Standing stone, Clogh, Co. Longford

Co. Longford |

Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Clogh, Co. Longford

The townland of Clogh in County Longford may owe its very name to a single upright stone standing in a field of hilly low-lying pasture.

That is the suggestion of the landowner, and it is not an implausible one. The Irish word "cloch" simply means stone, and across Ireland there are dozens of place-names that record the presence of a prehistoric standing stone so precisely that the monument became the landmark by which the whole surrounding area was known. This particular stone, narrow and irregularly shaped, measures 1.25 metres in height, 0.55 metres in width, and 0.35 metres in thickness, and is oriented roughly north to south.

Standing stones are among the most enigmatic survivals of prehistoric Ireland. Erected anywhere from the Neolithic through to the early medieval period, their original purposes remain genuinely uncertain, with theories ranging from boundary markers and ritual focal points to astronomical alignments and memorials. What is clear is that they were significant enough to endure in the landscape for millennia, and significant enough here that the community around them chose to name their townland accordingly. When the stone was recorded in 2004, it was almost entirely swallowed by briars and brambles, the kind of slow vegetative reclamation that can render a monument invisible within a generation. It has since been cleared of scrub, returning it to something closer to visibility.

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