Standing stone, Ballingoola, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Stone Monuments
Most standing stones rise from the landscape as solitary puzzles, their original purpose long severed from any visible context.
This one, recorded as Ballingoola No. 6, is different. It is one piece of a larger system, a single upright in a line of seven stones distributed across one County Limerick townland, each marking the course of a road that people stopped using so long ago that the ground itself has almost forgotten it.
The archaeologist M. J. O'Kelly documented the group in the early 1940s, publishing his findings in 1942 to 1943. He identified seven standing stones in the townland of Ballingoola that appeared to trace an ancient routeway running from Lough Gur Cross southward to the northern barony boundary, where a further three stones continued the alignment into the barony of Clanwilliam. Lough Gur, a few kilometres to the south, is one of the most archaeologically dense areas in Ireland, and the road O'Kelly was describing seems to have connected that hub to territories further north. The track itself had become almost entirely invisible by the time O'Kelly was working, but a short stretch between stones No. 2 and No. 3 remained legible on the ground. Just north of stone No. 2, a field that had been ploughed in 1941 revealed the road's surface as a broad band of limestone chippings cutting across the darker surrounding soil, the kind of accidental exposure that archaeologists depend on.
The townland of Ballingoola sits in south County Limerick, in broadly rural terrain where field boundaries and agricultural use have gradually obscured much of what O'Kelly observed. The individual stones in the sequence are spread across the landscape rather than clustered together, so visiting with O'Kelly's numbering in mind is more useful than arriving without a sense of the wider alignment. Stone No. 6 is one of the quieter members of the group, significant mainly for its position in the chain. Anyone interested in the full picture would do well to read O'Kelly's original account before visiting, since understanding what you are looking at depends almost entirely on knowing that a road, however faint, once ran beneath your feet.