Standing stone, Tanrego, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Stone Monuments
In the rolling pasture of Tanrego, roughly three hundred metres from the south-western shore of Ballisodare Bay in County Sligo, there is a standing stone that no longer stands.
Nothing remains visible at ground level, which makes it an unusual kind of historical site: one defined entirely by absence. What we know of it survives mainly because someone thought to mark it on a map.
The 1837 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map records the spot with the plain notation 'Stone', the standard shorthand surveyors used for a standing stone, one of the tall, unworked or roughly shaped monoliths erected across Ireland during the Bronze Age and earlier periods. W. G. Wood-Martin, the Sligo antiquarian whose 1882 survey of the county's prehistoric remains remains a foundational reference, noted the stone at this location. Whether it had already fallen or disappeared by his time, or whether it survived a little longer before being removed or buried, the notes do not say. By now, the field holds no trace of it above ground.