Boundary stone, Knockbrack East, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Ritual/Ceremonial
A stone set into a roadside wall once had the quiet authority to define where a city's power ended and the open county began.
This particular marker, recorded as the 'Liberty Stone' on the 1840 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, stood on the parliamentary boundary of Limerick City, on the verge south of what is now the R503, at its intersection with a local public road, roughly 450 metres east of the M7. The 'liberties' of an Irish city referred to the area within which its civic administration held legal jurisdiction, and a stone of this kind was not merely symbolic; it had a practical function, telling travellers and officials alike exactly where the Mayor of Limerick's writ ran out.
According to the Ordnance Survey Letters for the Parish of Stradbally, the stone was placed here in 1786 by Sir Christopher Knight, who was then serving as Mayor of Limerick. At that time it stood in the south corner of Ballynagowan townland, set into the front wall of a house belonging to a man named Terence Gleeson, beside the road running from Limerick to Nenagh. The stone itself was recorded as approximately three feet high and one and a half feet wide. By the time the more detailed 25-inch Ordnance Survey map was produced in 1897, the stone was no longer marked at this location, and when Google Earth imagery captured the spot in June 2018, it was not visible at all. Whether it was removed, buried, or incorporated into later building work is not recorded.
For anyone curious enough to look, the location is straightforward to reach, sitting at a road junction just off the R503 in County Limerick. Given that the stone does not appear on recent aerial imagery, a visit is more likely to reward the historically minded than anyone hoping to find a clearly legible monument. The value here is perhaps less in what survives than in what the absence itself suggests; a marker that once carried civic and legal weight, recorded carefully by Ordnance Survey officers in the nineteenth century, has since slipped from the landscape almost without trace.