Standing stone, Tyredagh, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Stone Monuments
At nearly three metres tall yet only thirteen centimetres thick at its base, the standing stone at Tyredagh in County Clare has the proportions of something that ought to have toppled long ago.
It rises from a gently south-west-facing slope in improved pasture, a tall, slender slab with a roughly rectangular face to the east and west, tapering slightly as it climbs before ending in a small rounded point. What draws the eye on closer inspection are the deep oval and irregular solution marks pitting those east and west faces, hollows formed over vast timescales as slightly acidic water worked its way into the stone's surface, dissolving the rock in slow, patient increments. The ground at the base has been worn into a slight depression by generations of livestock brushing past, which gives the stone an oddly domestic quality despite its evident antiquity.
The stone was already well established on the historical record by the time T. J. Westropp noted it as a pillar stone in 1917. Before that, it appeared on the 1842 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map as an upright stone, and on the later twenty-five-inch edition as a small circle, the conventional symbol surveyors used to mark such features in the landscape. Standing stones, raised during prehistory for purposes that remain genuinely uncertain, are scattered across Ireland in considerable numbers, but this example is notable for its exceptional slenderness relative to its height. A second standing stone sits approximately ninety metres to the south-east, which raises the possibility, common at other such sites, that the two were positioned in deliberate relation to one another, perhaps as markers, perhaps as something else entirely.