Standing stone, Loughgur, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Stone Monuments
A large slab of limestone leans quietly westward on the brow of a hill in County Limerick, incorporated into a modern field fence as though it were simply another post.
That it has been standing in roughly that position since prehistory, visible for miles across the landscape north of Lough Gur, makes its current role as a fencepost all the more quietly incongruous. This is National Monument No. 247, a gallaun, the Irish term for a single standing stone, and it is one of several such monuments scattered across the Lough Gur area, a landscape unusually dense with prehistoric remains.
When the antiquarian Bertram Windle catalogued the stones around Lough Gur in 1912, he designated this one as stone 'S' and described it with some admiration. He recorded its dimensions as 8 feet 6 inches in height, 6 feet 6 inches in breadth, and just 1 foot thick, a broad, flat, tabular shape that would have been conspicuous against the sky on the hill's edge. He noted that its long axis runs on a bearing of 183 degrees, almost due south, though he was candid that he could find no obvious astronomical or landscape alignment to explain this orientation. By 1944, when archaeologist M. J. O'Kelly revisited the stone, it had already been absorbed into a fence line, its height recorded then at around 8 feet, the lean to the west still pronounced at roughly 75 degrees from vertical. Two further standing stones lie 280 metres to the south, and another sits 250 metres to the west-northwest, suggesting this hilltop once formed part of a wider, intentional arrangement across the terrain.
The stone sits in grassland approximately 550 metres northeast of Lough Gur itself, a glacial lake that draws most visitors to the area thanks to its stone circle and interpretive centre. This monument sees far less attention. The lean and the fence integration mean it can take a moment to read the stone for what it is; approached from the north, where Windle noted it could be seen from a considerable distance, the scale of it becomes clearer. The surrounding area is working farmland, so keeping to paths and being mindful of boundaries matters. The Lough Gur Heritage Centre is a practical starting point for anyone wanting to orient themselves among the many monuments spread across this part of Limerick.