Anomalous stone group, Knockshanawee, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Anomalous stone group, Knockshanawee, Co. Cork

In a pasture at Knockshanawee in mid Cork, three stones stand, or almost stand, in a loose cluster that does not quite fit any standard prehistoric category.

Two of them are upright and broadly parallel, set only 0.4 metres apart, their long axes oriented roughly southeast to northwest. The taller of the pair reaches 1.35 metres; the shorter, though wider at 1.6 metres along its base, rises to just 0.85 metres. A third stone lies alongside them to the northwest, so deeply sunk into the earth and swallowed by grass that its full dimensions are unknown. The whole site is further obscured by a dense growth of briars. It is the kind of arrangement that resists easy classification, which is precisely why it carries the label "anomalous", a catch-all for prehistoric stonework that survives without conforming to the recognised types of standing stone pair, stone row, or stone circle.

The earliest recorded observation of the site comes from P. J. Hartnett, who visited in 1939 and noted only two standing stones. The third, whether it had already fallen and been obscured by then or was simply missed, went unrecorded. The discrepancy between Hartnett's two stones and the three identified in later survey work is itself part of what makes the site quietly interesting: it suggests that ground-level conditions, particularly heavy vegetation and soil accumulation, can cause a stone to disappear from the record entirely for decades at a stretch.

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