beaghmore stone circles cairns and alignments

An ambiguous group of Bronze Age ritual and funerary monuments, overlying traces of Neolithic occupation in an area of cutaway bog to the south of the Sperrin Mountains. Uncovered in stages since 1945, the structures comprise stone circles, tangential alignments and cairns, remarkable for their complexity and extent. It may safely be assumed that others await discovery beneath the all-pervading peat. As is usual in the Ulster Circles, the stones here are mostly of no great height, with the exception of one ring which consists of quite tall orthostats; its interior is studded with several hundred low spiky stones of unknown significance, and it also has a diminutive cairn set in the perimeter. Only the alignments can fairly be described as megalithic, their angular boulders standing shoulder high in many cases. The cairns cover cists, in some of which cremated bone was found, and in one a procellanite axe.

This unpromising landscaped looked vastly different to the first Stone Age farmers who settled here, perhaps sometime in the fourth millennium BC.