Cupmarked stone, Mullanarockan, Co. Monaghan

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Stone Monuments

Cupmarked stone, Mullanarockan, Co. Monaghan

In Tedavnet graveyard in County Monaghan, a prehistoric carved stone stands propped up like a headstone, quietly passing itself off as something it is not.

It bears three cup-marks, those shallow circular depressions ground into rock by people in the prehistoric period whose precise intentions remain genuinely unknown, and it has nothing to do with the Christian burials surrounding it. Two of the three cups are damaged at the edges of the stone, suggesting it has been cut or broken at some point in its history.

The stone measures roughly 0.83 metres at the base and stands about 0.7 metres high, with the cup-marks ranging between 11 and 15 centimetres in diameter and 2 to 4 centimetres deep. It sits approximately five metres west of a wall bearing the memorial to Richard Robinson, a named monument in its own right within the same graveyard. Crucially, this is not considered its original location. How it arrived in Tedavnet graveyard, and where it stood before, is not recorded. That kind of displacement is not unusual for cup-marked stones, which have been moved, reused, and repurposed across many centuries, sometimes incorporated into field boundaries or building work, sometimes simply shifted without explanation.

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