Standing stone - pair, Clonamona, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Stone Monuments
On an east-facing slope in Clonamona, County Wexford, two prehistoric standing stones were once recorded close together on the landscape, only to be swallowed by pasture and effectively lost from view within a few decades of their first formal description.
That quiet disappearance is itself what makes them curious: a pair of ancient stones, noted, measured, and then gone.
The stones appear on the 1940 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, marked close together near the upper part of a slope, with a col, a low saddle of ground between two higher points, lying roughly 300 metres to the west. When a surveyor visited and described them in 1939, the first was an earthfast stone, meaning it was set directly into the ground rather than placed on a surface, measuring approximately 1.5 metres long, 0.35 metres wide, and standing about 1 metre high. A second stone, broader and slightly lower at roughly 0.9 metres at its highest eastern edge, sat about 1.5 metres to the south. That second stone presented its own puzzle: surveyors noted it might be natural bedrock rather than a deliberately placed monument at all, which leaves open the question of whether this was ever truly a pair in the archaeological sense, or simply one standing stone beside a convenient outcrop. By 1987, neither stone was visible above the grass of the surrounding pasture.
Standing stones of this kind are found across Ireland, typically associated with the Bronze Age, though their precise purposes remain debated; they may have marked boundaries, trackways, burial sites, or held ceremonial significance now impossible to recover. What this particular site adds to that broader picture is a small lesson in the fragility of the archaeological record itself. A stone visible enough to be mapped in 1940 and described in 1939 had, within two generations, sunk below the turf entirely.
