Standing stone, Blackstairs, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Stone Monuments
A single limestone slab rising to just over two metres on an upland slope in County Tipperary has spent several thousand years doing at least two jobs at once.
Long after whoever erected it had gone, the stone was folded into the south face of a townland boundary, a later administrative line that simply made use of what was already there. That kind of quiet reappropriation is common with standing stones across Ireland, and it says something about how persistent these objects are in the landscape, too useful or too formidable to move.
The stone itself is triangular in cross-section, its broad faces tapering on both sides to a point at the apex, and it is orientated north to south. It measures 1.25 metres across at its widest and just 0.13 metres at its thinnest, giving it a blade-like profile. Natural hollows are visible on the surface, most likely the result of long weathering rather than deliberate carving. Roughly 550 metres to the south-south-east lies a ring-barrow, a type of low circular earthwork used for burial during the Bronze Age, its shallow banks and internal hollow still legible in the ground. Whether the standing stone and the barrow belong to the same period or the same community is not recorded, but the proximity is the sort of thing that tends not to be accidental.
The stone sits on a gentle south-east-facing slope with open views in all directions, which is a common characteristic of standing stones in upland settings, where visibility across the terrain seems to have mattered to whoever chose the location. The townland boundary it now anchors runs north-west to south-east, cutting across the slope and using the stone as a ready-made marker on its southern edge.