Standing stone, Ballyneill, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Stone Monuments
In the pastureland outside Ballyneill, there is a patch of flat ground with good views in all directions and no standing stone.
The stone that once occupied the spot, a rectangular block roughly two metres tall and just over half a metre wide, was lying on its side at that location until around 1980, when it was lifted and relocated approximately 300 metres to the south. It now stands upright in the front garden of a bungalow, which is either a preservation of sorts or an act of quiet appropriation, depending on your perspective.
The relocation means the stone is doubly displaced. It had already fallen, or been felled, at some earlier point before the twentieth century, and its original relationship to the surrounding landscape was broken long before anyone decided to give it a new address. What remains intriguing is a detail reported by the landowner: chisel marks on the side of the stone. Chisel marks on prehistoric standing stones are not common, and their presence raises questions that are unlikely to be resolved now that the stone has been moved from its original context. A large circular enclosure lies roughly 85 metres to the east of where the stone originally stood. Circular enclosures, which in Ireland often represent the remains of ringforts or earlier ceremonial boundaries, are frequently found in proximity to standing stones, and the spatial relationship between the two features might once have been meaningful, though what that meaning was is no longer recoverable.
For anyone curious enough to look, the stone is now standing in a domestic garden roughly 300 metres south of its original position, though it is currently hidden entirely beneath a dense growth of cotoneaster, a spreading ornamental shrub that has apparently swallowed it whole. The original site in the pasture, meanwhile, retains no visible trace.