Standing stone, Eardownes Great, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Stone Monuments
A granite standing stone in Co. Wexford carries a small anomaly that is easy to miss unless you look closely: somewhere along its long history, the upper portion has been twisted out of alignment with its base.
The bottom of the stone runs roughly east-northeast to west-southwest, while the top veers toward north-northeast to south-southwest. Whether this shift happened through deliberate reworking, slow geological pressure, or some episode of damage is not recorded. What is clear is that the top and the western side have been knocked about, leaving the stone in a state that feels less like ruin and more like interrupted transformation.
The stone sits just below the crest of a gentle south-west-facing slope in Eardownes Great, now enclosed within a cemetery. It does not appear on the earlier editions of the Ordnance Survey mapping; it was only noted on the 1940 edition of the six-inch OS map, where it is marked in the distinctive gothic lettering conventionally used to signal monuments of antiquity. The stone itself is granite, with a roughly subrectangular cross section at the base measuring approximately 0.75 metres by 0.46 metres, and it reaches a maximum height of 1.43 metres. Standing stones of this kind are among the most difficult prehistoric monuments to date or interpret with confidence; they were erected across millennia and rarely yield associated material. That difficulty was reinforced here when archaeological monitoring carried out around 2003, at a location roughly 50 metres to the south-west, failed to recover any related finds or features that might have shed light on the stone's origins or original context.