Stone row, Ummeraboy, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Stone row, Ummeraboy, Co. Cork

On a south-west-facing slope in the valley of the Athnaloingebaine River in North Cork, there is a prehistoric stone row that no longer exists in any meaningful sense.

Three stones, once set out in a deliberate north-east to south-west alignment, were lifted from the ground in the early 1980s and moved to a nearby fence to the south. What had been an ancient monument became, quietly and without ceremony, a bit of field boundary.

When the antiquarian Bowman recorded the site in 1934, it was already in poor condition. Of the three stones forming the alignment, only one was still upright. The other two lay recumbent, their dimensions carefully noted: the south-westernmost measured roughly four and a half feet long by nearly four feet wide; the middle stone, set about four feet away, was a more compact two and a half feet in each direction; the third, three feet further along, was just over four feet in length. A stone row, as the type is known, is a prehistoric monument consisting of two or more standing stones arranged in a line, found widely across the uplands of Cork and Kerry, and generally associated with the Bronze Age, though their precise purpose remains debated. This particular row sat in pasture, close to a separate group of standing stones located roughly ninety metres to the south-south-east, suggesting the wider landscape here was once arranged with some intention that is now largely illegible to us.

What exists at Ummeraboy today is the fence, and presumably the stones within it, though they would be indistinguishable from any other field clearance to a passing eye. The alignment is gone as a monument, absorbed into the ordinary fabric of a working farm.

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