Stone circle - five-stone, Cloghboola More, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Stone circle – five-stone, Cloghboola More, Co. Cork

At some point around 1984, a small prehistoric stone circle in the pastures of Cloghboola More, County Cork, was destroyed.

What had survived into the modern era was already incomplete, with the western stone missing, leaving four orthostats arranged in a formation that once constituted a five-stone circle. These monuments, a type found with some frequency across County Cork and Kerry, typically consist of an odd number of upright stones arranged in a tight ring, often with a large recumbent stone opposite a pair of portal stones. The Cloghboola More example was modest in scale: its orthostats ranged from around 0.7 to 1.15 metres in height, and the main axis of the circle, aligned north to south, measured just 2.8 metres across.

The circle sat on gently sloping pasture on the southern side of a valley carved by a tributary of the Finnow River. Seán Ó Nualláin, whose 1984 survey of Cork stone circles remains a foundational reference for the region, recorded the monument before its loss, noting both the missing western stone and the precise dimensions of those that remained. What his record also captures is that the circle did not stand in isolation. Two standing stones were documented nearby, one roughly 40 metres to the north-east and another approximately 70 metres to the south-east. This kind of clustering, a circle accompanied by outlying standing stones within a relatively small area, is not unusual in Mid Cork and suggests that prehistoric communities were organising these landscapes deliberately, marking or connecting particular points across the terrain rather than placing monuments at random.

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