Standing stone, Annagh Middle, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Stone Monuments
Some ancient stones announce themselves boldly in the landscape.
This one, in the townland of Annagh Middle in County Wexford, seems to have done the opposite, gradually disappearing into the earth until it was no longer visible at all. What makes it quietly peculiar is the gap between its two moments of record: noted on a map, then gone.
The stone appears on the 1940 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, marked specifically as a standing stone. A field observation from 1939 described something already modest in scale, a squat, low stone measuring roughly 0.75 metres by 0.3 metres, with a height of around 0.7 metres. By 1987, when someone looked for it in the surrounding pasture, it was no longer visible above ground level. Whether it had sunk, been buried, or been moved is unrecorded. The site sits near the floor of the Blackwater Stream valley, with the stream itself running west to east about 200 metres to the south. Roughly 190 metres to the west lies a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site typically identified by a mound of fire-cracked stone and charcoal, formed when heated stones were used to boil water in a trough. The proximity of the two features may or may not be coincidental; such pairings are not unusual in the Irish archaeological landscape, but no direct connection has been established here.