Standing stone, Garrycloyne, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Stone Monuments
A standing stone that nobody can find anymore occupies a peculiar category of archaeological site, recorded in enough detail to feel real but absent from the ground entirely.
The stone in question was known as Gallaun Garrycloyne, the word gallaun being an Anglicisation of the Irish gallán, meaning a single upright stone, typically prehistoric in origin. It was plotted on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map produced by the Munster Archaeological Survey in 1904, which gives it a degree of official solidity. The problem is that no surface trace of it has been found at that location, nor anywhere nearby.
The most substantial description comes from a 1916 account by Condon, who recorded its dimensions with some care: roughly two feet nine inches tall, twenty-seven inches wide, and forty-one inches in thickness. By those measurements it was not a towering monument but a substantial, squat slab, the kind of stone that would have been noticeable in an open field. Condon placed it in a field on the opposite side of the road from Garrycloyne Castle, and added the detail that the stone overlooked a small rivulet. That last observation is worth pausing on, because standing stones in Ireland are frequently found near water, whether by coincidence or by some pattern of prehistoric preference that remains poorly understood. The difficulty is that Condon's location does not quite match where the 1904 map placed it; his description situates it further to the south-east along the road. The two sources, in other words, do not agree, and neither location has yielded anything to look at.

