Standing stone, Boherash, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Boherash, Co. Cork

A standing stone in a flood plain beside the River Funcheon in north Cork went unrecorded on the Ordnance Survey maps of both 1842 and 1906, which is a curious absence for a block of stone nearly two metres tall.

Whether that omission reflects a deliberate decision by nineteenth-century surveyors, a temporary burial under silt, or simply an oversight is unclear, but the stone was there long before anyone thought to write it down, and it remains there now, in open pasture on the eastern bank of the Funcheon.

The stone stands 1.95 metres high and measures roughly 1.1 metres by 0.7 metres, subrectangular in plan with an irregular, unworked profile. Its long axis runs broadly east-south-east to west-north-west. At the base, packing stones are visible where the ground has shifted or eroded around them; these are the small wedging stones used to secure a standing stone upright in its socket, and their exposure here gives a rare glimpse into the practical mechanics of prehistoric monument-building. The flood plain setting beside the Funcheon adds another layer of interest. Standing stones are often interpreted as boundary markers, ritual focal points, or waymarkers along ancient routeways, and a river crossing would have been a logical place to mark in any of those contexts. What the stone at Boherash was originally intended to signify, however, is not recorded.

What is recorded, less admirably, is that the entire surface of the stone is covered in graffiti. This is not ancient inscription in the manner of ogham, the early medieval script sometimes carved into standing stones as memorials or territorial markers, but modern marking of the kind that accumulates on any unguarded surface. It is a reminder that even a monument overlooked by two successive national surveys is not, in the end, invisible.

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