Standing stone, Ballintlea, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Stone Monuments
Some standing stones dominate a hillside or command a river crossing in ways that make their survival feel almost inevitable.
The one at Ballintlea, County Wexford, managed the opposite trick: it was recorded, measured, and then effectively swallowed by the ground. By 1987 it was no longer visible at surface level in the surrounding pasture, leaving behind little more than a cartographic ghost on an Ordnance Survey sheet.
The stone appears on the 1940 edition of the OS 6-inch map, placed on a south-west-facing slope above the Bann River, which runs on a roughly north-north-west to south-south-east axis, with the stream itself lying around 500 metres to the south-west. A fieldworker who recorded it in 1939 described it as bulbous in shape, with a base measuring approximately 35 centimetres by 30 centimetres and a height of around 90 centimetres. Standing stones are among the most enigmatic of prehistoric monument types; they appear across Ireland in a wide range of sizes and contexts, sometimes associated with burials or boundaries, sometimes apparently isolated, and their precise purpose in any given location is rarely recoverable. This one, modest in scale and quietly set into sloping ground overlooking the river valley, left only those few dimensions and that single adjective, bulbous, before it disappeared beneath the turf entirely.