Standing stone, Ballycunningham, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Stone Monuments
Some places are most interesting for what is no longer there.
In Ballycunningham, County Cork, a standing stone once rose from the ground flanked by two fulachta fiadh, the horseshoe-shaped burnt mounds that are among the most common prehistoric monuments in Ireland, thought to have functioned as outdoor cooking sites or possibly as communal bathing places, though their precise use is still debated. The stone is gone now, leaving no visible surface trace, and the site exists primarily as a record of absence.
The stone's history is oddly compressed. It does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of 1842 or 1903, suggesting either that it was overlooked by the original surveyors or that it was already obscured or recumbent by those dates. By 1938, however, it had been recorded on the OS six-inch map under the Irish term gallán, the word used in cartographic tradition to mark a single standing stone. That 1938 appearance places it within a broader prehistoric landscape, standing between the two burnt mounds, a spatial arrangement that hints at a deliberate relationship between the monument types, even if the nature of that relationship is now impossible to recover. At some point after 1938 it was removed entirely.