Standing stone, Cloghnamanagh, Co. Limerick

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Cloghnamanagh, Co. Limerick

A large rounded boulder of conglomerate sitting in the southern end of a disused sand-pit in County Limerick carries a name that implies something far older and more significant than its current surroundings suggest.

Known locally as Cloghnamanagh, from the Irish Cloch na Manach meaning stone of the monks, it measures roughly 1.05 metres high, 1.55 metres wide, and 0.65 metres thick. Whether it ever functioned as a true standing stone in the prehistoric sense remains uncertain; the classification is tentative, and the stone itself has apparently shifted from its originally recorded position, now sitting approximately 80 metres east of the location marked on the Record of Monuments and Places map.

The name and its associations have been puzzling observers for at least two centuries. Writing in 1826, Fitzgerald noted that at the Monk's Stone there were the remains of some ancient buildings, though he admitted no trace of their date or founder could be established. When the Ordnance Survey visited later, the scholar John O'Donovan found nothing of those buildings at all, recording only the name of the townland in the parish of Fedamore and its Irish-language meaning, without any structures to report. By 1942 or 1943, a surveyor named O'Kelly similarly found no buildings, suggesting only that irregularities in the nearby sand-pit may have been what earlier observers mistook for walls. The conglomerate itself, a rock type formed from rounded fragments cemented together over geological time, is a distinctive enough object that it is easy to see how it accumulated legend around it, even as the structures once associated with it dissolved entirely from the record.

The stone is located in the parish of Fedamore in County Limerick, within the townland that shares its name. Anyone visiting should be aware that its present position inside a disused quarry or sand-pit is not where earlier surveys recorded it, so relying solely on the RMP map reference may lead to some searching. The site is low-key and unimproved, with no signage or formal access, and the ground around the pit is likely to be uneven. The stone itself is easy enough to identify once located, being a substantial rounded mass distinct from the loose material of the quarry floor.

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