We stopped here for dinner. We were actually heading for Athgreany at the time and the kids moaned about the detour. However when we arrived at this strange mounded circle all our opinions changed. The view is simply spectacular. Standing in front of the main stones you look out at the intersection of two hills on the horizon. The mountains rise up at your back and protect you. The circle has been disturbed badly and was once surrounded by a second mound, sadly little of this remains. Several stones lie in the center and many lie scattered to one side on the perimeter. There appears to be a small cairn in front of the main upright stones, but this is covered in grass now so it is hard to tell.

These stones contain many markings (mainly linear 'oblong cup marks') and several are shaped including one made round. One great stone had cup marks that form a bridge. The ambience here is enormous: you get very little road noise and the air has that quiet haunting quality that prevails in so many circles - bird song and insect noise on the outside, but once you are inside ... silence.

Oh yeah, my daughter found a frog here.

Revisited to show a friend, an attempt (successful) to visit four circles in a day ( The Piper's Stones, Castleruddery, Boleycarrigeen & Broadleas (County Kildare)).

It would appear that someone has been tidying up around here which was great to see. The weather also seems to have cleaned up some of the stones, too, especially the huge quartz boulders that form the entrance.

It was possible to see that many of the other stones are quartz too, which means that this place would have looked even more impressive when still used and maintained.

As we were here the landowner came along and spoke to me at length. Apparently, a bunch of Druids meet here every year to do a ceremony as the sun rises through the entrance, which faces due east, over a beautiful cleft in the mountains in the distance.

Melissa felt quite oppressed here and I must admit that I wasn't too comfortable either, perhaps this is just down to the appalling weather conditions we encountered. It was nearly sunny, but drizzly and thoroughly miserable. We managed to eat our snadwiches in the dry, but left pretty quickly.

On one of the thorn trees about the circle somebody had recenty left a little basket containing a carton of milk and a jar of honey - a practice I would normally associate with the piskies in Cornwall. They were obviously very thoughtful people as they'd removed the top from the honey jar - the little people do struggle with those!

Back again. I'm not going to mention every site that I took Jane and Aaron to today, but the mountains surrounding here were covered in a fine dusting of snow, giving a very nice feel to the place - even if it was bitterly cold and windy.

This was a quick stop off to take a GPS reading. There is now a new information board outside the field gate, which is much better than it being in the field next to the monument - a nice bit of clear thinking from those that erect these signs.

Yet another stop at Castleruddery, but this time I was here to look at the surroundings, rather than the circle. I was fortunate to bump into the landowner (by now the ex-landowner because the field has since been sold) who passed on lots of local lore, such as their once being bull fights in the field below!

As well as the alignment to the mountains through the enormous quartz entrance stones, several of the larger stones in the circle appear to line up with landscape features in the surrounding hills - something for future investigation.