Megalithic structure, Bunalunn, Co. Cork

Co. Cork |

Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic structure, Bunalunn, Co. Cork

In a patch of poorly drained scrubland at Bunalunn in County Cork, five stone uprights stand in a rough east-west line along the northern edge of a natural rock ridge, half-swallowed by furze, sally bushes, heather, and ferns.

The arrangement is not a dramatic monument in any conventional sense; the tallest upright reaches less than a metre in height, and several of the stones lean or lie displaced. Yet the deliberateness of the alignment is hard to dismiss, and the site sits in that uncertain category, recognised by archaeologists, of megalithic structures whose original purpose has not been definitively established.

The five uprights divide into two groups with a gap of roughly 65 centimetres between them. On the western side, two contiguous stones stand close together; on the eastern side, three further slabs continue the line. A flat stone lying just to the north of that gap may once have been a sixth upright, toppled at some point and now recumbent. At the eastern end, beyond the last upright, two additional stones lean heavily northward, separated from the alignment by a wedged stone, suggesting either a structural feature or later disturbance. A short distance to the west, two more stones protrude from the ground, though the easternmost of these may simply be natural outcropping rock rather than a placed stone. About five metres to the south, a natural rock face rises above the alignment, its base scattered with loose slabs, which makes it difficult to know where deliberate human arrangement ends and geological accident begins. Stone alignments of this kind, rows of upright stones set into the ground, are found across Cork and Kerry and are generally assigned to the Bronze Age, though precise dating for any individual example is rarely possible without excavation.

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