Stone row, Garrane, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Stone row, Garrane, Co. Cork

In a gently sloping pasture on the north-eastern flank of Bweengduff mountain, four prehistoric stones are arranged in a line pointing north-east to south-west.

Three of them still stand; the fourth has fallen and lies flat, measuring nearly three and a half metres from end to end. Stone rows, as these monuments are known, are a distinctive feature of the Cork and Kerry landscape, where they appear with unusual frequency compared with the rest of Ireland and Britain. Their purpose remains genuinely uncertain: astronomical alignment, territorial marking, and ritual approaches to burial sites have all been proposed, none conclusively proven.

The three standing stones vary considerably in height, ranging from around 3.25 metres to just over 4.2 metres, and they are spaced out over a total erected length of 7.6 metres. This variation in height, with the tallest stone at the north-eastern end, follows a pattern noted by the researcher Seán Ó Nualláin, who catalogued the monument in 1988 as part of a systematic survey of Cork stone rows. The site sits in the valley of the Duvglasha River, and roughly 300 metres to the south there is a related monument, a standing stone pair, which raises the possibility that the two sites formed part of a broader prehistoric arrangement across this stretch of ground. Stone pairs, like stone rows, belong to the same loose family of megalithic monument and are similarly concentrated in this part of Munster.

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