Standing stone, Ballingoola, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Stone Monuments
Most standing stones present themselves as solitary monuments, their original purpose lost to time.
The stone at Ballingoola is different. It is one of seven in the same townland, and together they appear to have functioned not as ritual markers or burial indicators but as a kind of ancient waymarking system, a line of stones set out to guide travellers along a road that has almost entirely vanished from the landscape.
The connection between the stones was recorded by O'Kelly in 1942 to 1943, and the detail of what he found remains quietly remarkable. He identified seven standing stones within the townland of Ballingoola, cataloguing this one as Ballingoola No. 7, and noted that their alignment traced a route running from Lough Gur Cross northward to the barony boundary. Beyond that boundary, in the barony of Clanwilliam, three further stones continued the same line. The road itself had largely disappeared, but just north of the stone catalogued as No. 2, a ploughing in 1941 disturbed the old surface and revealed what lay beneath: a broad band of limestone chippings cutting across the dark soil of the field. It is one of those rare moments in archaeology where a feature invisible from the surface is suddenly, briefly, legible. Limestone chippings used as road metalling suggest a constructed surface, not simply a worn path, and the fact that the stones maintained their alignment across a barony boundary implies the route was significant enough to be marked with some care.
The townland of Ballingoola lies in County Limerick, in the wider landscape around Lough Gur, an area unusually dense with prehistoric and early medieval monuments. Visitors already familiar with the main Lough Gur sites may find it worthwhile to look beyond the managed attractions and trace, at least in outline, the line that O'Kelly described. The stones are on agricultural land, and access will depend on the goodwill of landowners. The track itself is not visible at the surface in most places, but knowing that it once ran here, and that a plough in the mid-twentieth century briefly exposed its limestone spine, gives the ordinary-looking fields a different quality.