Standing stone, Cahirguillamore, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Stone Monuments
Some ancient monuments are lost to catastrophe or simple neglect; this one was lost to pragmatism.
A standing stone that once rose to over two metres on the former deer park of Cahir Guillamore demesne in County Limerick was, at some point in the twentieth century, quietly dismantled and incorporated into the fabric of a nearby house. No plaque marks where it stood. There is nothing to see.
The stone was recorded in detail in 1840 by the antiquarian John O'Donovan, working on the Ordnance Survey Letters for Tullabracky Parish. He noted it stood seven feet high, widening from roughly a metre across at the top to about one and a half metres at the base, and observed that the original slab appeared to have been split along much of its length, giving it an irregular, cleaved profile. O'Donovan placed it approximately 180 metres east of a nearby ring of stones, and it was duly annotated on the six-inch Ordnance Survey map of that year. The stone sat within a remarkably layered archaeological landscape: a deserted medieval settlement, an associated field system, and a cashel, which is a stone-walled ringfort of early medieval origin, all clustered within the same pasture ground. By 1942, when archaeologists Seán P. Ó Ríordáin and John Hunt surveyed the area, the stone had vanished. Local information at the time indicated it had been used in the construction of one of the Land Commission houses erected nearby, the Land Commission being the body that redistributed large estates into smaller landholdings across Ireland during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The site lies in pasture, roughly 50 metres south of a townland boundary and 110 metres west of the boundary with Rockbarton. Modern aerial photography confirms there is no visible trace of the stone in its original position. For anyone drawn to the area, the surrounding complex of monuments is real and present, even if this particular feature is not: the cashel and the traces of the medieval settlement remain part of the record. The stone itself survives, in all probability, as a lintel or a wall course in a domestic building somewhere nearby, unrecognised by those who pass it daily.