Standing stone, Ardkilmartin, Co. Limerick

Co. Limerick |

Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Ardkilmartin, Co. Limerick

Some monuments survive by accident, and some are lost through indifference.

The standing stone that once occupied a field in Ardkilmartin, County Limerick, belongs firmly to the second category. Recorded on Ordnance Survey maps under the name Cloghaleagaun, the stone was removed around 1998, leaving no surface trace whatsoever. What was once a physical marker in the landscape, likely standing for thousands of years, is now detectable only in cartographic records and archaeological files.

The name itself carries some weight. The Ordnance Survey Field Name Books, compiled for the Parish of St Peter and Paul and dating to 1579 in their notation, recorded the Irish form as Cloch a Liagáin, meaning simply the standing or pillar stone, described as the name of a large stone or rock. A liagán, in Irish placename tradition, typically refers to an upright prehistoric stone, the kind of monument erected during the Bronze Age or earlier as a territorial marker, burial indicator, or site of ritual significance. The stone's location is given in the Sites and Monuments Record as lying in pasture roughly 370 metres south of the Ahatrishnaun Stream and around 125 metres east of a road that appears on historic Ordnance Survey maps as Bohereennaderrymore. Enda Grogan's 1989 survey also noted the site. Despite all this documentation, the stone was gone before the end of the twentieth century, and aerial imagery confirms that nothing remains to be seen at ground level.

For anyone curious enough to visit the approximate location, the spot sits in ordinary agricultural pasture in County Limerick, accessible in the general vicinity of the road marked Bohereennaderrymore on older OSi maps. There is no monument to find, no plaque, and no physical evidence of what stood there. The interest, such as it is, lies entirely in the absence, and in what the recorded name suggests about how local communities once catalogued and remembered the prehistoric features around them, even as those features quietly disappeared.

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