Standing stone, Curraghawaddra, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Curraghawaddra, Co. Cork

At Curraghawaddra in County Cork, there is a standing stone that can no longer be seen.

It exists now only in cartographic memory, recorded on a 1938 Ordnance Survey six-inch map but absent from the equivalent surveys of 1842 and 1904. Sometime between that 1938 notation and the present, it was removed entirely, leaving no visible trace at ground level.

What makes the record quietly interesting is the stone's position. The 1938 map placed it just outside the western side of a ringfort, the nearby enclosure catalogued separately in the Cork archaeological record. Ringforts, the circular earthwork enclosures that dot the Irish landscape, were typically used as farmsteads during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries. Standing stones are far older as a category, generally associated with the Bronze Age, and their proximity to later ringforts is a recurring feature of the Irish landscape, suggesting either deliberate reuse of significant landmarks or simply the long persistence of stone in a field. Whether this particular stone predated the ringfort by millennia or was erected closer to its occupation is impossible now to say. Its absence from both the 1842 and 1904 maps is also worth pausing on: it could mean the stone was not yet noticed by surveyors, that it was temporarily fallen or obscured, or that it was erected or re-erected in the intervening decades before being taken away again.

There is nothing to see at the site today. The stone is gone, and no surface trace remains.

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Pete F
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