Standing stone, Kilmacanoge, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Stone Monuments
A rectangular slab of shale rises just over a metre and a half out of flat ground in Kilmacanoge, framed to the west by the Great Sugar Loaf and to the east by its smaller companion, the Little Sugar Loaf.
It is an understated presence in a landscape that tends to draw the eye upward, but standing stones like this one, erected during the Bronze Age as markers, ritual focal points, or territorial boundaries, have a habit of outlasting almost everything else around them.
The stone measures 1.56 metres in height, 0.58 metres in width, and up to 0.33 metres in thickness, and its two faces tell slightly different stories. The south-western face is noticeably smoother than the north-eastern one, which may reflect centuries of weathering from a prevailing direction, or could hint at deliberate finishing by whoever raised it. Lying on the ground to the north-west is a smaller irregular fragment, roughly 0.56 by 0.34 metres, which appears to have broken away from the base of the north-eastern face at some point, suggesting the stone has experienced at least one significant disturbance, whether from frost, ground movement, or human interference, since it was first set upright.

