Stoned

I used to have a fascination with megalithic monuments. Heck, I still do; it’s just more difficult to pursue in Belgium where very few of them are within easy striking distance of where I live.

Here in Northern Ireland it’s a different matter. There is an iron age fort in our back garden, and the countryside is littered with ancient monuments. Here are three local examples, for your delectation and delight:

The Stone by the Lake

By Loughbrickland Lake is a field owned by the Orange Order, with this stone in the middle of it. (Marked immediately north of the lake in the map at the end of this post.)

The plaque in the gatepost commemorates a relatively recent event in the history of this countryside, a mere 317 years ago:

But the stone itself is much older. One can never be sure, since after all there is only the stone there, but most of these monuments date from within a thousand years of 2500 BC, so at least ten times longer ago than the Battle of the Boyne. Two interesting features of this one: first of all, note the curious hollows in the side – were sacrificial liquids poured into them to fill them? Were they sockets to support long-decayed decorations? We shall never know.

The other thing is that if you sight through the angular cut in the top of the stone it appears to align with the island in the middle of the lake. The island is known to be an artificial crannóg (with its own WikiPedia entry), and is generally thought to date from 500 AD, much later than the standing stone; yet it seems a little too good to be true.

By the way, at the top of the hill visible on the left of that picture is a ring barrow, rather unusual for Northern Ireland (marked on the map as the Water Hill Fort).

The Three Sisters of Greenan

The next stop on my route is the only group of stones with a distinctive name, the so-called Three Sisters of Greenan. Sadly, they are not especially photogenic, sitting as they do in a gorse hedge. Also if you look for them using the map, you may have difficulty as it puts them on the wrong side of the main road; in fact they are just down the lane marked to the west. Two of them at least are still upright, although one of the two appears to have suffered a minor split some time ago:

The third sister has given up and is recumbent a couple of metres to the southeast:

There is some confusion caused by Samuel Lewis’ description of them in 1837: “three upright stones, called ‘the three sisters of Greenan’ apparently the remains of an ancient cromlech: they are situated on a gentle eminence, and near them is a fourth lying in a ditch”. I reckon Lewis was counting the three upright stones as the two big ones and the splinter, and thus saw the one in the ditch as a fourth; whereas local lore has always been pretty clear that only the big ones count, so there are only three sisters. Note also his inevitable assumption that this must have been a cromlech or dolmen, ie that there was once a covering capstone. Myself I reckon that we have now pretty much what we always had, except that the third sister was probably upright at first.

The Standing Stone at Lisnabrague

I explored most of the area’s monuments as a teenager, but don’t remember ever looking at this one – which is odd, as it is right next to the road from Loughbrickland from Poyntzpass, and within a few hundred metres of the linear earthwork known as the Dane’s Cast or Black Pig’s Dyke which I explored thoroughly in those days. At present, the Lisnabrague stone is in the middle of a field of unharvested wheat:

It’s made from a different stone to the others I saw earlier; they, I think, were of the local limestone, but the Lisnabrague rock is more metamorphic (I got my worst mark in my Cambridge career in my geology course, so don’t ask me more).

These are peculiar objects, aren’t they? Placed to commemorate we know not what, but still pregnant with meaning after three millennia. Or four. Or maybe five.

This map shows the three places I visited – the first standing stone just north of the lake (though the words “Standing Stone” are printed some way off to the east), the Three Sisters to the west of the lake (though in reality they are about 100m further west than shown on the map – a big discrepancy!), and the Lisnabrague stone another 3 km further west again. A good day’s exploration.

(Do you need me to tell you that the blue squares on the map are 1 km on each side? If so, the blue squares on the map are 1 km on each side.)

One thought on “Stoned

  1. See also the wonderful “Shady Characters” blog and its discussion of what the Americans still call the pound sign. It turns out also to be related to lb, via strikethroughs, the way the pound and dollar signs are related to their original forms.

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