Anomalous stone group, Carrigillihy, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Anomalous stone group, Carrigillihy, Co. Cork

On a north-facing slope above Glandore Harbour in west Cork, a small cluster of stones sits in rough pasture without quite fitting any recognised category.

That ambiguity is, in itself, the point of interest. Two roughly parallel standing stones, set about 1.5 metres apart and both aligned broadly WSW to ENE, are accompanied by two smaller stones at the base of the northern upright. Those smaller stones are angled differently, one running NW to SE and another N to S, and their positioning is suggestive of facings for a bank, a low earthen boundary wall of the kind often associated with prehistoric field systems or enclosures. The trouble is that no bank survives, and without it the grouping resists easy interpretation.

The taller of the two main stones stands 1.25 metres high and leans noticeably northward, resting against one of those lower companion stones. The southern stone, at 1.05 metres, remains upright. When surveyors revisited the site on 24 March 2005, they recorded the same configuration that had been noted in the Archaeological Inventory of County Cork, Volume 1, published in 1992, based on information originally supplied by Paul Walsh. Nothing had resolved itself in the intervening years. The monument is classified as anomalous precisely because it does not conform clearly to the better-documented prehistoric stone arrangements found elsewhere in Cork, such as stone rows or boulder burials, and the missing bank makes it impossible to be confident about what the grouping once formed part of. What remains is a fragment, probably, of something larger and more legible, now reduced to a few stones in a field.

The site occupies a terrace with occasional rock outcrops, and the view it commands is considerable, east across Glandore Harbour and west and north over rolling farmland. Whether that prospect was incidental or deliberate in the original placing of the stones is another question the site declines to answer.

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