Standing stone, Cloran Old, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Cloran Old, Co. Tipperary

On the crest of a hill in Cloran Old, a red sandstone monolith lies flat in the grass, no longer standing but still unmistakably present.

At 2.61 metres in length, it was never a giant among Irish standing stones, but it would have been a clear landmark on this elevated ground, visible across the undulating countryside of south Tipperary with Slievenamon Mountain rising to the south-east. At some point it fell, or was felled, and the stone has since split into two pieces: the upper portion, tapering to a near-square tip of around 21 centimetres, measures just over one and a half metres; the lower section, more consistent in its dimensions, accounts for the remaining metre or so. Together they preserve the rough outline of what was once an upright monument.

The name attached to the site offers a clue to how it was understood locally. By the time the revised Ordnance Survey mapped the area in 1904, the stone was recorded under the name Laghtnabar, a name with Irish roots suggesting a commemorative cairn or burial marker, though the stone itself is sandstone rather than a cairn. Intriguingly, the stone does not appear at all on the first edition six-inch Ordnance Survey map of 1840, which raises questions about whether it was simply overlooked by the earlier surveyors, or whether local knowledge of the site had faded and then been recovered by the time the later edition was produced. Standing stones, which are prehistoric in origin and were erected for purposes that remain genuinely uncertain, were sometimes recorded inconsistently in the early mapping surveys, particularly when they had already lost their upright form and no longer drew the eye in the way an intact monument would.

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Pete F
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