Standing stone, Scrahanard, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Scrahanard, Co. Cork

In the townland of Scrahanard in mid Cork, a standing stone that went unrecorded by the Ordnance Survey's first major mapping effort in 1842 had quietly made it onto the revised six-inch maps by 1903, labelled with the Irish word "gallauns", a term simply meaning standing stones.

The label suggests there was once a companion: a second stone stood to the south-south-east, though what became of it is not noted. The surviving stone, 1.75 metres tall and roughly subrectangular in cross-section, sits within a field fence along the southern side of a laneway, its long axis running northeast to southwest.

The 1842 absence is worth pausing on. The first Ordnance Survey of Ireland was a remarkably thorough undertaking, and the omission of a stone this size is slightly puzzling, though not unheard of; field monuments in awkward positions, particularly those embedded in boundaries, were sometimes missed or judged unremarkable by surveyors more interested in townland edges than prehistoric archaeology. By the time the 1903 revision came around, someone had noticed both stones and thought them worth naming. What makes the site more suggestive is its proximity to a ringfort, the remains of a roughly circular enclosed settlement of early medieval date, which lies only about fifteen metres to the southwest. Whether the stone predates the ringfort by millennia or was somehow incorporated into a later landscape is a question the record does not answer, but the clustering of features in such a small area hints at a place that was returned to, and built around, across a very long stretch of time.

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Pete F
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