Standing Stone, Dalystown, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Stone Monuments
At the centre of an earthwork enclosure in County Westmeath sits a small boulder that the 1912 Ordnance Survey six-inch map confidently labels a standing stone.
The label has stuck, but the stone itself raises more questions than it answers. It is modest in scale, its purpose is unclear, and it sits within a landscape of earthworks whose own function remains uncertain. That combination of confident cartographic naming and genuine archaeological ambiguity gives the site an oddly unresolved quality.
The earthworks here form two adjoining sub-rectangular enclosures, the larger to the south and a smaller one attached to its northern side, both defined by low banks of earth and stone. A fosse, the term for a ditch typically dug alongside a defensive or boundary bank, runs in a shallow arc through the site, beginning inside the western bank and continuing east before draining into a large depression to the east of the northern enclosure. Surveyors noted in 1977 that the bank separating the two enclosures looked fresher than the outer banks, suggesting it may have been added or modified at a different time. A gap on the western side of the southern enclosure could mark an original entrance, though this is not certain. Within the southern enclosure, a scattering of small stony hummocks may simply be old field clearance heaps rather than anything more deliberate; no coherent pattern could be identified. The whole site sits on a gentle rise in otherwise level pastureland, with a small valley to the east and open views to the north and west.