Standing Stones, Commons, Co. Leitrim

The other is still upright, a narrow conglomerate slab rising 1.7 metres from the rough pasture, oriented north to south. Nine metres to its south, the second stone lies prone, measuring two metres in length. It was still standing when the revised six-inch Ordnance Survey map was produced in 1944, which means the fall happened sometime in the past eighty or so years, unrecorded and unwitnessed, in a patch of ground that few would have been watching closely.

The site sits in a hollow edged by rock outcrop, at the eastern margin of a marshy basin, the kind of landscape that tends to preserve old things simply by being inconvenient to develop or plough. Both stones appear on the 1835 OS map, already labelled as standing stones, which tells us they were recognised as antiquities from the moment the surveyors arrived, even if their original purpose and age remain unspecified. Conglomerate, the rock type of the upright stone, is a sedimentary material made of cemented fragments of older rock, sometimes chosen by prehistoric monument builders for its availability rather than any particular symbolic quality, though we cannot know that here. What is recorded, in Michael J. Moore's Archaeological Inventory of County Leitrim published in 2003, is the physical fact of the pair: their dimensions, their orientation, and the gap between them.