Standing stone, Dromalta, Co. Limerick

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Dromalta, Co. Limerick

A standing stone that cannot be seen from the air, sits on no historical map, and measures less than a metre tall might seem an unlikely candidate for serious archaeological attention.

Yet that is precisely what makes this small upright in Dromalta, County Limerick, quietly interesting. It occupies a south-west-facing slope in open pasture, positioned close to the inside angle where two field boundaries meet, and it is so thoroughly modest in scale and situation that aerial photography has failed to record it at all.

Standing stones, as a category, are among the most enigmatic monuments in the Irish landscape. They date broadly to prehistory, though pinning down any individual example is notoriously difficult without excavation. Their purposes are debated: boundary markers, ritual monuments, aids to navigation, memorials. The Dromalta example was formally described in 1999 by the Archaeological Survey of Ireland, which recorded it as a single upright stone, roughly square in section, standing 0.89 metres high and measuring 0.2 metres by 0.3 metres across. That it does not appear on Ordnance Survey historic mapping suggests it was either overlooked during earlier surveys or had already fallen and been re-erected, or perhaps was simply too small to catch a surveyor's eye. Subsequent attempts to locate it through Digital Globe orthophotos taken between 2011 and 2013, and again on Google Earth imagery from June 2018, drew a blank on both occasions. The record was compiled by Alison McQueen and Vera Rahilly and uploaded in July 2020.

For anyone wishing to find it, the stone sits approximately ten metres north-east of a public road, in pasture on that gently sloping ground. Given its height of under a metre and its position against a field boundary corner, it would be easy to walk past without noticing it, particularly in summer when grass is long. The surrounding farmland is private, so permission from the landowner would be the sensible first step. A visit in late autumn or winter, when vegetation has died back, is likely to offer the clearest view of the stone in its landscape context.

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