Standing stone, Clearagh, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Clearagh, Co. Cork

A standing stone that went unrecorded by the Ordnance Survey not once but twice tells you something about how quietly a prehistoric monument can persist in a landscape.

The example at Clearagh in County Cork was absent from the six-inch maps produced in 1842 and again in 1904, meaning it sat in its field for the entirety of the modern mapping era without official acknowledgement, simply doing what standing stones do, which is stand.

The stone itself is modest in scale but deliberate in character. It rises to about 1.12 metres and measures roughly 1.24 metres by 0.7 metres, with a subrectangular plan and its long axis running east to west. It sits on a north-facing slope in rough grazing land. Standing stones, as a class of monument, are among the most enduring and least understood features of the Irish countryside. Erected during the Bronze Age in most cases, they are thought to have served as boundary markers, ritual focal points, or commemorative monuments, though the specific purpose of any individual stone is rarely recoverable. What distinguishes this one is less its size than its invisibility to the cartographers who surveyed Cork in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an absence that raises quiet questions about what else was overlooked, and why.

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