Standing stone, Ballinlyna, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Stone Monuments
Some ancient monuments vanish without ceremony.
At Ballinlyna in County Limerick, a standing stone that was once prominent enough to earn its own annotation on an Ordnance Survey map has since disappeared entirely, leaving behind little more than a cartographic memory and a patch of ordinary pasture. By the time aerial imagery was captured between 2011 and 2013, no surface trace of the stone remained visible, and more recent Google Earth orthoimages confirm the same absence. Whatever happened to it, whether it was removed, buried, or repurposed in a field boundary, went unrecorded.
The stone does not appear on the 1840 edition of the Ordnance Survey Ireland six-inch map, which suggests it was either overlooked by the original surveyors or had already been lost by that point. It does, however, show up on the later Cassini edition of the same map series, annotated as a Pillar Stone and positioned immediately west of the junction between a farm trackway and a public road. That the surveyors named it at all implies it was still standing and recognisable at the time of that survey. The site sits in pasture to the north of a track running roughly northeast to southwest, with the public road close to the east. Notably, a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage typically associated with early medieval settlement and used for storage or refuge, lies approximately fifty metres to the south-southwest. The proximity of these two features is the kind of detail that hints at a once-more-complex landscape, though no formal excavation appears to have been carried out.
For anyone inclined to visit, the location is accessible from the public road to the east, though the land is private pasture and the usual courtesies around farmland apply. There is nothing to see at the stone's recorded position, which is itself the peculiar point. The Cassini map annotation offers the clearest orientation, placing the stone at the trackway junction, and that junction can still be identified on modern mapping. The souterrain to the southwest has its own separate record in the Archaeological Survey of Ireland under the reference LI056-01, and its presence nearby rewards the effort of locating the general area, even if the stone itself has long since gone.