Standing stone, Glannaharee, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Glannaharee, Co. Cork

On a sloping pasture on the northern side of the Glannaharee River valley in County Cork, a single upright stone stands aligned roughly west-northwest to east-southeast.

It measures 1.4 metres in height and just 25 centimetres in thickness, a narrow blade of local stone that has been holding its position in this quiet field for an unknown stretch of prehistory. What makes it quietly anomalous is not what is there, but what is missing.

When the antiquarian Condon recorded the site in 1916, there were two stones standing 1.17 metres apart. The second, slightly smaller stone, roughly 92 centimetres high and 28 centimetres thick, has since disappeared. Pairs of standing stones, sometimes called aligned stones, are a recognised monument type in Cork and across Munster more broadly, and their orientation is generally thought to have held some astronomical or ritual significance for the communities that erected them, though no consensus exists on exactly what that was. The surviving stone's WNW-ESE alignment is consistent with the orientations recorded at other paired monuments in the region, which lends the site a certain coherence even in its reduced state. The loss of the second stone sometime between 1916 and more recent surveys is a reminder of how quietly these monuments can diminish, absorbed into field boundaries, broken up for building material, or simply toppled and buried by ordinary agricultural activity over the course of a century.

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Pete F
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