Standing stone, Ballymalone, Co. Clare

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Ballymalone, Co. Clare

A low hill in County Clare pastureland holds a standing stone that barely clears a metre in height, yet manages to pose a small puzzle.

Along its eastern edge run a series of striations that might, at a glance, suggest ogham, the early medieval script in which letters are encoded as notches and strokes cut along the edge of a stone. On closer inspection, however, those marks do not resolve into any recognisable ogham characters, leaving the scoring unexplained.

The stone, oriented roughly northwest to southeast and leaning towards the southwest, measures about a metre at its tallest, 63 centimetres wide, and 25 centimetres thick. Its upper face slopes and rises toward the northwest, and the northwest face itself carries large natural breaks, a reminder that what can look deliberate in old stonework is often simply geology. The monument sits on a southeast-facing slope and was reported to the National Monuments Service by Rick Zevering, bringing it into the formal record. Standing stones of this kind are scattered across Ireland and range in date from the Neolithic through the Bronze Age, though the purpose of any individual example is rarely certain; they have been associated with burial markers, territorial boundaries, and astronomical alignments, sometimes all three depending on which theory a researcher favours. At the base, the ground has been heavily poached by livestock, the soft churning that hooves produce around any fixed point in a field, which means the immediate context of the stone has been somewhat disturbed over time.

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Pete F
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