Lack Loman, Monroe, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Holy Sites & Wells

Lack Loman, Monroe, Co. Westmeath

At the centre of a small, heavily overgrown enclosure in County Westmeath sits a naturally shaped, dished flagstone that has spent decades being misidentified.

Officially logged as an earthwork when it was placed on the Register of Historic Monuments in 1977, the site has at various times been proposed as a prehistoric barrow, a hut site, an artificial mound, and even the remains of a summerhouse or gazebo. None of those descriptions quite fits. What it most likely represents is something far more personal and worn-smooth by use: a pilgrimage station, the kind of marked stopping point where early Christian travellers would pause, pray, and leave a stone as a token of their visit.

The site takes its name from Leac Lomáin, meaning St Lomán's Stone. Lomán, son of Oireannan and said to be a disciple of St Patrick, founded a monastery at Portloman, which lies 800 metres to the north-east, and was associated with a church on Church Island, known as Inis Mór, near the eastern shore of Lough Owel. When H. A. Wheeler inspected the monument in 1969, he described a small roughly square mound, approximately one metre high and six metres across, enclosed by an earth and stone bank with an entrance gap at the north-west corner. He noted that the place name raised the possibility it had once been Lomán's burial place. A 2012 survey by David McGuinness offered a more grounded reading: a naturally shaped flagstone at the centre, surrounded by an oval penannular bank, open on the north-west side, with a narrow entrance passage leading directly to the stone. Probing beneath the grassy bank revealed substantial stone beneath the sod, consistent with a cairn built up over generations of visitors. Ordnance Survey letters from 1837 record the site as an active pilgrimage station associated with the nearby Portloman church, and McGuinness noted that according to local memory, travellers were still visiting the stone as recently as the early 2000s, continuing the old practice of leaving stones at it.

The monument sits fenced off from the surrounding field, overgrown with thick grass, with a ringfort about 100 metres to the south-east and Lough Owel's shoreline roughly 700 metres to the east. The entrance passage, less than two-thirds of a metre wide and nearly two metres long, still leads to the flagstone at the centre, much as it would have done for the pilgrims making their stations here in the nineteenth century and, according to tradition, long before that.

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