Standing stone, Tullig, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Stone Monuments
On the north-western foothills of Musheramore in mid Cork, a single upright stone leans at a pronounced angle in rough grazing land, noticed by almost nobody.
What makes it quietly anomalous is its absence from the Ordnance Survey's six-inch maps of both 1842 and 1904, meaning it passed unrecorded through the great era of Irish cartographic surveying, either overlooked by surveyors walking the ground or already obscured by vegetation and neglect.
The stone itself is modest but solid: 1.6 metres tall, with a nearly square cross-section of 0.7 by 0.6 metres, its long axis oriented east to west. It leans heavily towards the south-south-west, whether from the pressure of centuries of boggy ground shifting beneath it or some earlier interference, it is impossible to say. Standing stones of this kind are prehistoric in character, though rarely datable with precision. They appear throughout Cork and Kerry in considerable numbers, sometimes associated with burial activity, sometimes with boundaries or routeways, and often enough in isolation that their original purpose remains genuinely open. This one, sitting in rough pasture on the lower slopes of Musheramore, belongs to that ambiguous company.