Beaghmore Stone Circles

Beaghmore is a remarkable Bronze Age complex on the southern edge of the Sperrins, seven low stone circles, alignments and cairns exposed from the blanket bog in the 1940s. It is exactly the kind of site that rewards an overhead camera, because the geometry of the rings and rows only really reads from above. Access is refreshingly simple by Northern Ireland standards: it is a State Care monument managed by the Department for Communities, with open pedestrian access and a small free gravel car park on Beaghmore Road, so you can launch from the car park or road verge without hunting down a landowner. Two honest caveats. First, the monument itself is scheduled, so keep the aircraft in the air over it and do not land on or among the stones. Second, this is high, boggy moorland fringed by Forest Service conifer plantation, the ground is soft and uneven and there is no shelter, so mind your footing and expect wind. It is genuinely remote and usually deserted, which makes for easy, uncrowded flying and superb low-sun raking light that picks out the stone rows. No FRZ is anywhere near, the nearest being Belfast International well over 50km east. A quiet, legal, atmospheric Sperrins spot.