Standing stone, Whitechurch, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Stone Monuments
Some places earn their way into the archaeological record not by surviving but by disappearing.
A standing stone once occupied a south-west-facing slope near Whitechurch in County Wexford, a prehistoric upright of the kind erected across Ireland from the Neolithic through to the early medieval period, typically as boundary markers, ceremonial waypoints, or memorials. It no longer exists, and what we know of it amounts to a few lines and a dot on a map.
The stone appears only on the 1940 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, where it is identified as a standing stone and located on a sloping hillside. A field measurement from the same year recorded a roughly rectangular cross-section of approximately 1.5 metres by 0.75 metres, with a sloping crest that gave it a height somewhere between 1.45 and 1.8 metres, a modest but solid presence in the landscape. By the time the Archaeological Inventory of County Wexford was compiled and published in 1996, it was already gone. Whether it was removed for agricultural convenience, incorporated into a field boundary, or simply toppled and lost to the ground, the record does not say.