Standing stone, Lisladeen, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Stone Monuments
There is a standing stone in Lisladeen, County Cork, in the sense that there was one.
It no longer stands, and it leaves no visible trace on the surface of the ground. What remains is essentially a gap in the landscape, a place where something once marked the earth and then quietly disappeared.
Standing stones are among the most common prehistoric monuments in Ireland, single upright slabs of stone erected during the Bronze Age, though their precise purposes remain debated. They may have served as territorial markers, memorials, or waypoints in ritual landscapes. The Lisladeen example has a particularly thin documentary trail. It does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of 1842 or 1903, suggesting it was either missed by surveyors, already gone by that point, or perhaps not yet identified as a monument of note. Its sole cartographic appearance comes from the 1938 OS six-inch map, where it is marked as a single standing stone. At some point after that, it was removed, leaving the ground undisturbed and the record almost empty.