Anomalous stone group, Oughtihery, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Stone Monuments
In the pastureland of Oughtihery in mid Cork, there is nothing left to see.
That absence is itself the point of interest. A site formally categorised as an anomalous stone group occupies a field where, within living memory, at least two standing stones were still upright and measurable, and where today there is no visible trace whatsoever.
The cartographic record tells a quietly puzzling story. The Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842 shows a single standing stone at this location, labelled with the Irish term "Dallaun", a word used for a shaped or notable upright stone. By 1904, a revised edition still records only one stone, this time under the variant spelling "Gallaun". Then, on the 1940 edition, the depiction changes: suddenly two standing stones are marked. Whether a second stone had gone unrecorded for a century, or whether it came to light between surveys, is not clear. What is clear is that by 1939, when P. J. Hartnett documented the site, two stones were physically present and could be described in detail. The north-west stone measured forty inches high, thirty inches wide, and nine inches thick; the other, standing roughly twenty yards to the south-east, was thirty-eight inches by thirteen by fifteen. After that record was made, both stones were removed, and the ground now shows nothing.
Because the stones are gone and the field gives no indication of what once stood there, a visit would offer little beyond the atmospheric fact of standing on ground that older maps and a careful observer once considered worth recording. The site is a reminder of how many such markers, modest in scale but quietly significant, have quietly disappeared from the Irish landscape through clearance, land improvement, or simple indifference to what they were.