Baltray

Stone Pair / Alignment

I first read about this stone pair in a blog written by Anthony Murphy of Mythical Ireland. Anthony and two other local men had made an exciting discovery of a winter solstice alignment here at Baltray. Originally there were three stone present here, but now only two remain. They stones stand 9 metres apart and both of them are oriented in a NW-SE direction. The northern stone, pictured to the left in the image below, stands 1.8 metres in height, the south stone is almost 3 metres high and is about 1.25 metres in width. Around the end of the last millenium these three men, Anthony, Richard Moore and Michael Byrne observed the sun rising, around the time of the winter solstice, over Rockabill, a small island off the coast of Skerries. The flat side of the largest stone was in alignment with the island, meaning it was aligned with the rising sun at winter solstice.

On my first visit to Baltray in 2006, I was accompanied by an old friend, John Donnellan. Recently John called back to Baltray and he has kindly shared these images with us. For more of John pics see Monasterboice and Mellifont Abbey.