Drombeg - Cooking Place - Fulacht Fia | Drombeg - Hut Site - Hut Circle |
I think I may upset a few people here. I didn't like this place at all. Don't get me wrong - it is a beautiful circle, made with some lovely stones, but it's sterile. Sorry to all you Drombeg lovers out there, but that's the way I felt. I did meet some lovely people here though.
The circle is now in an area of gravel. I know this is to protect the site from the vast numbers of people who come here, but it never looks right.
This is a site that you will be lucky to get to yourself. I arrived here at 9pm and while I was there another 20 people came along. It is great to see people visiting places such as this, but I got the impression that most of them were only there because the guide book had told them to visit.
The circle is a large mutliple stone axial one with alignments to the Winter Solstice sunrise (and therefore the Summer Solstice sunset) on the recumbent. The recumbent has a couple of shallow cup marks in its top face.
The smallest stone is 1.1m high and the largest ones approach 2m. It is impressive, but it failed to live up to my expectations I think.
The shop was shut when I arrived and so can not comment on that.
The weather had looked like turning nasty, but upon my arrival here the sun burst out and the site and I were bathed in its glorious rays. Even better, I had the site to myself until just after I'd taken my last photo ... wonderful.
Definitely come here early in the morning to get the place to yourselves, but even then it won't last very long. This is a very popular place indeed.
We came to Drombeg to have a quiet evening watching the sun go down. Our tent was pitched just a mile down the road, so we could walk to the site and back again. This meant that we could have a little drink as the sky turned pink and enjoy each other's company.
When we arrived there was a group of Spanish kids sitting on the axial stone and a party of Austrians having a picnic by the huts in the corner. Eventually they left and we had the place to ourselves - a very rare and special thing in the summer.
Any sense of evil that may prevail for some people here was totally dispelled for us by the presence of what we called The Drombeg Pusscat. A beautifully affectionate little fella that kept following us all around the field.
This is an explanation of (and a bit of a disclaimer for) the coordinates I provide. Where a GPS figure is given this is the master for all other coordinates. According to my Garmin these are quite accurate. Where there is no GPS figure the 6 figure grid reference is master for the others. This may not be very accurate as it could have come from the OS maps and could have been read by eye. Consequently, all other cordinates are going to have inaccuracies. The calculation of Longitude and Latitude uses an algorithm that is not 100% accurate. The long/lat figures are used as a basis for calculating the UTM & ITM coordinates. Consequently, UTM & ITM coordinates are slightly out. UTM is a global coordinate system - Universal Transverse Mercator - that is at the core of the GPS system. ITM is the new coordinate system - Irish Transverse Mercator - that is more accurate and more GPS friendly than the Irish Grid Reference system. This will be used on the next generation of Irish OS maps. |