Standing stone, Teernahillane, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Teernahillane, Co. Cork

A low rectangular slab sitting in the saddle between two West Cork summits might not announce itself as anything remarkable, but the standing stone at Teernahillane rewards a closer look, partly because of what it is and partly because of what lies just beyond it.

At just under a metre in height and oriented along an east-north-east to west-south-west axis, this is not a towering monolith. It is a deliberate, precisely placed stone, and the landscape around it opens out to the south-west in a way that feels considered rather than incidental.

The saddle sits between Miskish Mountain and Knockgour, and roughly sixteen and a half metres to the south of the standing stone lies a wedge tomb, a type of megalithic burial monument common in the west of Ireland and typically dating to the late Neolithic or early Bronze Age, around 2500 to 2000 BC. Wedge tombs take their name from their shape, wider and higher at the front than the back, and were used for communal burial. The proximity of the standing stone to the tomb is unlikely to be coincidental. Whether the two monuments were raised at the same time or one came after the other is not recorded, but the pairing is a familiar pattern across the Irish uplands, where single stones and burial structures appear to have been placed in deliberate relationship with one another and with the wider horizon.

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