Standing stone, Ballygirriha, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Ballygirriha, Co. Cork

A standing stone rising less than a metre out of a Cork bog is easy to walk past without a second thought, and for much of recorded history this one effectively did not exist at all, at least on paper.

When the Ordnance Survey conducted its meticulous six-inch mapping of Ireland in 1842, this stone in Ballygirriha went unrecorded. Whether the surveyors missed it, considered it too modest to note, or simply never reached that particular stretch of bogland is now impossible to say.

What is known is that the stone itself is a quiet, unassuming thing. Standing at 0.96 metres tall and measuring roughly 0.52 metres by 0.2 metres, it is subrectangular in plan, meaning its cross-section is broadly rectangular with softened or irregular edges rather than perfectly squared off. Its long axis runs east-northeast to west-southwest, an orientation sometimes associated with prehistoric standing stones across Ireland and Britain, though whether that alignment was intentional here is a question the stone does not answer. It sits in bogland, the kind of waterlogged, peat-forming terrain that has preserved countless ancient objects and structures across Ireland precisely because it is so inhospitable to later development. That same boggy ground likely helped keep the stone in place and largely undisturbed.

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