Standing stone, Cloroge More, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Stone Monuments
On a south-facing slope in the eastern foothills of the Blackstairs Mountains in County Wexford, a solitary granite stone stands at less than a metre tall, and yet its modest height is itself part of the story.
The stone's maximum elevation of 0.95 metres is reached at its north-east angle, an asymmetry that speaks to damage sustained long ago. Large pieces appear to have been removed from the western side at some point in antiquity, leaving what was once a more substantial upright reduced to a fragment of its original form. At the base, the granite still holds a roughly rectangular cross-section measuring 0.77 metres by 0.4 metres, enough to suggest the deliberate shaping that characterises a standing stone, one of the prehistoric upright monoliths erected across Ireland during the Bronze Age, though their precise purposes remain a matter of ongoing debate among archaeologists.
The stone occupies a considered position in the landscape, looking across a small col towards Cloroge More hill to the south. Whether that orientation was intentional, aligned to mark a route, a boundary, or some now-unrecoverable ceremonial purpose, is impossible to say with certainty. It was first recorded by a researcher named Byron Jones, and the site sits quietly in the eastern reaches of the Blackstairs range, a granite upland that straddles the Wexford and Carlow border, where prehistoric remains of various kinds are scattered across the higher ground and its approaches.