Standing stone, Carrignavar, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Carrignavar, Co. Cork

At the eastern end of the playing field at Carrignavar College in County Cork, a prehistoric standing stone has spent the last several decades lying on its side against a wall, its upright days apparently over.

At more than three metres long and nearly a metre and a half wide, it is a substantial slab of stone, and the indignity of its current position is somewhat at odds with the considerable presence it would once have had in the landscape.

When a researcher named Condon recorded the stone in 1916, it was still standing, measuring roughly eight feet nine inches in height and five and a half feet across, though he noted it was already "very much out of the perpendicular", suggesting it had been leaning for some time before it finally gave up the vertical altogether. At some point during the 1960s it was removed from its original position entirely, and it has remained prostrate ever since. Standing stones as a category are among the more enigmatic survivals of prehistoric Ireland, raised during the Bronze Age or earlier for purposes that remain genuinely unclear, whether as boundary markers, ritual monuments, or indicators of burial sites. This one's history since Condon's visit offers a fairly compact illustration of how such monuments fare when they end up inside the grounds of an institution with a playing field to maintain.

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Pete F
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