Standing stone, Lisdachon, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Stone Monuments
Some monuments are notable for what they no longer are.
At Lisdachon in County Westmeath, a standing stone once occupied a west-facing slope of gently undulating pasture, significant enough to be recorded on the 1837 Ordnance Survey Fair Plan map with the simple annotation 'Stone'. That single word is now more or less all that remains of it.
By 1983, whoever visited the site found nothing to see. The stone had been levelled, leaving no surface trace, and aerial photography has since confirmed the absence of any visible remains in the area where the map once placed it. Standing stones are among the most common prehistoric monuments in Ireland, typically erected during the Bronze Age and associated variously with burial, boundary marking, or astronomical alignment, though their precise purposes are rarely certain. What is certain is that once they fall or are removed, the landscape closes over them quickly. Lisdachon offers a quiet example of how thoroughly a monument can disappear, surviving only as a cartographic footnote from a survey conducted nearly two centuries ago.