Standing stone, Coolowen, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Coolowen, Co. Cork

A two-metre standing stone in a field beside a roadside boundary in Coolowen, County Cork, is not quite where it should be.

That slight displacement is what makes it quietly interesting: the stone is not in its original position, and the evidence for this comes from a nineteenth-century map.

The 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map places the stone approximately 100 metres to the south-south-east of where it now stands. At some point between that survey and the present day, it was moved to its current location beside the field boundary, where it now leans at an angle. The stone itself is substantial, standing two metres tall and measuring 1.7 metres by 0.4 metres, a broad upright slab of the kind erected across Ireland during the Bronze Age, though the precise period and purpose of any individual standing stone is rarely easy to establish with certainty. Walsh, writing in 1985, recorded and catalogued it as part of a broader study of Cork's prehistoric monuments. The fact of its relocation is not unusual in itself; standing stones across Ireland have been shifted over the centuries to clear land, mark boundaries, or simply because they were in the way. What is unusual here is that the earlier position is documented, giving the stone a kind of double presence, both where it stands now and where it once stood, roughly the length of a football pitch to the south-east.

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Pete F
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