Standing stone, Leny, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Stone Monuments
A two-metre limestone slab leaning at an angle on the bank of a prehistoric burial monument is already a curious enough sight, but what makes this particular stone stranger still is the suspicion that it may have had nothing ceremonial about it whatsoever.
When fieldworkers visited Leny in County Westmeath in 1981, they recorded a possible standing stone on the north-eastern bank of a ring-barrow, and noted, with admirable frankness, that it may simply have been erected as a scratching post for cattle. The slab was limestone, uniformly thin at ten to fifteen centimetres, and lying or leaning at roughly twenty-five degrees to the south-west.
A ring-barrow is a circular earthen mound or platform surrounded by a ditch, typically associated with burial practices in the Bronze Age, and Leny's example sits within a landscape that carries its own quiet prehistoric weight. The 1981 report left the stone's origins deliberately open, and the uncertainty was never resolved. When McGuinness carried out a field survey of the same ring-barrow in 2012, the stone on the north-eastern bank was not mentioned at all, which suggests it had been removed in the intervening thirty years. What had once been either a prehistoric marker or a pragmatic piece of farm furniture appears to have quietly disappeared, leaving only the 1981 description behind.