Standing stone, Glenaglogh, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Stone Monuments
A modest upright stone in a pasture field near Glenaglogh, in mid Cork, went unrecorded by the Ordnance Survey on their six-inch maps of both 1842 and 1904, which means that for much of the period when such monuments were being systematically catalogued across Ireland, this one simply did not appear.
Whether it was overlooked, buried, or somehow obscured from view during both surveys is unknown. It came to official attention only later, a quiet addition to a county already dense with prehistoric remains.
The stone itself is relatively modest in scale, standing 0.8 metres high with a footprint of roughly 0.4 by 0.6 metres, and subrectangular in plan, meaning its cross-section is approximately rectangular with slightly irregular edges. Its long axis runs east-northeast to west-southwest, an orientation that may or may not carry prehistoric significance; many standing stones across Ireland and Britain show deliberate astronomical or landscape alignments, though without excavation or further survey it is impossible to say whether that applies here. It sits on a north-facing slope in pasture ground, which gives it a slightly out-of-the-way quality even within its immediate setting. Standing stones in Ireland generally date to somewhere within the Bronze Age, roughly 2500 to 500 BC, though pinning down individual examples without associated finds or datable contexts is rarely straightforward.