Standing stone, Garryglass, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Garryglass, Co. Tipperary

Some places appear in the record only as absences, and the supposed standing stone at Garryglass is one of them.

On a south-east-facing slope in County Tipperary, there is no upright stone to find, no worn stump in a field corner, no local name surviving in conversation. What remains is a single cartographic ghost: a feature marked as the 'White Stone' on an estate map drawn by J. Grace in 1772 for the Castleotway estate, sitting on this hillside in a way that suggests it may once have been a standing stone, the kind of prehistoric marker, typically a single unshaped or roughly dressed upright, that punctuates the Irish landscape in varying degrees of survival.

The 1772 map is the stone's only appearance in any document. It did not make it onto the first or second edition Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, which were compiled in the nineteenth century and which recorded many earthworks and field monuments that had already weathered centuries of agricultural use. Whether the stone was removed between Grace's survey and the OS work, or whether the cartographers simply passed it by, is not recorded. The name 'White Stone' is suggestive, since pale or whitened stones were sometimes used as landmarks or boundary markers, though whether this one carried any older ceremonial significance is impossible to say now. No visible remains exist at the site today. The hill has since been planted with young forestry, and drainage ditches run downslope through the area, the kind of ground disturbance that tends to settle any remaining question about surface archaeology.

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