Standing stone, Milltown, Co. Limerick

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Milltown, Co. Limerick

A standing stone that never made it onto the Ordnance Survey's historic maps is either very well hidden or very easy to overlook, and this slender sandstone slab in Milltown, County Limerick, seems to have managed both for quite some time.

It stands in improved pasture on a gentle north-east-facing slope, quietly doing what standing stones have always done, which is to say very little that can be easily explained, while continuing to provoke the same quiet questions about purpose and origin that prehistoric monuments tend to generate.

When the Archaeological Survey of Ireland recorded the stone in 2008, their measurements told a particular story. The stone rises to 1.55 metres, is roughly rectangular in plan, and narrows slightly from base to top, from 0.1 metres thick at the bottom to 0.08 metres at the crown. Its width is 0.4 metres, and it is oriented along an east-northeast to west-southwest axis on its long face. A clean fracture at the top suggests the stone is not at its original height; something broke off at some point, though when or how the record does not say. The monument sits approximately 35 metres south-east of the townland boundary with Ballyphilip, a positioning that may be entirely coincidental or may reflect something about how prehistoric communities understood and marked the landscape. Its absence from the Ordnance Survey's historic mapping means it escaped official notice for a considerable period, and it was confirmed in satellite imagery captured between 2011 and 2018.

The stone sits in working farmland, so any visit should be made with the usual courtesies toward landowners in mind. The erosion visible around the base offers one clue about recent use, the stone has apparently served as a scratching post for cattle, which gives it a certain undignified double life as a Bronze Age monument and bovine grooming aid. The sandstone surface and the clean break at the top are the details most worth examining up close, as they suggest a monument that has had a longer and more eventful biography than its modest profile implies.

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Pete F
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