Standing stone, Bohateh, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Stone Monuments
In the townland of Bohateh in County Clare, a standing stone occupies its patch of ground with the quiet indifference typical of such monuments.
Standing stones, raised singly or in loose arrangements during the Bronze Age or earlier, were planted into the Irish landscape for reasons that remain genuinely unclear, ranging from territorial markers and astronomical alignments to memorials for the dead. This particular example is one of several hundred that survive across Clare, a county whose geology and farming patterns have allowed many to persist where stones elsewhere were broken up for walls or drainage.
Beyond its location in Bohateh, the documentary record for this stone is, for the moment, thin. It has been catalogued as a monument, which means it was identified and recorded by fieldworkers at some point, but the detail that would normally accompany such a record, including dimensions, orientation, and condition notes, has not been made publicly available. That gap is not unusual for rural Clare, where the sheer density of prehistoric remains means that full documentation takes time, and where some sites sit on private land with limited access for surveyors.