Standing stone, Leadawillin, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Leadawillin, Co. Cork

Standing stones rarely arrive alone, and the one at Leadawillin in County Cork is a quiet reminder of that.

A single upright stone, roughly 1.2 metres tall and rectangular in cross-section, sits in a field under tillage, its long axis oriented NNE to SSW. That alignment is the kind of detail that tends to accumulate meaning the more you look at it, though whether it was deliberate or incidental has long since passed out of recoverable knowledge.

What gives this site an extra layer of interest is the ghost of a companion. Writing in 1939, the archaeologist P. J. Hartnett recorded a second stone of similar dimensions lying fallen about fifteen feet to the north, partially obscured by grass. By the time the site was being assessed for the published inventory of Mid Cork, no visible trace of that second stone remained above the surface. It had not been removed so much as absorbed, swallowed back into the field. Together the two stones would have formed a pair, a type of monument not uncommon across Munster, though pairs are rarer and less studied than the larger stone rows of the region. The surviving upright is modest in scale, 0.4 metres by 0.27 metres at its widest, which places it among the smaller class of standing stones rather than the more dramatic monoliths that tend to attract attention.

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