Standing stone, Liscolman, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Stone Monuments
A slab of granite rising 2.3 metres from a ridge in County Wicklow is easy to walk past without fully registering what it represents: a deliberate act of placement, carried out in prehistory, whose purpose has long since dissolved into the landscape.
The stone at Liscolman sits on a northwest-to-southeast ridge, its proportions broad and flat rather than needle-like, measuring 1.7 metres wide and 0.6 metres thick. It is the kind of object that rewards a second look.
What gives the site its particular interest is its relationship to the surrounding landscape. Roughly 80 metres to the south lies a cemetery mound, the raised earthen signature of prehistoric burial practice. Between the standing stone and that mound, aerial imagery has revealed the cropmarks of two enclosures. Cropmarks appear when buried features, walls, ditches, or banks, affect how vegetation grows above them, leaving faint outlines visible from the air but invisible at ground level. The effect here is of a cluster: a marker stone, a burial monument, and two enclosures arranged across a relatively small stretch of ground, suggesting that this corner of Wicklow once held more structured, possibly ceremonial, significance than its present quiet state implies.
