Standing stone, Loughgur, Co. Limerick

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Loughgur, Co. Limerick

A limestone pillar barely taller than a person stands somewhere in the woods at the north-eastern end of Lough Gur in County Limerick, and for much of the past century it has been quietly disappearing.

Not physically, but cartographically and visually: the stone does not appear on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1840, woodland had swallowed it entirely by the time aerial imagery was captured between 2005 and 2013, and what was once open rocky pasture has closed in so thoroughly around it that the monument exists now more on paper than in easy public view. What makes it stranger still is the note recorded by archaeologist M. J. O'Kelly in 1944, who described it not merely as a standing stone but as part of an ancient road, a detail that raises quiet questions about what was once moving through this landscape and why.

The stone, catalogued in later scholarship as Lough Gur 3, is a modest thing by the measures of prehistoric monuments: O'Kelly recorded it as a limestone pillar approximately 1.22 metres high and around 0.3 metres by 0.15 metres at the base, sitting at roughly 107 metres above sea level. It was listed by Bertram Windle in 1912 as Site Q in his survey of the Lough Gur complex, and by 1897 the Ordnance Survey had at least acknowledged its existence, annotating it as an antiquity under the name Leagaun on both the 25-inch and Cassini editions of the six-inch map. That name it shares with a neighbouring standing stone 175 metres to the north-west. The surrounding area is extraordinarily dense with prehistoric and early medieval remains: Bronze Age burials were excavated just 75 metres to the south-west, the stone circle known as Circle O lies 230 metres to the south-east, and the Early Medieval settlement known as the Spectacles sits roughly 550 metres to the west-north-west.

Lough Gur as a whole is well signposted from the N24 between Limerick city and Tipperary town, and the interpretive centre near the lakeshore provides a useful orientation to the wider complex of monuments scattered across the area. This particular stone, however, is not among the sites on any managed trail. Its position is recorded in the national monuments database, and Google Earth imagery from 2006 and 2020 confirms the location within the woodland at the lake's north-eastern edge, but on the ground the tree cover that obscured it in earlier aerial surveys is still present. Anyone making a determined effort to locate it should expect rough going underfoot and no guarantee of a clear view once there.

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