Clocha Neart: The Lifting Stones Ireland Forgot

Nearly every parish once had a stone that was lifted to prove what a person could do. The custom died out here, and the stones were only found again by reading what schoolchildren wrote down in 1937.

Somewhere near you there is probably a stone that used to matter.

Not a monument and not a gravestone. An ordinary lump of rock sitting against a graveyard wall, or half buried above the tide line, or in the yard behind a pub. For a long time it was how a parish settled a question that came up in every generation. Could you lift it?

What a lifting stone was

The test was simple and it was public. Get the stone off the ground.

Getting it up a few inches was called getting the wind under it, and that was a beginning rather than a pass. Taking it to the chest was a different matter. Carrying it any distance was the sort of thing people were still repeating fifty years later, with the name of the man attached.

There was nothing ceremonial about any of it. The stone sat where it sat, anyone could try, and everybody in the parish knew who had and who had not. That is what makes these stones unusual as heritage objects. They were not built, carved or placed by anyone. They were simply the heaviest thing nearby that a person could get two hands under.

Why Ireland forgot

The custom held on in Scotland and in Iceland. In Ireland it went quiet, and it went quiet thoroughly enough that for a long stretch it was assumed there was nothing here to find. No stones, no record, nothing but a few stories about strong men that could have been about anything.

That assumption turned out to be wrong, and what overturned it was not a dig or an archive of the usual kind. It was a pile of schoolbooks.

The archive that found them

In 1937 the schoolchildren of Ireland were sent home to write down the folklore of their own parishes. They asked their parents and their grandparents and they wrote the answers into copybooks: cures, weather signs, local characters, where the forts were, what happened at the crossroads. That collection survives, and it is online, and a great many children wrote about the stone their father or their grandfather had lifted and exactly where it lay.

David Keohan, a kettlebell champion from Waterford, read his way through it and then went out looking. He found them in graveyards, on beaches, beside pubs and up the sides of hills.

How many there are depends on who you ask and when you ask. Published reports range from around thirty stones confirmed and lifted to more than fifty located. A public directory now records twenty nine places with a weight and a position, and because three of those places hold more than one stone, that comes to thirty four stones between fifty and two hundred and sixty kilos.

If you want to see what the children actually wrote, it is on dúchas.ie, and we have a guide to finding your own parish in it.

The stone the women lifted

One of them is not like the others.

At Faha in Co. Clare, also written Fahy, there are two stones rather than one. The heavier is a hundred and sixty two kilos. The lighter is a hundred and twelve, and it was reported as the first lifting stone anywhere identified as one the women of a place used rather than the men.

That single detail rearranges the whole picture. A test of strength that only ever involved half a parish is one kind of custom. One that had a stone for the women as well is another kind entirely, and it raises the obvious question of how many more there were that nobody wrote down, or that nobody thought to look for.

The Irish in a lifting stone

A lift was graded by how high the stone got, and the grades are a plain lesson in the body:

And the words around the thing itself:

Every one of those is spoken aloud in Tóg an Chloch, where you lift the thirty four stones in order, lightest first, by getting the Irish right. The heavy ones slip faster.

It is written on the map as well

There is a townland in Co. Monaghan called Cloghnart. That is Cloch Neart, the stone of strength, and it is named for a lifting stone.

This is the ordinary condition of the Irish map. The names are Irish words sounded out by English speaking mapmakers and then frozen, so the meaning sits there in plain sight once you can read it. Put Cloghnart, or your own town, into the Placename Explorer and it will take the Irish apart word by word.

Where they are now

Twelve counties have a stone that somebody has written down: Carlow, Cavan, Clare, Cork, Galway, Kerry, Kilkenny, Louth, Mayo, Roscommon, Tipperary and Westmeath. The lightest is a fifty kilo stone in a Carlow graveyard. The heaviest is a millstone in Louth at around two hundred and sixty.

You can see all of them, with what they weigh and where they lie, on our Clocha Neart page.

One request

These are heritage objects. A fair number of them sit in graveyards, and none of them were put where they are for your benefit.

Read about them. Go and look at them if you are passing. But the sensible thing is to leave them where they lie, and do your lifting with the Irish instead.

Names, weights and positions follow the public directory at liftingstones.org. The folklore of the Schools' Collection is held by the National Folklore Collection and published on dúchas.ie under a non commercial licence, so we link to it rather than reproduce it. Counts of how many stones have been found vary between sources and dates, and are given here as a range for that reason.