Standing stone, Ballycaskin, Co. Cork

Co. Cork |

Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Ballycaskin, Co. Cork

In the pasture at Ballycaskin, on a north-east-facing slope in County Cork, there is, or perhaps was, a standing stone.

The qualification matters, because the site currently shows no visible surface trace. What we have instead is the memory of an object, preserved in a century-old measurement.

The stone was recorded in 1916 by a researcher named Condon, who described it as irregular in shape and noted its dimensions with the careful specificity of someone who had actually stood beside it: somewhere between twenty-eight and thirty-six inches tall, five feet and two inches wide, and just eight inches thick. That combination of a relatively modest height, considerable width, and thin profile gives a sense of something more like a broad slab than the tall, tapering pillar most people picture when they hear the term standing stone. Standing stones, as a category, are among the most common prehistoric monuments in Ireland, erected across a vast span of time for purposes that remain genuinely unclear, ranging from burial markers to territorial indicators to elements of astronomical alignment. Whether this particular example ever served any such function is unknown. What is certain is that by the time of the most recent assessment, the ground offered nothing to confirm Condon's record.

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Pete F
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