Anomalous stone group, Curramore, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Anomalous stone group, Curramore, Co. Cork

Two upright stones stand in the floor of a boggy, east-facing valley on the western side of the Borlin Valley in County Cork, surrounded by mountains and swallowed up by coniferous plantation.

What makes them peculiar is precisely what cannot be said about them with any confidence. Their alignment, their proportions, and their relationship to each other do not add up to anything tidy, and the people who have examined them most carefully have declined to say what they are.

The eastern stone is the taller of the pair, a neat rectangular slab standing 0.95 metres high and notably thin at 0.15 metres, aligned roughly east-south-east to west-north-west. The western stone is shorter and broader, at 0.47 metres high, and stands 1.15 metres to the north-west, aligned north-west to south-east. Crucially, their long axes do not point towards each other, which breaks the pattern expected of a typical paired-stone arrangement. The tentative suggestion is that the eastern stone could be an axial stone and the western one a flanking stone, the kind of configuration found in Cork's distinctive recumbent stone circles, where a low horizontal slab sits opposite a pair of tall portal stones, often with clear astronomical orientations. But without further evidence, that interpretation remains speculative. Adding to the ambiguity, the surface of another slab protrudes from the ground 1.5 metres north-east of the eastern stone; its full outline is buried, and whether it belongs to the same monument or is entirely unrelated is unknown. Roughly 120 metres to the east lies a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site typically identified by a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone beside an ancient hearth or trough, which at least confirms that people were active in this valley during prehistory.

The site sits within a coniferous forest, about 20 metres south of its northern perimeter, which means visibility and access are both likely to be awkward. The boggy ground in the valley floor would make any visit in wet seasons uncomfortable, and the tree cover means the stones offer little of the open skyline drama that makes Cork's better-known stone circles so legible. What remains is something genuinely unresolved: two stones in a wet valley that may be the last remnant of a Bronze Age monument, or may be something else entirely.

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