Features
The stone circle consists of seventeen closely spaced stones spanning 9.3 metres (31 ft) in diameter, of which 13 survive. The most westerly stone (1.9m long) is the long recumbent and has two egg shaped cup-marks, one with a ring around it. A "Cork-Kerry type" stone circle, it is flanked by a pair of 1.8m high axial portal stones, which provide a south-west axis, and orientate the monument in the direction of the setting sun during the midwinter solstice. The stones in the circle have been shaped to slope upwards to the recumbent stone, the midpoint of which was set in line with the winter solstice sunset viewed in a conspicuous notch in the distant hills. While the alignment is good, it is not precise.
The ruins of two round stone walled conjoined prehistoric huts and a fulacht fiadh lie just 40m west of the monument. Evidence suggests the fulacht fiadh was in use up until the 5th century AD. The larger of the huts had a timber roof supported by a timber post. The smaller hut had a cooking oven on its east side. A causeway leads from the huts to the cooking place (fulacht fiadh) featuring a hearth, well and trough in which water was boiled by adding hot stones.
Read more about this topic: Drombeg Stone Circle
Famous quotes containing the word features:
“Each reader discovers for himself that, with respect to the simpler features of nature, succeeding poets have done little else than copy his similes.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph into a tree, has arrested us in an accustomed movement.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“It is a tribute to the peculiar horror of contemporary life that it makes the worst features of earlier times—the stupefaction of the masses, the obsessed and driven lives of the bourgeoisie—seem attractive by comparison.”
—Christopher Lasch (b. 1932)