Standing stone, Pluckanes, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Pluckanes, Co. Cork

A modest upright stone in a pasture field near Pluckanes in mid Cork managed to go unrecorded by the Ordnance Survey not once but twice, appearing on neither the 1842 nor the 1904 six-inch maps.

That kind of cartographic invisibility is not unusual for standing stones, which tend to be small, unenclosed, and easy to overlook when surveyors were focused on townland boundaries and built structures. What it does mean is that this particular stone entered the formal record relatively late, quietly occupying its east-facing slope for an unknown span of centuries before anyone in an official capacity wrote it down.

The stone itself is rectangular in plan and fairly modest in scale, standing approximately 1.15 metres above ground with a face measuring around 0.84 metres across and 0.3 metres in depth. Its long axis runs northeast to southwest, an orientation that may or may not carry prehistoric significance; standing stones across Ireland show a range of alignments, and without excavation or associated features it is difficult to assign firm meaning to any single example. Standing stones, as a class of monument, are generally understood to date from the Bronze Age, though some may be earlier or later, and their original purposes remain debated, ranging from boundary markers to ritual or commemorative functions.

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