Standing stone, Lackaduv, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Lackaduv, Co. Cork

A standing stone that escaped the notice of Ordnance Survey cartographers on two separate occasions, in 1842 and again in 1903, has a particular kind of anonymity about it.

The stone at Lackaduv in County Cork is not a dramatic outlier on a bare hilltop; it stands in a field fence on a north-east-facing slope, incorporated into the working landscape of a pasture farm, which may go some way towards explaining why it slipped past the surveyors entirely.

The stone itself is nearly two metres tall, measuring 1.95 metres in height, with a roughly subrectangular cross-section of 0.56 metres by 0.5 metres. Its long axis runs north-east to south-west, an orientation that recurs across many Irish prehistoric standing stones, though whether that alignment was intentional or incidental is rarely possible to say with certainty. Standing stones as a monument type are among the most enduring and least understood features of the Irish prehistoric landscape; they were erected across a broad span of time, often in isolation, and their original purposes, whether ceremonial, territorial, or funerary, remain largely a matter of informed speculation. What is clear is that this one has been standing long enough to be absorbed into a field boundary, its prehistoric origins quietly overwritten by centuries of agricultural reorganisation.

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