The Cromleac of the Phantom Stones

Dolmen 4, known as the Phantom Stones, is a small and very beautiful monument is located directly across the road from the visitor centre, between Circle 3 and the Circle 7, the Kissing Stone. The Phantom Stones stands at the centre of a low, round, flat platform or tertre some twelve meters in diameter and one meter high.

These low platforms or tertres are a feature of the early neolithic monuments in Brittany from which the Carrowmore monuments appear to be deriveed or descended. In an act which seems to imply a bargin or covenant with an external diety, possibly in exchange for the secrets of farming, the deceaced remains are treated and interred using specific formal rituals of transformation.

The communal burial chamber, supported by the tertre is raised above the surrounding ground level, implying a movement or belief in something above and beyond the Earth. The burial chambers are artificial caves where the human remains, which have been burned or dismembered or both, are returned to the cosmic womb of the Earth goddess, the cailleach, known in this area as Garavogue.

There are remains of many such neolithic platforms at Carrowmore, forty at least back in its neolithic prime, all arranged in a huge ring about the central monument at Listoghil. It often struck me while giving tours at Carrowmore, that the whole complex of forty monuments is a giant model of an ancestor monument, quite possibly Kercado, a very early passage-grave of about the same specifications and dimensions as Listoghil, high on a hill above Carnac.

When Petrie visited this monument in 1837 he recorded a circle of forty stones surrounding the platform; today there is only one solitary boulder remaining on the north side of the monument. Charles Elcock, during his investigations at Carrowmore, discovered that an industrious tenant who had been clearing the field in 1840, had dug pits and toppled each boulder over and down, where they still lie buried today. Elcock dubbed this monument the Cromleac of the Phantom Stones, or simply Phantom Stones because the ring of stones is there still today, but invisible. The tips of several stones can be seen when the grass has been cut short.

Like all the other monuments at Carrowmore, this chamber would probably have been cleared by Roger Walker, a good friend of Petrie. Walker hosted Petrie in his house in Rathcarrick while he surveyed the Carrowmore Circles in August of 1837. Walker and Petrie were both collectors, and Walker had his own private museum in his house at Rathcarrick. Circle 4 is certainly one of the most accessible monuments, and looks attractive with its dramatic backdrop of the Dartry Mountains, when viewed from the Seafield road.

Wood-Martin's excavation report is given below. He found that the floor of the chamber was flagged. About six kilograms of cremated bone was found here.

Circle 4 - Borlase

No. 4 (dolmen-circle, a short distance to the northeast of the last).

This circle is in part destroyed, but the cromleac is untouched. The diameter of the circle is forty feet, and the number of stones appears to have been forty, but twenty-one only remain. The cromleac of this circle is a good example of the size most common to such monuments in Carrowmore. It is formed of five supporting-stones, and one table-stone. It measures altogether not more than five feet in height, and the table-stone is fourteen feet in circumference.

- George Petrie, 1837.

The circle had, when Colonel Wood-Martin visited it, been buried by the tenant, except one boulder. On excavation,

near the surface were the unburnt remains of a wolf or dog, and of a large rodent. When the flagged floor was reached, there were abundant traces of calcined remains, some imperfect bone pins and piercers; also a worked bone, seemingly the handle of some implement.

The animal bones, of dog or wolf, and rodent, were unburnt and unpetrified, and, from their colour, had evidently lain in clay, the humus still adhering to them. There was about fourteen lbs. weight of small fragments of bone, lime-soaked, and therefore much increased in weight and density. Many of them were charred and blackened by fire.

William Gregory Wood-Martin.

With these remains was found a

large, roundish stone of white quartz, smooth, and weighing 14.5 ozs. It is three inches long, the same broad, and 1.75 inchs thick; also a smooth, black, cuneiform stone, with a thin coating of carbon, weighing 13.5 ozs., and measuring 2 11/16 inches long, 1 11/16 inch broad, and 5/8 of an inch thick.

Also a piece of rough white quartz of rudely triangular form, with some of its edges sharp; also some pieces of red sandstone in process of disintegration. There were also, in the general mass of small fragments, a few teeth of a young pig, bird bones, part of the valve of a shell, and half of the lower jaw of a rabbit.

William Gregory Wood-Martin, 1886.

The Cromleac of the Phantom Stones is one of the more picturesque monuments remaining in Carrowmore, with fine views towards the majestic table-top mountain of Benbulben. In recent years young birds of prey can be seen roosting on the capstone in the evenings.