Anomalous stone group, Gour, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Stone Monuments
On the lower eastern slope of Knockgour in County Cork, a small cluster of stones sits in rough grazing land in an arrangement that does not quite fit any tidy category.
Two upright stones flank a flat recumbent stone in the centre, the three together forming a slight arc, and the whole group is just anomalous enough that the word itself has attached to it officially. A possible fourth standing stone lies a couple of metres to the west, adding to the sense that whatever was once intended here has either been partially lost or was never quite finished.
The arrangement has some formal resemblance to a recumbent stone circle, a monument type found across Cork and Kerry in which a large flat stone is flanked by uprights and set within a broader ring, often with proposed astronomical alignments. This group, however, falls short of that classification, hence the cautious designation. The stones themselves are modest in scale, none rising much above knee height, and each is oriented along a slightly different axis: the northernmost runs roughly north-west to south-east, the recumbent north to south, and the third stone roughly south-south-west to north-north-east. Whether those orientations once carried meaning, or whether the group has simply shifted and settled over centuries of agricultural use, is not recorded. A few loose stones lying about suggest the site may have lost elements over time.
