Stone, Leitrim More, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Stone Monuments
In the hilly pastureland of Leitrim More in County Galway, a standing stone once rose from the ground, and now nothing marks where it stood.
The site is recorded as a monument, yet there is no visible surface trace whatsoever; the place exists almost entirely as an absence, documented on maps but emptied of its physical presence decades ago.
The 1838 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map indicated and named the feature simply as 'Stone', written in Roman script, the convention used to denote antiquities of uncertain or pre-Christian origin. That small typographic distinction carried real meaning to nineteenth-century surveyors, flagging the object as something older and stranger than a field boundary marker. By the early 1930s, however, the stone had been removed. A landowner later recalled a large stone that had stood in front of the house, and its removal in that period is the closest thing to a dated event the site possesses. The complication is that this remembered stone did not stand at exactly the spot the OS map had recorded, which leaves open the question of whether the two accounts refer to the same object at all. A second possible standing stone lies approximately ninety metres to the south-east, suggesting that the immediate landscape may once have held more than one of these upright monoliths, the purposes of which, whether ceremonial, territorial, or memorial, are rarely recoverable with certainty.