Standing stone, Ballinvir, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Ballinvir, Co. Tipperary

A red sandstone pillar rising 2.6 metres from a Tipperary hillside, this standing stone at Ballinvir has spent at least part of its long life pressed into service as a fence post.

Sometime before 1908, when the local antiquarian Power noted it, the stone had been incorporated into a field boundary, its prehistoric purpose quietly subordinated to the practical demands of Irish agriculture. The fence has since been removed, and the stone stands alone again on a gentle south-westerly slope above the valley of the Lingaun River.

The stone itself is worth looking at closely. Cut from red sandstone and orientated roughly NE-SW, it tapers to a point at the top and carries what appear to be natural cleavage planes and shallow, sub-circular depressions on two of its faces. Possible packing stones survive at the base, suggesting the original effort taken to set it upright and keep it that way. Standing stones of this kind are among the most common prehistoric monuments in Ireland, yet also among the least understood; their dates, usually somewhere in the Bronze Age, are rarely pinned down with precision, and their purposes remain genuinely uncertain. What is clear here is the siting. From this spot, the cairn on the summit of Slievenamon, the conspicuous flat-topped mountain that dominates this part of Tipperary, is visible about seven kilometres to the west. Whether that relationship was intentional is impossible to say, but the visual connection between the two monuments, one low and solitary in the valley landscape, the other crowning a peak long threaded through with mythology, is difficult to overlook.

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Pete F
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