Standing stone, Caherkeen, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Caherkeen, Co. Cork

On a rough east-facing slope at Caherkeen in West Cork, a triangular standing stone juts from the ground at just under a metre tall, its angular form aligned along a northwest-to-southeast axis.

Standing stones, erected during the Bronze Age in most cases, are common enough features of the Irish landscape, but this one is modest even by the standards of the type, measuring roughly half a metre across and forty centimetres deep. What it lacks in scale it makes up for in quiet particularity: the deliberate triangular shape and precise orientation suggest it was placed with care, for reasons that remain, as with so many of these stones, entirely unrecorded.

The stone was recorded by O'Brien in 1970 and later included in the archaeological inventory of County Cork published in 1992. Beyond that, the documentary trail is thin. The site sits in rough grazing land, the kind of terrain that has kept many such monuments from being disturbed by later development or intensive agriculture, which may in part explain its survival. Whether it once formed part of a larger complex, marked a boundary, or served some other purpose in the prehistoric landscape of West Cork is unknown.

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