Standing stone, Ballynamona, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Ballynamona, Co. Cork

In a field boundary in Ballynamona, north Cork, a prehistoric standing stone is still present, in a sense.

It has not been taken away or broken up. It was simply buried on the spot, pushed into the earth beneath the fence line where it had stood for centuries, because it was leaning at an angle someone considered dangerous. The fence remains. The stone is underneath it.

The antiquarian John Windele recorded the stone in 1856, describing it as roughly twelve feet high, one of a pair in the area. Standing stones are among the most enigmatic prehistoric monument types in Ireland, erected during the Bronze Age in contexts that remain largely unclear, whether as territorial markers, ritual focal points, or something else entirely. By the time the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map was drawn, this one was already being mapped as part of a field boundary fence, which suggests it had long since been absorbed into the working landscape rather than treated as a thing apart. Then, sometime before 1906, a local farmer made a practical decision. The stone was leaning, it posed a risk, and rather than remove it entirely, he buried it where it stood. The Cork antiquarian James Grove White recorded this in his notes around that date, matter-of-factly, as something that had happened a few years earlier.

What remains visible today is the fence itself, running along the line shown on that Victorian map. The stone beneath it is unverified, unexcavated, and largely forgotten, present only in the documentary record and, presumably, in the ground.

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