Anomalous stone group, Clonglaskan, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Anomalous stone group, Clonglaskan, Co. Cork

In a rough pasture in West Cork, close to the Inchinagat river, four small upright stones are arranged in a loose scatter that does not quite fit any recognised prehistoric category, which is precisely why archaeologists have labelled them anomalous.

They sit immediately to the west of a stone row, a type of monument common in this part of Munster, typically comprising a line of standing stones whose precise ritual or astronomical function remains debated. The stone row and this cluster are clearly related in space, yet the cluster refuses to behave like a tidy component of it.

The four stones vary noticeably in size, ranging from a modest 0.4 metres in height up to 1.1 metres, and they are spaced between 0.7 and 1 metre apart in a rough south-westerly progression. What complicates matters is the easternmost stone: it partially underlies a slab of the adjacent stone row, suggesting either that the two monuments were built in sequence, one partially burying the other, or that the ground has shifted enough over the millennia to create that relationship. A fifth stone, taller than any of the four at 1.4 metres, stands a little further to the south-west but is embedded in a field fence, and it is genuinely unclear whether it ever belonged to the same complex. Adding to the puzzle, a boulder-burial, a form of prehistoric grave in which a large boulder is placed over a burial deposit, lies to the north-east of the group, suggesting this corner of Clonglaskan was used repeatedly, or continuously, for purposes that mixed the monumental with the funerary.

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