Standing stone, Monbay, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Stone Monuments
Some archaeological sites are notable for what survives.
This one is notable for what does not. A standing stone that once occupied a west-facing slope at the head of a small valley in Monbay, County Wexford, was removed around 1970 and buried beneath a farmyard roughly sixty metres from where it had stood, possibly for millennia. It does not appear on any map before the 1940 Ordnance Survey six-inch edition, where it is marked without fanfare, and it exists now only as a recorded absence.
When an Ordnance Survey field investigator noted the stone in 1940, it was described as subrectangular, meaning roughly rectangular but without sharp, dressed edges, a shape common among prehistoric standing stones that were worked only minimally or shaped by natural splitting. Its dimensions were modest: somewhere between one metre and just over a metre in length, and standing perhaps 0.7 to 0.9 metres above ground. It sat on the western side of a north-south road bank, on a slope looking out over a small east-west valley. By 1987, a local account put its height at around 1.2 metres, suggesting either that earlier measurements had been conservative or that the stone had shifted slightly over the intervening decades. Shortly after that, it was gone. The decision to bury rather than simply discard it is curious, and the stone presumably remains underground somewhere beneath the farmyard to the north-east of its original position.
There is nothing to see at the site today. The valley and the road bank are still there, and the landscape retains the quiet, enclosed character that may well have made the spot significant to whoever erected the stone in the first place. But the monument itself is underground, and its original purpose, like its precise age, remains unrecorded.
