Athgreany Stone Circle (Piper’s Stones)
The legend of the Piper’s Stones:
There was a time in Ireland when the government was repressive; groups were not permitted to congregate and dancing wasn’t permitted. A man could be hung for being out of their house after curfew. But the Irish young people, rebels at heart, met to dance at lonely crossroads. They posted lookouts for any approaching soldiers and danced anyway.
On a hill outside of the village, with pipers and harpists in tow, the young people danced. Once they started to dance they could not stop. On and on they danced, the pipers played faster and faster until they collapsed to the ground in exhaustion where they turned into stone as punishment for dancing on Sunday.
The Athgreany Stone Circle is a Bronze Age National Monument. It has 16 granite boulders, of which only five are still in their original positions. There may have originally been 29 stones. The entrance to the circle is marked by a pair of stones at the north-east which face an outlying boulder 40m to the north-east called the “Piper”. The site has not been archaeologically investigated so its exact construction date is unknown but similar examples excavated elsewhere in Ireland have tended to date to the later part of the Bronze Age.