Standing stone, Scottstown, Co. Meath

Co. Meath |

Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Scottstown, Co. Meath

Standing stones are so common across the Irish landscape that it is easy to walk past one without registering it as anything other than a field marker or a forgotten gatepost.

The example at Scottstown, in County Meath, is easy to overlook in precisely this way, and yet its presence on a south-facing slope, just a few metres from an east-west field bank, quietly signals something older and more deliberate.

The stone itself is sandstone, standing upright at roughly 1.1 metres tall and between 0.1 and 0.17 metres across, oriented approximately northeast to southwest. Standing stones of this kind, single upright slabs set into the ground, are a feature of the Irish prehistoric landscape whose precise purpose is rarely certain. Some are thought to mark boundaries, others burial sites or routeways; many may have had ritual or astronomical significance. The alignment of this particular stone toward the northeast-southwest axis is a detail worth noting, since that orientation appears frequently at prehistoric monuments across Ireland and Britain. It was first recorded by Justin Kenny, whose observation brought the stone into the wider body of documented sites in the county.

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