Standing stone, Portloman, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Stone Monuments
On a low ridge of grassland beside Lough Owel in County Westmeath, a broken limestone slab has been quietly doing double duty for an indeterminate stretch of time: first as a prehistoric or early historic monument of uncertain purpose, and more recently as a scratching post for cattle.
The lower portion of the stone is noticeably polished, worn smooth by generations of livestock rubbing against it, which gives this ancient upright an unexpectedly domestic quality. Set in concrete at its base is a benchmark reading 347 feet, a surveying mark used by Ordnance Survey teams to record a fixed point of known elevation, suggesting the stone was useful enough as a landmark to be conscripted into nineteenth-century mapping work as well.
The slab stands 1.75 metres tall now, but it is broken, and would originally have reached higher. It measures roughly 0.3 metres by 0.25 metres in cross-section, a relatively slender profile for a standing stone. Its presence here is no modern discovery: it was already marked as a standing stone on the Ordnance Survey Fair Plan map of 1837, meaning it was a recognised feature of the landscape during the first systematic mapping of Ireland. The stone sits approximately 60 metres from the western shore of Lough Owel, with Portloman Church lying around 150 metres to the north and a second standing stone a further 220 metres to the west, hinting that this stretch of lakeside ground held some significance over a long period. Lough Owel itself has early medieval associations, and the clustering of a church site with multiple standing stones in close proximity suggests the area accumulated meaning across different eras, even if the precise origins of the stones remain unclear.