Anomalous stone group, Cullomane, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Anomalous stone group, Cullomane, Co. Cork

On a south-east-facing slope above the Coomnagoragh river valley in west Cork, a small cluster of stones sits in rough pasture, classified in the archaeological record not as a stone circle, alignment, or pair, but simply as an "anomalous group".

That label alone says something. When a site resists the usual categories, it tends to mean that something has changed, been moved, or gone missing, and here the documentary trail confirms exactly that.

When Ordnance Survey officers recorded the site in 1897, they noted two upright stones standing close together. By the time a later OS memorandum was compiled in 1936, one of those uprights had been removed. What remains today is one rectangular standing stone, roughly 0.98 metres tall and oriented north-east to south-west, alongside a fallen stone of similar dimensions lying adjacent to it. A second fallen stone lies about a metre to the south. Whether the arrangement once formed a recognised monument type, such as a stone pair or part of a small alignment, can no longer be established with confidence, because the group is now incomplete. The NE-SW orientation of the surviving upright is consistent with alignment types found elsewhere in Cork and Kerry, where prehistoric communities sometimes positioned stones in relation to solar or lunar events on the horizon, though without the full original complement of stones that inference remains speculative here.

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