Anomalous stone group, Annagannihy, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Stone Monuments
On a south-west-facing slope in reclaimed rough grazing in mid-Cork, a loose arrangement of stones sits beneath a label it has never quite earned.
Ordnance Survey maps from 1904 and 1934 both mark it as a stone circle, yet the site has resisted that tidy classification ever since. Seven stones survive, six of them forming an irregular enclosure roughly 7.5 metres by 4.5 metres, with a seventh placed on its edge within the setting. A shallow depression surrounds the whole arrangement. It is the kind of place that accumulates questions rather than answers.
The earliest detailed notice comes from P. J. Condon, writing in 1916, who also recorded a second, similar feature some twenty yards to the south, described as 33 feet in diameter and made up of seven stones. That second grouping has never been relocated. When Hartnett examined the main site in 1939, he interpreted it not as a circle at all but as the kerb of a cairn, a ring of stones that would once have retained a mound of earth or rubble over a burial. His interpretation gained some weight from what had been found within the setting: a small square stone box, sometimes called a cist, containing ashes and small scraps of bone. Cists of this type are a recurring feature of Bronze Age burial practice in Ireland, the bones and ash representing cremated remains placed carefully within a stone-lined chamber. Despite this find, when Seán Ó Nualláin surveyed the site in 1984, he measured the six outer orthostats, upright standing stones ranging from half a metre to just over a metre in height, and concluded that the nature of the site remains uncertain. That verdict has not been revised since.