Standing stone, Lyradane, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Lyradane, Co. Cork

There is a particular kind of melancholy to an archaeological site that has vanished entirely, leaving not even a depression in the ground.

At Lyradane in County Cork, on a west-facing pasture slope, a standing stone once leaned at an angle that suggested age and settlement into the earth. It is gone now, with no visible surface trace remaining, and what little is known of it survives only because someone thought to measure it before it disappeared entirely.

The stone was recorded in 1916 by Condon, who noted it was inclining to the ground and gave its dimensions as twenty-eight inches high, twenty-three inches wide, and ten inches thick. These are modest proportions for a standing stone, the broad category of upright or formerly upright prehistoric monoliths found across Ireland in a variety of sizes and contexts, their original purposes debated but often associated with ritual, territorial marking, or burial. What makes the Lyradane example particularly elusive is that it never appeared on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of 1842, 1904, or 1938, meaning it left no cartographic trace across nearly a century of mapping. Whether it was already low and easily missed by surveyors, or simply overlooked, is impossible to say now. Condon's brief note is essentially the stone's entire documentary life.

The site today offers nothing to see on the ground. The pasture has absorbed whatever remained after the stone was removed, and its precise location on that slope in Lyradane is, for practical purposes, lost.

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