Standing stone, Cush, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Stone Monuments
A leaning pillar of stone in rough pasture on a Limerick hillside might not announce itself as anything remarkable.
At around 1.65 metres tall and tilting noticeably from the vertical, this stone at Cush is easy to overlook, which is precisely what makes it quietly extraordinary. It sits within one of the more layered archaeological landscapes in the county, a complex of monuments on Slievereagh, the speckled mountain, that the antiquarian T. J. Westropp associated with a site he called the Supposed Site of Temaír Erann, believed to have been the ancient burial ground of the Ernai tribe.
Westropp, who documented the monuments of Munster with tireless energy in the early twentieth century, recorded this stone across several publications between 1917 and 1919. In his account he described a low pillar, already leaning, standing some 7.92 metres to the east of a ringfort's southern boundary. A ringfort, for context, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank or stone wall, common across early medieval Ireland and often associated with farmsteads or high-status settlement. The stone appears immediately to the south-east of one such ringfort at Cush, forming part of a wider cluster of archaeological features recorded under the reference LI048-034006. It was listed separately by Eoin Grogan in 1989, under the designation Cush 2, and the Cassini edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map annotates it simply as Pillar Stone. A possible standing stone at this location was also visible on a Google Earth orthoimage taken in June 2018, suggesting it remains in place.
The site lies within rough pasture, so footwear suited to uneven, potentially wet ground is advisable. The stone sits in the southern quadrant of the broader archaeological complex, south-east of the ringfort, and the Ordnance Survey annotation provides a useful navigational anchor for those working from historical maps. The Cush complex as a whole rewards slow exploration; the individual monuments are close together, and understanding the stone's position relative to the ringfort gives a clearer sense of how the landscape was organised and used across different periods.