Standing stone - pair, Lisheentyrone, Co. Tipperary

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone – pair, Lisheentyrone, Co. Tipperary

One of the two limestone standing stones at Lisheentyrone has fallen and now rests on the very packing-stones that once held it upright, a detail that gives the site an oddly unfinished quality, as though whoever set it in place simply walked away.

The pair are aligned east to west and stand 9.5 metres apart on a low platform in upland County Tipperary, their triangular profiles tapering from north to south. Orthostats, as such uprights are known, were placed across Ireland and Britain during the Bronze Age, often in pairs or rows whose exact purpose remains contested. Here the surviving erect stone, the eastern one, reaches 2.1 metres in height, while its fallen companion to the west, slightly shorter at 1.5 metres, lies where it toppled, its original position preserved beneath it.

What makes Lisheentyrone particularly worth attention is the concentration of prehistoric activity in a small area. A bowl-barrow, a type of low circular burial mound typically dating to the Bronze Age, sits roughly 42 metres to the north-west. Twenty metres to the west lies a rock outcrop decorated with cup-marks, shallow circular depressions pecked into stone whose meaning has never been satisfactorily explained. Cup-marks appear on prehistoric monuments across Atlantic Europe, sometimes associated with burial sites, sometimes seemingly placed to mark a feature in the landscape. The connection here feels deliberate: the north-west face of the still-standing eastern stone appears to carry cup-marks of its own, echoing the carvings on the nearby outcrop, as though the same impulse, or the same hand, worked on both surfaces.

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