Standing stone, Carriganish, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Carriganish, Co. Cork

At Carriganish in County Cork, there is a prehistoric monument that can no longer be seen.

What makes the site unusual is not what survives but what the maps reveal about its disappearance, a slow erasure played out across six decades of cartographic record.

The Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1842 marks three upright stones at this location and names them 'Dallauns', a term for large standing stones found across Munster. The OS Name Books, compiled around the same period, recorded their heights as six, five, and four feet respectively. By the time the OS resurveyed the area and produced its revised six-inch map in 1904, one stone had already gone, and the site was renamed 'Gallauns', the more common anglicisation of the Irish word for such monuments. At some point after that, the remaining pair vanished too, leaving no visible surface trace. Writing in 1939, the archaeologist P. J. Hartnett suggested the stones had either been deliberately removed or absorbed into a field boundary, the kind of fate that overtook countless prehistoric monuments as agricultural land was reorganised and enclosed. The site may also be identifiable as 'Group B' of what the antiquarian P. Conlon, writing in 1917, called the 'Carriganish Group of Gallans', suggesting the stones belonged to a broader cluster of monuments in the area, most or all of which have since met a similar end.

There is nothing to visit at Carriganish today. The value of this particular site lies not in what can be found on the ground but in what the successive maps and notebooks document: a monument present, then diminished, then gone, its biography preserved almost entirely in paper.

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