‘The base of a very ruined dry-built leacht, roughly rectilinear in plan, about 1.92 m by 2.3 m, with no cross slab’. Thus, while O’Donovan could describe a leacht and cross-slab in the 1830s, the monument had been reduced to a ruinous heap by the 1980s and had disappeared from view entirely by the 1990s. Despite this, it was possible to identify the base of the leacht by means of a very limited archaeological investigation [99E0382] in 1999. The base consisted of a setting (2.6m E−W; 2.4m N−S) of stones, roughly trapezoidal in plan, defined by a rough kerb of large and medium-sized stones (O’Sullivan and Ó Carragáin 2008, 239-241).
The leacht was reconstructed on site by the excavators in 2006.

The above description is derived from the results of a programme of survey and excavation undertaken in 1997-2000 on Inishmurray and published in:

Jerry O’Sullivan and Tomás Ó Carragáin 2008 Inishmurrary. Monks and pilgrims in an Atlantic landscape. Volume 1: Archaeological Survey and Excavations 1997-2000. Cork. The Collins Press.

Date of upload: 23 January 2018