Standing stone, Cappaphaudeen, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Cappaphaudeen, Co. Cork

What makes this modest stone in Cappaphaudeen, North Cork, quietly interesting is not its size but its apparent invisibility to the map-makers who came before us.

When the Ordnance Survey teams passed through in 1842, and again when they revised their sheets in 1904, the stone was not recorded. It simply was not there, on paper at least, which raises the obvious question of whether it was overlooked, obscured, or possibly re-erected at some point in the intervening years.

The stone itself is not a dramatic monolith. Standing to a height of 0.9 metres, it measures roughly 0.52 metres by 0.3 metres and is subrectangular in plan, meaning it has a broadly rectangular cross-section with slightly irregular edges. Its long axis runs NNE to SSW, an orientation that may or may not be intentional but is the kind of detail that archaeologists note carefully when cataloguing standing stones, since some alignments appear to relate to solar or lunar events. It sits in pasture on an east-facing slope, the sort of unremarkable agricultural setting where prehistoric uprights often survive precisely because they have been left alone, too awkward to move and not obviously in the way. Standing stones in Ireland range widely in date, with many attributed to the Bronze Age, though they are notoriously difficult to date without associated finds or excavation.

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