Standing stone, Grange (Smallcounty By.), Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Stone Monuments
On a low, west-facing knoll about 330 metres from the shores of Lough Gur in County Limerick, there is nothing to see.
That is precisely the point. A prehistoric standing stone once occupied this spot, measured, recorded, and then lost, removed at some point in the nineteenth century, leaving behind only a sequence of written descriptions and, eventually, a blank in the pasture grass. It does not appear on Ordnance Survey historic maps, and aerial photography reveals no trace of it. What survives is the paper record of something that once stood here, and the faint outline of a tradition that made it stranger still.
The stone was documented while it still existed by Thomas Crofton Croker in 1833, who placed it about 160 yards to the north-east of the smallest of the nearby stone circles and recorded its dimensions: roughly 1.5 metres high, 2 metres broad, and 1.2 metres thick, with a circumference of over 5 metres. Maurice Lenihan noted it again in 1866, describing a sunken gallaun, the Irish term for a standing stone, as quite rude in form, meaning roughly shaped rather than dressed. By 1895, P.J. Lynch was writing of it in the past tense, reporting a local tradition that the stone had been the last remnant of a large stone chair that once stood on the site. Lynch returned to the subject in 1913, recording that a man named Edward FitzGerald had told him his father had actually seen the stone chair before its destruction, and had described it repeatedly to his sons. The nature of that structure, whether a megalithic seat, a collapsed monument, or something else entirely, is unresolved. O'Kelly confirmed in 1942 that the stone had by then been removed. The site sits within a dense cluster of prehistoric monuments, including the standing stone called Ardaghlooda 100 metres to the north-east, an earthwork to the north-north-west, and an ancient north-south trackway known as Cladh na Leac running roughly 70 metres to the east.
The area around Lough Gur is well signposted and accessible, and the concentration of monuments in this part of County Limerick makes it straightforward to orientate yourself using the surviving stone circles as reference points. The site of the removed stone lies in what is now private pasture land, so access would depend on local permissions. There is nothing to find underfoot, but Crofton Croker's published measurements are specific enough that the position of the stone can be reasonably fixed relative to its surviving neighbours. What lingers here is the question behind the oral tradition: what exactly was the stone chair, who used it, and what prompted someone, at some point before the 1890s, to take it apart entirely.