Anomalous stone group, Reagrellagh, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Stone Monuments
On the south-eastern slopes of Knockanare Hill in Reagrellagh, there once stood two standing stones whose pairing was considered sufficiently unusual to earn the classification "anomalous", a label archaeologists apply when stones do not fit neatly into recognised monument types such as stone pairs, stone rows, or boulder burials.
What made these particular stones worth recording is now a matter of archive rather than landscape: the monument was destroyed around 1965, leaving behind only the measurements and observations of an earlier recorder.
The stones were documented by Condon in 1916, at which point they stood approximately 2.5 metres apart in open pasture. The larger of the two was roughly 2.7 metres long, half a metre thick, and 1.3 metres high; the second, considerably slimmer at around 0.17 metres thick, stood taller at approximately 1.75 metres, though it was shorter in length. The slight asymmetry between them, both in proportion and in height, is likely part of what prompted the anomalous designation. Whether they were the remnants of a more complex arrangement, a collapsed or partial structure of some kind, or simply two stones whose original purpose had become illegible by the time anyone thought to write them down, cannot now be determined. Within fifty years of Condon's record, they were gone.