Standing stone, Ballyshurdane, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Ballyshurdane, Co. Cork

A stone standing in a field in Ballyshurdane, in north County Cork, managed to escape the attention of the Ordnance Survey on two separate occasions, appearing on neither the 1842 nor the 1905 six-inch maps.

That kind of omission is not especially rare with standing stones, many of which were already ancient when Victorian cartographers first came through, but it does mean this particular stone sat unrecorded in any official capacity for well over a century after those surveys were made.

The stone itself is about one and a half metres tall, with a roughly subrectangular plan measuring approximately 0.9 metres by 0.46 metres, irregular enough in shape to suggest it was chosen rather than dressed. Its long axis runs northeast to southwest, an orientation that may or may not be deliberate but is common enough among Irish standing stones to invite the question. What gives the Ballyshurdane stone a quiet additional interest is its proximity to a short cist, a small stone-lined burial box of the kind typically associated with the Bronze Age, which lies roughly fifty metres to the east-southeast. Standing stones and cist burials are frequently found in loose association across the Irish landscape, and while no direct relationship between the two features can be assumed here, the pairing is suggestive of a wider ritual or funerary use of this patch of ground in prehistory.

The stone sits in pasture, which means access would depend on the landowner's consent. There is no indication of any formal public access or interpretation at the site.

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Pete F
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