Standing stone, Carrick, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Carrick, Co. Tipperary

On the relatively flat top of a prehistoric standing stone in County Tipperary, someone has placed a small rounded sandstone boulder.

It measures roughly 24 centimetres across and sits there with no obvious explanation, on a stone that has been upright in the landscape for millennia. Whether it was placed deliberately as a marker, rolled there by accident, or simply came to rest through some long-forgotten act, nobody now knows. That quiet ambiguity is part of what makes this particular stone worth noticing.

The standing stone sits on a gentle north-west-facing slope, set just off the crest of a hill in undulating terrain in the Carrick area of North Tipperary. It is a rectangular block, 1.37 metres tall and roughly 90 centimetres wide, aligned on a north-south axis with its apex rising towards the south. The eastern face has been split at some point, though when or how is unrecorded. About 100 metres to the west lies a ringfort, a roughly circular earthwork enclosure of the early medieval period, most commonly associated with farmsteads between around the fifth and twelfth centuries. The proximity of the two features suggests this stretch of ground has been meaningful to people across a very long span of time, even if the standing stone itself almost certainly predates the ringfort by thousands of years. There are no packing-stones visible at the base, which would normally have been used to stabilise a deliberately erected monument, though cattle trampling over the years has hollowed out the ground around it, which may have obscured any original arrangement of stones.

The cattle that graze around it are the most consistent visitors the stone receives. The hollow worn into the earth at its base is their work, and the grass tufts clinging to the stone's foot are a reminder that this is a working agricultural landscape, not a managed site. The small sandstone boulder balanced on top remains, for now, part of the picture.

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Pete F
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