Anomalous stone group, Nedinagh, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Stone Monuments
Three standing stones in a field in Nedinagh, County Cork, have resisted easy classification for decades.
They are not quite an alignment, not quite a circle, and not quite anything else in the standard repertoire of Irish prehistoric monuments. Instead, they form a rough arc in level pasture, a configuration unusual enough to earn the designation "anomalous" in the formal archaeological record. That label is rare, and quietly telling.
The stones were recorded by Seán Ó Nualláin in 1984, as part of his work cataloguing standing stone groupings across Ireland. The three uprights decrease in height from west to east: the most westerly stone is the most imposing, standing nearly two metres tall and measuring roughly two metres by one point two metres at its base; the middle stone reaches about one point one metres; and the third, shortest stone is just over half a metre high. Each has an irregular plan and its own axis of orientation, and none of the three conforms to the neat geometric logic that characterises better-known prehistoric arrangements such as stone rows or the more familiar four- and five-stone circles of West Cork. Whether the arc shape is original or the result of lost companion stones is unknown. The site was catalogued in the Archaeological Inventory of County Cork, Volume 1, published in 1992, which brought it into wider scholarly view, though it has attracted little attention since.