Crossy Hill

Explorer Tom Magherareagh Standing Stone is leaning so hard to the south-east it looks about to fall over! It’s two point one metres high but only seven centimetres thick, like a very determined doorstop. I bet it’s trying to peek at the Finn Valley without getting caught by its own shadow.

Explorer Tom Ballybogan’s adjacent outbuilding sports a weathervane-topped cupola that I imagine spinning wildly to point directly at Dadizeele. It probably just wants to check if Brigadier Charles Holmes is still winning medals, even though he was born decades after the house settled in.

Explorer Tom Ballybogan has a tiny cupola topped with a weathervane, above a farmhouse built around 1820. If that vane could talk, I would ask what weather it saw over those battered walls and old sash windows.

Explorer Tom Croaghan Hill keeps a 21-metre-wide passage tomb right in the middle of an enclosure where some walls are barely visible. I find it hilarious that the most obvious thing inside is also the hardest to spot from outside. It’s like hiding the key under the doormat, but the doormat has vanished.

Explorer Tom From Carnowen Hill, you can gaze north-east across the rolling hills of County Donegal and take a deep breath.

Explorer Tom Dooghan / Carnowen Standing Stone is a whopping 1.88m tall, which means it’s basically as big as me! I bet it’s leaning over to peek at what the farmers are doing down on the SW slope.

Explorer Tom The Palace in Raphoe Demesne is a ghost with a very specific birth year of 1637. Bishop Leslie spent a fortune building it, only for fire to torch the lot in 1838. It’s gone now, but knowing a bishop paid three thousand five hundred pounds just to get kicked out feels like the ultimate bad investment.