Standing stone, Bawnmore, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Bawnmore, Co. Cork

A single upright stone in a level field is one of the more quietly insistent features of the Irish countryside, easy to walk past and easy to underestimate.

The standing stone at Bawnmore in County Cork is modest by any measure, rising just one metre from the pasture around it, and measuring roughly thirty centimetres by twenty at its base. What it lacks in scale it makes up for in persistence, having occupied this same patch of flat ground for a very long time indeed.

The stone is subrectangular in plan, meaning its cross-section is roughly oblong rather than round or irregular, and its long axis runs northeast to southwest. That orientation is worth noting: many Irish standing stones appear to have been positioned with deliberate regard for solar or lunar alignments, though whether that applies here is unknown. Standing stones as a class belong broadly to the prehistoric period, most commonly associated with the Bronze Age, though precise dating is rarely possible without excavation. They served a range of purposes across different sites, from burial markers to boundary indicators to ritual focal points, and the record at Bawnmore does not specify which function, if any single one, applies. What survives is the stone itself, sitting in pasture much as it has always done.

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