Simulated
Feara Bréige
The Seven Monuments, near Loughrea, Co. Galway. An embanked stone circle · Liagchiorcal.
No alignment can be calculated.
The official record says seven stones are still there, and it says which way they sit by using words such as north-east and south-east. A word like that covers a wide slice of the sky. It is not a measured line, so it cannot be matched to the Sun or the Moon.
A 1915 account gives the size of the bank and how far apart the stones stand. It does not give a compass bearing either. The small cairn in the middle was dug and found to be recent, so it is not an ancient sighting mark.
This card is a desk study. Nobody stood at the stones and watched the sky for it. The word Simulated means that.
Sources and licences
Class, place and the wording of the layout: National Monuments Service, Sites and Monuments Record, record GA105-162----. Description compiled by Olive Alcock, uploaded 8 October 2018. CC BY 4.0.
Sizes, and the wider space on the west: H. T. Knox, “The Masonbrook Ring”, Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland 45 (1915), pages 310–311. Read from the Internet Archive scan. No bearing is printed there.
The excavation that found the central cairn to be recent is R. A. S. Macalister, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 33 C (1917), pages 505–510, as cited by the monument record. Those pages, including their plates, were not available in an open copy, so they were not measured from.
The position on this card is the project’s data row mon:GA105-162----, checked against the live record on 18 October 2026. Both give ITM 564502 east, 715459 north.
| Latitude | 53.1884° |
|---|---|
| Longitude | −8.53115° |
| Live class | Stone circle, embanked |
| Random directions within 2° of a sun or moon target | 1,993 of 10,000 on a flat horizon. 2,000 of 10,000 on the Copernicus horizon. |
That one-in-five figure is how wide the net is. It is not a result for these stones, because no direction was measured. The draws use seed 20261009.
Horizon profile: Copernicus WorldDEM-30, © DLR e.V. 2010–2014 and © Airbus Defence and Space GmbH 2014–2018, provided under COPERNICUS by the European Union and ESA. Ground height about 144 m. Townland name An Mhóin Mhór Thoir, Tailte Éireann, CC BY 4.0.
The prediction was written down before this check, in the project’s notes, and it was “no solar or lunar event”. That is still the result.