Standing stone, Cabragh, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Cabragh, Co. Cork

At Cabragh in mid-Cork, a small group of standing stones once occupied a stretch of landscape that was, by any measure, unusually crowded with prehistoric monuments.

Within roughly a hundred metres lay a stone row and a stone circle; nearby stood five upright stones whose arrangement was more complex than a casual glance at the 1842 Ordnance Survey map would suggest. What makes the group particularly interesting is not just what it was, but that it is entirely gone.

When the antiquarian Conlon wrote about the site in 1918, he recorded five stones in total. Three of them, which he labelled A, B, and C, were not arranged in a simple line but formed the points of an equilateral triangle, each side roughly 58 yards across. Stone A, the northernmost, stood seven feet and an inch tall; stone B reached six feet; stone C, five feet. Around 150 yards to the south, two further stones, D and E, stood only about two feet three inches apart, far closer together than the others. Each stone carried the local name "gallaun", a term used across Munster for a single upright standing stone, typically of prehistoric date. The 1842 map had already shown only three of the five, arranged in a rough north-south line, and the southernmost of those three had disappeared from later editions of the same map. The process of loss, in other words, was already well under way before Conlon arrived to count them. By the time the site was formally assessed for the county inventory published in 1997, all five had been removed.

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