Anomalous stone group, Dooneens, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Stone Monuments
In a field at Dooneens in County Cork, there is a small stone arrangement that does not fit neatly into any recognised category of monument.
Five upright stones form an oval, open-ended enclosure, with smaller stones curving in an arc around the outside. It is compact, barely a metre across internally, and it has no capstone, so it was never a tomb in the conventional sense. It sits oriented north to south along its longest axis, and the largest of the uprights stands on the western side. The whole thing is just slightly too deliberate to be a collapsed wall or a cleared-field dump, and just slightly too irregular to be a cist, which is the name given to a stone-lined burial box typically found beneath a mound. Whatever its original function, it resists easy explanation.
The structure came to wider attention during an archaeological assessment carried out in 2010 by Quinn and Carroll of Tobar Archaeological Services, in connection with a proposed wind farm in the area. Their report described it plainly as an anomalous stone feature, a term that is less evasive than it sounds. In archaeological fieldwork, anomalous is a precise kind of admission: the feature is clearly there, clearly made, but cannot be confidently assigned to a known type or period. Its location, in pasture to the north-east of a cluster of huts recorded elsewhere on the same survey, adds a layer of context without resolving anything. Whether the stone group relates to those structures, or predates them, or was built long after them for some entirely different purpose, is not recorded.