Standing stone, Gortmahonoge, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Gortmahonoge, Co. Tipperary

Between 2005 and 2006, a small standing stone disappeared from a rounded hillock in the uplands of Gortmahonoge, County Tipperary.

No one recorded its removal with any fanfare; it was simply gone. What remains is the hillock itself, a low, ambiguous rise that offers clear views in all directions, particularly south towards the Galtee Mountains, and a quiet puzzle about what, exactly, was here and why.

The hillock is genuinely difficult to categorise. In places it reads as artificial, the kind of deliberate earthwork that might mark a prehistoric burial mound; in others it looks entirely natural. The Ordnance Survey's first edition six-inch map, published in 1840, recorded the spot as a small quarry, while the 1902 to 1903 revision noted a hollow measuring roughly 18 metres north to south and 15 metres east to west. These are not contradictory so much as suggestive of a site that different centuries interpreted differently. The standing stone, a single upright slab of the kind erected across Ireland from the Neolithic through the early medieval period, may have been placed there to mark a burial beneath or within the mound. That practice was not uncommon; standing stones frequently served as territorial or funerary markers, anchoring the landscape around a place of the dead. Whether the mound predates the stone, or whether both belong to the same moment of intention, is now very hard to say.

The hillock itself survives, and the views it commands give some sense of why this particular spot might have mattered to whoever raised a stone here. The Galtees form a long, clear horizon to the south. The stone is gone, but the position it occupied still has a quality of deliberate elevation, of somewhere chosen rather than simply found.

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Pete F
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