Standing stone, Glenaglogh, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Stone Monuments
A standing stone that managed to escape notice on not one but two Ordnance Survey maps is either very easy to overlook or very good at keeping its own counsel.
The stone at Glenaglogh in County Cork was absent from the six-inch OS surveys of both 1842 and 1904, which means it slipped past the cartographers of two separate centuries without leaving a mark on the official record.
The stone itself is modest in scale: just one metre tall, roughly 80 centimetres wide and 25 centimetres thick, and triangular in plan rather than the roughly rectangular slab more commonly associated with Cork's prehistoric standing stones. It sits in pasture on a north-facing slope, with its long axis running northeast to southwest. Whether that alignment carries any deliberate significance is unknown, though orientations of this kind are sometimes associated with solar or lunar observation in prehistoric monument-building traditions. What can be said with confidence is that someone, at some point before the cartographers arrived and failed to notice it, chose this particular hillside and set this particular stone upright in the ground.