Standing stone, Glenaknockane, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Glenaknockane, Co. Cork

A standing stone that failed to appear on two consecutive Ordnance Survey maps, spaced sixty years apart, is either very easy to overlook or very good at avoiding official notice.

The stone at Glenaknockane in County Cork managed both. When surveyors mapped the area in 1842 and again in 1904, they either missed it entirely or deemed it unworthy of record. It sits in rough pasture on a north-west-facing slope, quietly occupying ground that cartographers twice passed over.

The stone itself is a modest but solid presence. Standing 1.55 metres tall and rectangular in plan, it measures 0.65 metres by 0.45 metres at the base, with its long axis oriented north-east to south-west. Standing stones of this kind are a familiar, if poorly understood, feature of the Irish prehistoric landscape. They were erected during the Bronze Age in most cases, though their precise purpose remains debated; some appear to mark boundaries or routeways, others seem connected to burial sites or astronomical alignments, and many simply resist interpretation altogether. The north-east to south-west orientation here is not unusual among Irish examples, and whether it was deliberate or incidental to the lie of the land is impossible to say with certainty.

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