Standing stone, Annagannihy, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Annagannihy, Co. Cork

A standing stone that manages to be simultaneously documented and lost is a peculiar kind of monument.

The stone at Annagannihy in County Cork fits that description precisely. When it was recorded, it was described as four feet high, six feet three inches wide, and only five inches thick, making it an unusually broad, slab-like example of the form. Prehistoric standing stones were erected across Ireland for purposes that remain largely debated, ranging from boundary markers to ceremonial focal points, but this one has effectively slipped out of the landscape altogether. The area is now under forestry, and no visible surface trace remains.

The stone's cartographic history is itself a small puzzle. It does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of 1842 or 1904, which is unusual given that such surveys were generally thorough in recording upright stones. It surfaces only on the 1940 edition of the same map series, suggesting either a late discovery or a delayed inclusion. There is a further complication: a researcher named Condon, writing in 1916, may have recorded the same stone but placed it at a different location, West Knocknagoun, raising the possibility of a simple geographical error that confused the record for decades. Whether the stone Condon described and the Annagannihy stone are one and the same has not been firmly resolved.

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