Standing stone, Loughgur, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Stone Monuments
A limestone pillar standing roughly chest-high in a field boundary near Lough Gur might not stop most people in their tracks, yet this modest stone belongs to a cluster of prehistoric monuments in one of the most archaeologically dense landscapes in Ireland.
What makes it quietly curious is not its size but its elusiveness: it does not appear on Ordnance Survey Ireland historic maps, and aerial imagery from 2005 through to 2013 failed to capture it at all. It only becomes clearly visible on Google Earth images from March 2017 and June 2018, suggesting it had been obscured, fallen, or simply missed, for years before that.
The stone was recorded by M. J. O'Kelly in 1944, who described it as a limestone pillar measuring approximately 1.52 metres in height and 0.69 metres by 0.36 metres at its base. O'Kelly noted that it forms part of a broader group of standing stones in the area, one that had already drawn scholarly attention as early as 1912 when Windle included the group in a published plate. Eoin Grogan, in his 1989 doctoral thesis, catalogued it under the working name "Lough Gur 10", a dry label that nonetheless places it within a systematic effort to document the remarkable concentration of prehistoric remains around the lake. The site sits roughly 450 metres northeast of Lough Gur itself and 500 metres east-northeast of Knockfennell Hill, with another standing stone, known as Leagaun, lying about 250 metres to the southeast. Some 400 metres to the south-southwest lies an Early Medieval settlement site called the Spectacles, a pair of connected ring-features visible from the air, so named for their shape.
The stone sits in pasture, close to or incorporated within a field boundary, which means access depends on the land being in agricultural use and on the goodwill of the landowner. Visitors to the Lough Gur area will find the broader landscape well worth exploring on foot, and those with a specific interest in the standing stones should use the 2017 and 2018 Google Earth imagery as a reference point before heading out, since the stone is not marked on standard maps. The surrounding ground can be soft, particularly after wet weather, and the stone itself is unenclosed and unlabelled, easy to walk past without knowing what you are looking at.