Standing stone, Knockraheen, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Knockraheen, Co. Cork

A two-metre standing stone in a field fence at Knockraheen is easy to overlook, partly because it has been absorbed so thoroughly into the working fabric of the landscape.

Rather than occupying some ceremonial prominence, it sits on a south-south-west-facing slope in ordinary pasture, its long axis oriented roughly west-northwest to east-southeast, irregular in plan and weathered to the point where it reads, at a glance, as just another feature of the boundary.

What makes its history slightly puzzling is that it does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, one of the most thorough cartographic exercises ever carried out in Ireland. That absence does not mean the stone is recent; standing stones of this kind are generally prehistoric, erected during the Bronze Age as boundary markers, ritual waypoints, or monuments to the dead, though their precise function in any given case is rarely certain. It simply means that the surveyors of the 1840s either missed it, chose not to record it, or found it already so embedded in the field boundary that it did not register as a freestanding antiquity. At roughly two metres tall and with a face measuring approximately 1.65 metres by 0.6 metres, it is not a small stone, which makes the omission curious.

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