Standing stone, Park, Co. Cork

Co. Cork |

Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Park, Co. Cork

There is nothing to see at this site in the townland of Park in north County Cork, and that absence is precisely what makes it worth thinking about.

Two standing stones once rose from flat pasture here, and today the ground gives no indication whatsoever that they ever existed.

The stones were recorded in 1934 by Bowman, who noted two features he called "dallans", a term used in Irish for tall, upright memorial or boundary stones. They stood aligned east to west, roughly 1.22 metres apart. The eastern stone reached 1.4 metres in height; the western had already lost its upper portion by the time Bowman examined it, standing at only 0.4 metres. At some point in the late 1970s, both were removed entirely. No surface trace remains.

What is quietly striking about this record is the precision with which a vanished thing has been preserved in description. Bowman's measurements, the east-west alignment, the broken top of the western stone, all of it documented, and then the stones gone within half a century of that documentation. The east-west orientation is a detail worth pausing on: such alignments in prehistoric standing stones are sometimes associated with solar events, though whether that was the case here cannot be said. What can be said is that flat pasture in north Cork once held something deliberate and old, and that somebody, at some point in the late twentieth century, decided it was in the way.

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Pete F
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