Standing stone, Meenahony, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Meenahony, Co. Cork

A single oval-shaped standing stone in a field in Meenahony, mid Cork, might not seem remarkable in itself, but it sits within a cluster of prehistoric uprights that raises more questions than it answers.

Within roughly fifty metres to the north-east lies a pair of standing stones, and a further anomalous pair stands about fifty metres to the north, making this one of those quiet townland corners where the prehistoric landscape has survived in unusually concentrated form. The stone itself is modest in scale: fifty-five inches tall, forty-four inches wide, and just eleven inches thick, a broad flat slab rather than a towering monolith.

The stone appears in the historical record under the name "Gallauns", a term used in parts of Ireland for standing stones or upright memorial markers, and it was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1904. Its measurements were documented by Hartnett in 1939, which places it within a mid-twentieth-century wave of interest in cataloguing Cork's prehistoric field monuments. What makes its local situation worth noting is the descriptor applied to the nearby pair: "anomalous". In the careful language of archaeological survey, that word signals something that does not conform to the expected pattern, whether in spacing, orientation, or form, though the notes do not elaborate further on what precisely sets that pair apart.

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