Standing stone, Barnacurra, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Barnacurra, Co. Cork

There is a field on a north-facing slope above the Glenlara River in County Cork where, at some point in the not-too-distant past, a standing stone was removed and left no trace at the surface.

No hollow, no socket stone, no scatter of packing material; just pasture carrying on as if nothing had ever been there. The absence is, in its own way, the story.

What makes this site particularly difficult to pin down is that it never appeared on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of 1842 or 1904, meaning it was either missed by those surveyors or had already been disturbed by the time they came through. The only real record of its existence comes from a 1934 observation by Bowman, who found it already broken, with the remaining portion standing one foot ten inches high and measuring six feet three inches in girth. That girth suggests a reasonably substantial stone, likely oval or irregular in cross-section, the kind of prehistoric standing stone, erected during the Bronze Age as a marker, boundary indicator, or ritual focus, that once punctuated the Cork landscape in considerable numbers. By the time anyone thought to document it formally, it was already a fragment. By the time it was included in the county's archaeological inventory, it was gone entirely.

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Pete F
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