Stone circle - five-stone, Glenleigh, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Stone circle – five-stone, Glenleigh, Co. Cork

On a low ridge above the rolling pasture of the northern Boggeragh foothills in County Cork, there is a stone circle that is not quite whole.

Four stones remain where five once stood, the western stone now gone and the eastern entrance stone shifted from its original position. What survives is compact, the internal span along the main axis measuring roughly 3.4 metres, and the uprights, known in archaeological terminology as orthostats, range considerably in their dimensions, from under a metre to just over two metres in length and standing between 0.9 and 1.1 metres high. It is a modest arrangement by any measure, and that modesty is part of what makes it worth attention.

This belongs to a family of monuments known as five-stone circles, a type concentrated in County Cork and parts of Kerry, generally dated to the Bronze Age and characterised by their small diameter and a consistent northeast to southwest axial alignment. The Glenleigh example follows that convention closely, its axis running NE-SW, which in comparable circles is thought to relate to solar or lunar events at particular points in the year. The site was catalogued by Seán Ó Nualláin in 1984, whose survey of Cork and Kerry stone circles remains a foundational reference for understanding how these monuments were distributed and organised across the landscape. The incompleteness of this circle, one stone absent and another displaced, is not unusual; centuries of agricultural activity across mid-Cork have left many such sites partially dismantled or disturbed.

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