Standing stone, Loughgur, Co. Limerick

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Loughgur, Co. Limerick

Somewhere in the pasture at the north-eastern tip of Lough Gur, a standing stone may or may not still exist.

That ambiguity is itself the point. The monument recorded as LI032-050, once annotated on Ordnance Survey maps under the name Leagaun, had already shrunk to a remarkably modest limestone pillar by the mid-twentieth century, and by the early 2000s it had apparently vanished beneath ground level entirely. A stone that was once, presumably, tall enough to serve whatever ceremonial or territorial purpose standing stones were raised for has been reduced, over centuries, to something archaeologists can only locate by cross-referencing aerial imagery and nineteenth-century cartography.

The site sits in a landscape extraordinarily dense with prehistoric and early medieval remains. Lough Gur itself, 450 metres to the west-southwest, is one of the most extensively studied archaeological zones in Ireland, and this particular stone formed part of a cluster. A companion stone lies just 75 metres to the north-west, another known as Leagaun, Site S, stands roughly 420 metres to the north-north-west, and the Early Medieval settlement known as the Spectacles, a double-ringed enclosure visible from the air, lies about 410 metres to the west. The stone does not appear on the 1840 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which raises questions about whether it was simply overlooked or had already lost much of its height by then. It does appear, annotated as an antiquity, on the 1897 twenty-five-inch edition. The antiquarian Windle catalogued it in 1912 as Site R, and O'Kelly, writing in 1944, described a very low limestone pillar just 0.46 metres high and roughly 0.25 by 0.15 metres at the base, noting that it was probable the stone was much higher at the time. Grogan, in his 1989 doctoral thesis, logged it simply as Lough Gur 4.

For anyone visiting the Lough Gur area, the broader landscape rewards close attention. The pasture where this stone once stood is on private agricultural land, and the monument itself does not appear to survive above ground. Google Earth imagery from 2016 and 2018 shows the location, but there is nothing visible to a casual eye in the field. The interest here is less in what can be seen and more in what the record tells us about how prehistoric monuments quietly disappear, not through dramatic destruction but through gradual subsidence, agricultural pressure, and the slow indifference of passing centuries.

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