Standing stone, Kilkieran, Co. Clare

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Kilkieran, Co. Clare

In a marshy, undulating field in County Clare, a limestone monolith rises 1.7 metres from ground that cattle have churned to mud around its base.

It is not a dramatic presence, but it is a deliberate one, rectangular in cross-section, tapering very slightly from base to crown, with packing stones still visible at its foot, the small wedged rocks used to stabilise upright stones when they were first set in place, possibly thousands of years ago. That qualification, possibly, has followed this stone for decades.

The site sits on ground that, according to the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1840, once carried a roadway, a detail that complicates any simple reading of the stone's origins or purpose. Was it a waymarker, a boundary indicator, or something older and harder to categorise? Official records have hedged accordingly. When the Sites and Monuments Record was compiled in 1992, and again when the Record of Monuments and Places was published in 1996, the stone was listed only as a "possible" standing stone, that cautious designation applied when an upright stone cannot be confirmed as prehistoric but cannot be dismissed either. When archaeologist Frank Coyne visited in November 2017 as part of an Archaeological Impact Assessment, he recorded its dimensions carefully: 0.6 metres wide and 0.5 metres long at the base, narrowing almost imperceptibly to 0.5 metres square at the top. The limestone is local to the region, and the stone's rectangular form suggests it was shaped or at least selected with some intention.

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Pete F
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