Standing stone, Farranmareen, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Stone Monuments
In the pasture of Farranmareen, on a south-facing slope in West Cork, two standing stones were once prominent enough to be mapped twice, by surveyors working on both editions of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, and then, at some point between their recording and the present day, they effectively vanished.
No visible surface trace remains. The ground holds them, or held them, and the grass has moved on.
Standing stones are among the more enigmatic monuments in the Irish landscape. Erected typically during the Bronze Age, they served purposes that remain genuinely uncertain, ranging from boundary markers and ritual focal points to memorials or astronomical alignments. Most survive as solitary uprights, which makes a paired arrangement like the one recorded at Farranmareen slightly unusual, and potentially more significant. The Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, produced across two separate survey campaigns in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were meticulous documents, and the appearance of two stones on both editions suggests the monuments were still visible and considered worth marking during that period. What happened subsequently is unrecorded.