Standing stone, Glengoura, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Stone Monuments
On a north-facing slope in Glengoura, County Cork, there is a standing stone that no longer stands.
The stone is recorded, mapped, and catalogued, but anyone walking the pasture today would find no visible trace of it above ground. It is, in a sense, a monument that survives only on paper.
Ordnance Survey maps from 1904 and 1935 both mark the spot with the label "Gallaun", the Irish-derived term for a standing stone, typically a single upright megalith of prehistoric origin whose exact purpose, whether marker, boundary indicator, or ritual site, is rarely certain. The fact that two successive map editions acknowledge it suggests the stone was either still present or at least remembered locally well into the twentieth century. At some point between that last cartographic record and the present, it vanished from the surface, whether toppled, buried by shifting pasture, removed for use as a gatepost or wall stone, or simply swallowed gradually by the soil. What remains is the name on old maps, a grid reference, and the outline of an absence.