Standing stone, Loughgur, Co. Limerick

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Loughgur, Co. Limerick

Lough Gur in County Limerick is one of the most archaeologically dense landscapes in Ireland, yet one of its monuments has managed to evade cartographers, aerial photographers, and satellite imaging alike.

A modest limestone slab standing just over a metre tall on the north-eastern shore of the lake, its socket packed with small boulders to hold it upright, this standing stone is so thoroughly absorbed into the rocky shoreline that it has never been clearly distinguishable from the surrounding lakebed geology on any aerial or satellite image taken between 2005 and 2020. It does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840, nor on the twenty-five-inch edition of 1897, nor on the later Cassini edition. For a monument that may have been placed here in prehistory, it has kept itself remarkably quiet.

The stone was recorded in some detail by O'Kelly in 1944, who described a well-weathered limestone slab measuring three feet nine inches in height and roughly two feet two inches by one foot four inches at the base, its socket stabilised with small boulders. The site was later catalogued by Grogan in 1989 as "Lough Gur 9", a designation that reflects just how many prehistoric features crowd this shoreline. The stone sits 305 metres south-east of the summit of Knockfennell Hill, and its immediate surroundings are equally layered: within a few hundred metres lie a natural cave known as Pollavaddra, the Red Cellar Cave, a ring cairn (a type of circular burial monument defined by a kerb of stones), a possible stone circle, and a ringfort. Whether all of these features were ever meaningfully related to one another is unknown, but the concentration is striking.

Finding the stone requires some patience. It sits at the current water level on the north-eastern shore, which means that lake levels and seasonal conditions will affect how accessible the shoreline is underfoot. Because the stone blends so readily with the natural limestone outcrops of the lake edge, it is worth approaching with a grid reference rather than relying on signage or any obvious visual cue from a distance. The surrounding area is well worth exploring slowly; the cave at Pollavaddra lies only fifty metres to the north-north-east, and the broader Lough Gur landscape rewards unhurried attention.

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