Anomalous stone group, Tooms, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Anomalous stone group, Tooms, Co. Cork

In scrubland on a north-facing slope in Co. Cork, five sandstone boulders sit in a rough ring above the Gearagh, the drowned oakwood floodplain of the River Lee.

Of the five, only one still stands upright. The rest are recumbent, lying at various angles across an area roughly 4.40 metres east to west and 3.60 metres north to south, their arrangement oriented on a northwest to southeast axis. Smaller stones are scattered among them, including pieces of quartz, a material that appears repeatedly at prehistoric burial and ritual sites across Ireland, where it seems to have carried some particular significance for the people who placed it there. The whole grouping is classed as "anomalous", meaning it does not fit cleanly into any recognised monument type, which is itself a quiet provocation.

The single upright stone, Stone A, sits on the southwest side of the ring; it stands 0.70 metres high and measures a metre across. The other four boulders are all recumbent, lying flat or near-flat, and their dimensions have been carefully recorded. Stone E, the most easterly of the cluster, is so overgrown with vegetation that it resists proper assessment, though a small quartz boulder sits at its base. What the monument was originally built for is unknown. Locally, people call it a grave, which may reflect genuine transmitted memory, or may simply be the instinct communities apply to any old arrangement of stones that feels deliberate and a little solemn. Either way, the name gives it a human weight that the neutral archaeological language does not quite provide.

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