Stone row, Dooneens, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Stone Monuments
On the north-west-facing slopes of Carrigagour Hill in mid Cork, on a natural platform overlooking the Laney River valley, three large stones were set out in a line during prehistory.
Only one of them is still standing. The other two have long since fallen, their bulk now measured horizontally rather than by the height they once commanded, and yet the arrangement still reads clearly as a row, its north-east to south-west orientation intact after thousands of years.
Stone rows are a distinctive feature of the Cork and Kerry landscape, and this one at Dooneens follows the pattern recorded by the archaeologist Seán Ó Nualláin in his 1988 survey of the type. The single upright stone at the north-east end is 2.2 metres tall, relatively slender, measuring just over a metre in length and 0.55 metres thick. Moving south-west along the row, the next stone lies prostrate on the ground and measures 3.5 metres by 1 metre, a considerably more substantial slab. The third and most south-westerly stone is also fallen, measuring 3.35 metres by 1.1 metres, making it the largest of the three. The spacing between them is uneven: roughly one metre between the first and second, and 2.8 metres between the second and third. Beside the row to the south-east sits a radial-stone cairn, a type of Bronze Age funerary monument in which stones are arranged like spokes radiating outward from a central burial area. The pairing of a stone row with a nearby cairn is not unusual in this part of Ireland, and the two features together suggest this platform on Carrigagour Hill once served as a place of some ceremonial or commemorative significance.