Standing stone, Corfad, Co. Monaghan
Co. Monaghan |
Stone Monuments
Some places earn their place in the archaeological record not through what survives, but through what has vanished entirely.
At Corfad in County Monaghan, a standing stone, the kind of upright prehistoric marker erected across Ireland over thousands of years, exists now only as a cartographic memory. Its sole documentation is an appearance on the 1907 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, where it is noted in gothic lettering, the convention used by OS cartographers to signal antiquities, as simply a 'Standing Stone'.
Beyond that single map notation, almost nothing is known. The stone sat on a west-to-east spur of land, a modest topographical detail that hints at the kind of elevated, directionally meaningful position that prehistoric communities often chose for such monuments, but no written description of its appearance, dimensions, or condition has ever come to light. At some point between the 1907 survey and the present day, it disappeared, whether removed, buried, or broken up is unrecorded. The site is no longer extant.