Standing stone, Rathneaveen, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Stone Monuments
In a field of improved pasture on an east-facing slope in County Tipperary, a limestone standing stone has been quietly enduring the company of cattle for an indeterminate number of centuries.
The ground immediately around its base has been worn into a hollow by generations of livestock pressing against and trampling around it, a small irony given that the stone almost certainly predates the agricultural landscape surrounding it by several thousand years.
The stone stands 1.18 metres tall and is rectangular in cross-section, measuring 0.45 metres wide and 0.18 metres thick, with its long axis oriented north to south and a generally flat top. Standing stones of this kind are among the most enduring and least understood monument types in the Irish landscape. Erected most commonly during the Bronze Age, they appear across the country in various contexts, sometimes as burial markers, sometimes as territorial indicators, sometimes in apparent alignment with astronomical events, and sometimes in ways that resist any tidy explanation. What gives this particular example a little extra interest is the presence of an enclosure, roughly 10 metres to the west. Enclosures in this context can mean anything from a ring-barrow to a ceremonial or settlement site, and the proximity of the two monuments suggests this was once a more complex and intentional landscape than a glance across a modern pasture might imply.