Stone row, Knockcurraghbola Commons, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Stone Monuments

Stone row, Knockcurraghbola Commons, Co. Tipperary

Two limestone slabs rise barely knee-height from a pasture on the upland commons of Knockcurraghbola, and the local landowner cannot say whether they were ever used as scratching posts for cattle.

That qualification matters, because it is the kind of thing people do say about standing stones in agricultural land, and here it has been specifically considered and set aside. These are almost certainly prehistoric, and their arrangement is deliberate: a stone row, meaning two or more upright stones set in a line, aligned along an east-west axis with a gap of 2.48 metres between them. Both are roughly triangular, tapering to a point at the top, with rectangular cross-sections. The western stone stands 0.9 metres tall; the eastern is marginally shorter at 0.8 metres. Modest by any measure, yet placed with apparent intention on a south-east facing slope that opens onto long views down a mountain valley.

The site sits within a cluster of prehistoric monuments on these same upland commons in County Tipperary. A wedge tomb, one of Ireland's most common megalithic tomb types and generally dated to the late Neolithic or early Bronze Age, lies to the north-north-west. To the south-east is a fulacht fiadh, a type of burnt mound associated with cooking or industrial activity and typically dated to the Bronze Age, consisting of a horseshoe-shaped mound of heat-shattered stone accumulated beside a trough. The proximity of these three monument types to one another is a pattern seen repeatedly across Irish uplands, where prehistoric communities appear to have used the same elevated landscapes over long periods for purposes that were at once practical and ceremonial. What connected this particular stone row to its neighbours in the minds of the people who raised it is not something the archaeology can answer directly, but the clustering itself suggests it was not placed here by accident.

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