Standing stone, Ballynakilla, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Ballynakilla, Co. Cork

A single rectangular stone standing just over a metre and a half tall in a field in Ballynakilla is not the sort of thing that announces itself.

There are no fences around it, no interpretive panels, no car park. It sits in pasture on a north-facing slope, and if you did not know to look, you might walk past it entirely.

What gives the stone a quiet interest is its orientation. It is aligned along an east-south-east to west-north-west axis, a deliberate placement that was almost certainly intentional rather than incidental. Standing stones of this kind are scattered across West Cork in considerable numbers, and while their precise purposes remain debated, alignments with solar or lunar events at particular times of year have been proposed for many of them. This stone is relatively slender, measuring roughly fifty-three centimetres wide and only fourteen centimetres thick, which makes its careful positioning feel all the more considered. Someone at some point in prehistory chose this slope, chose this angle, and set this stone upright in the ground. The reasons have not survived, but the stone has.

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Pete F
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