Standing stone, Glenaglogh, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Stone Monuments
At Glenaglogh in mid Cork, a standing stone once occupied a patch of ground that now shows no trace of it whatsoever.
It appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1938, marked plainly as a single standing stone, but it is entirely absent from the equivalent maps of 1842 and 1904. Sometime between 1904 and 1938 it was recorded, and at some point after that it was removed, leaving nothing visible at the surface.
Standing stones are among the most enigmatic monument types in the Irish landscape. Erected largely during the Bronze Age, they served purposes that remain a matter of debate, ranging from territorial markers to ceremonial focal points to indicators of burial sites beneath. What makes the Glenaglogh example unusual is not what it was, but the narrow window in which it was known to exist on the cartographic record. Its appearance on only a single edition of the six-inch OS maps suggests either that it was newly discovered by surveyors in the 1930s, or that earlier survey teams simply passed it by. Either way, the stone itself did not survive long enough to be examined in any depth, and the land has since closed over whatever evidence it might have offered.