EDIT: I had to rename the tag due to the more common UK usage, but I’m leaving the title of the diary entry: historic=tyring_platform

[On with original text:]

There is a strange site in Thomastown, Co. Kilkenny where you have a circular stone and several iron hoops in the ground, and I’ve often wondered what it is, and presumed it had something to do with tying up horses.

This week, I bought Deirdre O’Neill’s excellent book “Remnants of Our Past” (which I’m incidentally acknowledged in and which has quite a few overlaps with topics I have covered in my videos). And lo and behold, now I know! It was the site of a smithy or forge (marked on old Ordnance Survey maps), and the circular stone is a “binding stone”. Those stones, often recycled millstones were sunk into the ground near the smithy, a cart wheel placed on top with the hub in the centre depression of the mill stone, and a new iron rim placed around the wheel that way.

Obviously, I will have to make a video about them and get other people to map them. I have mapped the one in her book which is in the courtyard/ bailey at Parke’s Castle in Co. Leitrim and has a wheel placed on top permanently. I might go there in November and take a better photo.

I think the car is “conveniently” parked on top of the one I know here in this Panoramax imagery: https://panoramax.openstreetmap.fr/?s=fp;s2;p7d10fd92-62d3-4760-956c-4feca8ca6642;c64.16/-17.89/0;m18.93/52.5221343/-7.1369549;vd;bs

I also wonder whether some spud stones have been misinterpreted and are actually binding stones. Spud stones are the bottom part of where a medieval door was hung with the hanging eye being the top part. There is a stone in the entrance door of Ullard Church with a “spud stone” in the centre of the entrance which makes no sense for a spud stone. See here: https://panoramax.openstreetmap.fr/?s=fp;s2;p54e8d835-52c6-405e-8392-1cf25db3d531;c94.55/-45.39/30;m20.71/52.5801105/-6.93296;vd;bs.

A 3D model of such a doorway with hanging eye and spud stone is available on my Sketchfab: https://skfb.ly/pBYnZ

Anyways, I’ve started a wiki page, I’ll skip the proposal for now: historic=binding_stone.

If anyone knows of any, please record on the map and on Wikimedia!!! If you know of any historic=millstone that might actually be binding stones, please retag them.

Thank you for your attention. Happy mapping!