Standing stone, Poulmaloe, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Stone Monuments
Some places earn their place in the archaeological record not by surviving, but by disappearing at precisely the moment someone thought to write them down.
At Poulmaloe in County Wexford, a standing stone once occupied the southern edge of a plateau, the kind of elevated, open position that prehistoric communities across Ireland favoured for these upright markers, whether they served as boundary indicators, ceremonial focal points, or something else entirely. By the time anyone thought to look for it again, it was gone.
The stone appears on the 1940 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which is the only cartographic record of its existence. Field notes from that same year describe it in some detail: a sub-triangular cross-section, meaning the stone tapered to something approaching a three-sided profile rather than being simply rectangular or rounded, with dimensions of roughly 0.65 metres by 0.6 metres at the base and a height of about 1.2 metres. That is a modest but not insignificant stone, standing perhaps chest-height on an adult. It does not survive. Whether it was removed for use in a field boundary, a building, or simply toppled and buried at some point in the intervening decades is not recorded.