Standing stone, Annagannihy, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Stone Monuments
A stone that does not appear on either the 1842 or 1904 Ordnance Survey six-inch maps is, by definition, one that slipped past the Victorian and Edwardian surveyors who catalogued much of Ireland's prehistoric landscape.
That omission alone gives this modest upright in Annagannihy a quietly anomalous character. It stands just under a metre tall, with a subrectangular plan measuring roughly 0.8 metres by 0.36 metres, its long axis oriented west-northwest to east-southeast. It sits in rough grazing ground on a southwest-facing slope, and it is not the only prehistoric marker in the immediate vicinity.
About 45 metres to the northwest stands a second, separately recorded standing stone, suggesting that the two may have formed part of a related arrangement, though the nature of any original pairing or alignment remains uncertain. Standing stones in Cork are broadly prehistoric in origin, most likely dating to the Bronze Age, and were erected for purposes that still resist confident interpretation, whether as territorial markers, astronomical indicators, or focal points for ritual activity. The fact that this particular stone went unrecorded through two major mapping surveys of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is a reminder of how many such markers remain embedded in farmland, noticed locally but overlooked by official record until relatively recently.