Standing stone, Carrowneden, Co. Sligo

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Carrowneden, Co. Sligo

A large, squat boulder rising from the pasture on a ridge in Carrowneden, County Sligo, has managed to avoid official cartographic notice entirely.

Despite its considerable size, it appears on no edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the standard baseline for recording landscape features across Ireland. That absence is quietly remarkable. Standing stones were erected across Ireland from the Neolithic through the Bronze Age, typically as markers, territorial indicators, or focal points within ritual landscapes, and even modest examples tend to attract some cartographic attention over two centuries of surveying. This one did not.

The stone itself is approximately rectangular in plan, measuring 1.2 metres in height, 0.8 metres along its north-south axis, and 0.65 metres in width, with a pointed top that distinguishes it from the surrounding unworked field boulders. It sits on the crest of a northwest-to-southeast ridge, set within level pasture, which is exactly the kind of elevated, visually commanding position that standing stones were often placed to exploit. Whether its omission from the OS maps reflects an early misidentification as a natural boulder, or simply a gap in the surveying record, is difficult to say now. The ridge position and the pointed, deliberate-looking top suggest this is no accidental fieldstone.

The site sits in working farmland, and the level pasture around it means the stone is relatively unobstructed once you are near it. The ridge itself gives it a quiet prominence that would have been more apparent before the surrounding landscape was enclosed and hedged.

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